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The Criteria Taronja project at UPV aims to identify the public spaces in cities where women feel unsafe or experience aggression to improve policies against gender violence.

This initiative of the Research Group in Geospatial Technologies of the Universitat Politècnica de València is funded by the Department of Innovation, Universities, Science and Digital Society of the Generalitat Valenciana. It is being developed in five cities: Valencia (where the pilot project is being carried out), Dublin (Ireland), Sofia (Bulgaria), Toluca (Mexico) and San Francisco (United States).

The final result will be an interactive web portal, a geoportal, which will provide real-time information on the situation of insecurity in each city and its evolution over time. The tool will provide information to decision-makers so that they can deploy more efficient measures and evaluate their results.

Mapathon at the UPV

The Universitat Politècnica de València has invited the university community, especially women students, to contribute their experiences of insecurity in public spaces in Valencia through an application. This Mapathon (a meeting to map an area) took place on Thursday, 7 March, as part of the activities planned for Women's Day at the UPV.

Data on the experience of insecurity is collected through citizen science software. It is an application in which users can locate on a map the places where they have experienced sexual harassment or have felt fear (and what caused it).

The Research Group in Geospatial Technologies of the UPV has collaborated with experts in gender equality to identify the parameters that contribute to the feeling of safety and their relative weight. Interdisciplinary cooperation has also made it possible to identify the behaviours that make women feel insecure, such as being followed by a stranger, exhibitionism or expressions of sexual content.

Public space

According to the United Nations, sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces are a daily problem for women and girls in all countries of the world. This reduces their opportunities for education, employment, leisure or public participation and negatively affects their well-being and health.

Ana Anquela, the UPV researcher in charge of the project, explains that Criteria Taronja "works to prevent gender-based street violence in cases where the aggressor and the victim have no previous relationship". This contributes to Sustainable Development Goal 5 of the UN 2030 Agenda: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Access to data

The project is being implemented in five cities with very different legislation: València, Dublin (Ireland), Sofia (Bulgaria), Toluca (Mexico) and San Francisco (USA).

According to researcher Ana Anquela, Europe has open data policies that facilitate the modelling of perceptions of security through quantitative information on infrastructures, socio-economic information, and real-time traffic... "[However], data on crime is limited, so we had to request it".

In contrast, data protection policies are more relaxed in the United States, and the geolocation of crimes is available.

Finally, in Toluca, "to generate indispensable data sets, it is necessary to intensify the collection of information through citizen science, either through sentiment analysis of social network data, through the participation of volunteer groups that report episodes of street violence or feelings of insecurity in public spaces, through mapathons, or by using computer techniques such as web scraping (automatic data collection from web pages)".

"According to our information, Valencia is a very safe city, in contrast to Toluca (Mexico), where students report many experiences of feelings of insecurity or street harassment near the university campus," explains Ana Anquela.

Continuation of the project

Criteria Taronja is scheduled to end in December 2024, although the group intends to continue its research beyond that date. "The project has many dimensions that we want to deepen," explains the UPV professor.

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