There is a moment in the city when the night begins to settle, and the streets take on a different kind of life. The pace slows, the rhythm shifts, and a question lingers in the quiet: Is our city safe? But perhaps a more urgent question is:
Safe for whom?
Urban space is never neutral, it reflects the social structures that shape our everyday lives. Nowhere is this more visible than in public space, where encounters with differences of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity unfold daily. Public space is where the politics of visibility play out, revealing who feels a sense of belonging, who is allowed to appear, and who is made to disappear. These spaces mirror broader inequalities, laying bare the fault lines of inclusion and exclusion in urban life.
Public spaces, intended as sites of diversity, interaction, and exchange, have long been linked to fear and violence, especially for women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other marginalised communities (Vera-Gray, 2018; Berry et al., 2021). As a result, we have come to internalise public space as dangerous, and this persistent threat of gender-based violence produces not only fear, but also particular forms of bodily discipline (Bows, 2022). For example, women are often held responsible for managing the risks of the city, asked to avoid certain areas, dress cautiously, or not walk alone, while simultaneously being blamed when violence occurs. LGBTQ+ communities also face systemic violence in public spaces. According to a 2015 study by ILGA-Europe, LGBT individuals are most often exposed to violence in public spaces - streets(40%), parks, clubs, and public transport. These attacks are not random, they are symbolic acts of territorial control that mark public space as a site of control and send a clear message that queer presence and otherness is unwelcome (Pink Armenia, 2016).
When we shift the problem to the local context, we are faced with Yerevan’s paradox of safety. According to Numbeo’s crowd-sourced crime and safety index, Yerevan ranks 22nd out of 382 cities in terms of safety (Crime Index by City 2025, NUMBEO). But statistics often obscure more than they reveal. We must return to the question: Who is Yerevan safe for? Whose experiences are counted in these indexes, and whose fears are rendered invisible? Behind the reassuring numbers lies a different reality, one where women, queer individuals, gender non-conforming people, and others navigate the city cautiously, facing harassment or violence in spaces others consider safe or neutral. The so-called safety of Yerevan is not equally shared; for some, it is a myth that conceals the violence of exclusion.
In mainstream discourse, issues of safety in public space are often framed as a result of limited and inadequate oversight, equating safety with control. The dominant response to perceived danger is to increase surveillance and expand police presence. However, these attempts at managing risks through control and fear continue to fail, as they ignore the crucial roles of accessibility, visibility, and belonging. When public space is treated merely as something to be observed and regulated, violence does not disappear. It simply shifts into new shadows, hiding beyond the reach of the panopticon, which, as Foucault suggests, functions as a site of normalisation and control (Foucault, 1975). This creates a dangerous illusion of safety, where sanitised statistics and curated images of controlled urban life obscure the realities of exclusion, fear, and harm that persist beyond official narratives.
Feminist urbanism challenges this narrow, control-based approach. It insists on centring the lived experiences and caring for the embodied presence. Caring-about, here, begins with a fundamental recognition and identification that someone or something is in need (Tronto & Fisher,1990). Feminist urbanism in this context guides us to question whose needs are not met, not considered, and whose bodies are not protected. It demands that we step into the lives of others and ask: Can they walk through the city without fear? Can they breathe freely? Can they simply exist in public space without shrinking themselves or planning escape routes?
Yet urban design frequently fails to accommodate these needs. It often forces people to rush, to calculate escape routes, to scan for exits, and to shrink themselves just to move through the city. Jane Jacobs, urban thinker and activist, argued that fear is not merely abstract or psychological; it is material and spatial, linking fear and urban design together (Jacobs, 1961). When public spaces do not welcome or acknowledge certain bodies and identities, they become complicit in exclusion. This exclusion, in turn, creates the conditions for further violence.
In the Armenian context, issues of safety, visibility, and belonging in urban space are rarely acknowledged by city authorities, urban planners, or policymakers. These questions remain largely absent from official planning agendas and strategic frameworks. Conversations around urban development tend to prioritise infrastructure, traffic, or “aesthetics”, while overlooking the lived experiences of those who move through the city with fear, vulnerability, or exclusion. The politics of visibility, who feels safe, who belongs, and who is erased, are not part of the mainstream urban discourse. Instead, these concerns are most often articulated by urban activists and artists, who use the city itself as a medium to expose injustice and provoke dialogue. Through performance, protest, installation, and other forms of intervention, they claim public space as both a site of critique and a space of reimagination.
Oftentimes, urban interventions, particularly those grounded in feminist and queer perspectives, disrupt the silence of the city by articulating what is often left unsaid: that fear and exclusion are built into the very structure of urban life.
Since the country’s independence, among the notable instances of artistic resistance that may be recalled is Armine Hovhannisyan’s “I Am Here In the City”, which problematizes the politics of visibility in public space. This gesture problematizes the near-total erasure of women’s voices in the shaping of urban environments. The female body, wrapped in the visual fabric of the city, becomes a powerful site of critique. It draws attention to how gendered exclusions are embedded in the urban landscape. Re-exhibited in 2022, the work underscored the urgency of these questions, asking whose bodies are allowed to shape the city and whose are only allowed to pass through it.
Urban space also becomes a place to address broader forms of violence, extending to the realities of harm and loss, bringing what happens in private shadows into public visibility. One such intervention took place in 2021, when the “Coalition to Stop Violence Against Women” tied red ribbons around trees in Yerevan, each bearing the name of a woman killed by domestic violence. These simple gestures transformed the everyday landscape into a space of collective mourning and resistance. The red ribbons swaying in the wind interrupted the assumed neutrality of the urban, making visible a form of violence that is usually hidden or ignored. Altering public space in this way raised the awareness of passersby, confronting them with what dominant narratives of safety often overlook or suppress.
However, not all urban and artistic interventions are received with tolerance by the public; they often encounter sharp backlash. The tense dynamic between what is deemed permissible and impermissible in public space was particularly highlighted by the 2019 contemporary performance “ՀուԶԱՆՔ ու ԶԱՆԳԸ” (HuZANQ u ZANG), taking place near the Republic Square metro station. The performance was an experimental re-reading of 1920s Armenian futurist poetry (Kara Darvish, Gevorg Abov, Azat Vshtuni), interwoven with poetry by Lilit Petrosyan and choreographed through futuristic movements by Hasmik Tangyan. By questioning the public perception of women’s behaviour, speech, and movement, the performance intervened in dominant norms (Hetq, 2019)․
On the day of the event, the performers were physically attacked with zelyonka – a green dye that became widespread in the 2000s in Russia and Ukraine by pro-government groups to target political oppositions, dissenters. Free movements and voices were interrupted by several men, accompanied by hate speech labelling the artists, proclaiming that a woman’s sole role is "to have children and to discipline (the children)."Despite being supported by Armenia’s Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports, the project was later disavowed by the ministry, which requested the return of its funding. This official response claimed that the work did not meet evaluation criteria, while ignoring the fact that the artists had been harassed even in the presence of law enforcement.
The attack and its consequences indicate that public space continues to function as a field of exclusion, banishing bodies and voices that do not conform to the normative order. Even the presence of police officers did not prevent the violence, highlighting the failure of control as a means of ensuring safety.
Exclusion in the urban environment does not occur solely through such assaults and pressures. Active exclusion is also accompanied by passive exclusion, which manifests not only through violent interventions but also through silence, neglect, and covert urban planning policies. As urban planning in Armenia continues to ignore the needs of the communities, city authorities refuse to acknowledge the importance of inclusive, care(full) space. In response, people of the city have created their own small islands of freedom, spaces carved out quietly in the urban fabric, where alternative forms of being and otherness can exist. These spaces often remain unmarked, held together through trust, shared experience, and mutual care. These places, often tolerated only when silent and invisible, become targets when they begin to assert themselves or grow too visible. Heteronormative, patriarchal, and securitised visions of the city treat these spaces as threats, unwelcome interruptions to the dominant order.
In the context of the heteronormative/queer opposition, the DIY club and the attack on it hold a significant place in urban memory. Within Yerevan’s heteronormative landscape, DIY was one of the few accepting spaces for queer individuals; however, in 2012, the club was bombed by nationalist extremists.
In response to the 2012 attack on the DIY Club, artist lucine talalyan, a member of the Queering Yerevan Collective (QYC), created the experimental film postDIY. Founded in 2007 and originally named “Women Oriented Women,” QYC is a group of artists, writers, cultural critics, and activists, with or without queer identities, who use Yerevan itself as an experimental space. Through artistic and collective acts, they challenge heteronormativity, traditionalism, and exclusion in both public space and cultural discourse. In postDIY, the city’s rigid architecture, captured through long, drifting shots of Soviet-era apartment blocks, is set against the vulnerability and intimacy of queer existence. The film portrays bodies seeking rest, desire, and care within a landscape that renders them invisible. A poetic text by Shushan Avagyan and the haunting voice of Araksia Gyulzadyan singing “The Snow on the Mountains Melted” accompany the images, offering a moment of rupture as two women touch and embrace. Perhaps it is through this exploration that we find an act of resistance – reclaiming space through tenderness. postDIY is not only a memorial to the loss of a safe space, but a demand to recognise queer presence in the city, and a call to imagine a Yerevan where belonging, intimacy, and care are not privileges, but rights.
Yet while the attack on DIY happened more than thirteen years ago, the fragility of these islands of freedom still persists. A more recent example is Poligraf – a club in Yerevan known for being free of prejudice and welcoming to all bodies – when In 2023, it was raided by police forces who reportedly used discriminatory tactics on individuals perceived to be queer. This targeted act of aggression was not merely a violation of rights; it was a deliberate message about who is deemed unwelcome in public life. The discriminatory public reaction that followed serves as a testament to the extent to which society seeks to normalise public space by regulating visibility, suppressing difference, and enforcing normative boundaries of belonging. In response to the pressures of normalisation, the community that lost its care(ful) space gathered in protest outside the club, in the public space. The language of the protest was the electronic music, the unifying rhythm, the liberating dancing and the banners bearing the slogan #DefendDance. In the language of rave culture, this expression of collective resistance re-wrote the city through an urban intervention, momentarily transforming the street into a space of tolerance, warmth, and belonging. Through their embodied presence, the protesters returned the queerness to the city’s space, demanding the right to exist without fear and refusing the erasure of queer life from Yerevan’s urban fabric.
In the ongoing process of making and remaking the city, urban space remains a site of struggle, not only over infrastructure and policy, but over visibility, voice, and care. Artistic interventions, performances, and acts of collective presence reclaim the city’s surfaces as spaces of critique and possibility. They expose the gaps left by dominant narratives and invite us to imagine what the city could become if shaped by care rather than control. Safety, in this sense, cannot be measured in statistics or secured through exclusion. It must be felt, built through relationships, and sustained by practices of mutual recognition.
In the ever-expanding, dense and rigid Yerevan, where urban discourse is centred around the ecological crisis, uncontrolled construction, and the deterioration of infrastructure, the vulnerability of marginalised communities, along with their problems and needs, is further subordinated. As the city “grows,” so do exclusion and neglect, the alienation and displacement of the other.
It is precisely this exclusion that highlights the importance of feminist and queer perspectives on the city—ways of reading and shaping urban space through these lenses. Such perspectives generate questions that immediately destabilise the idea of a “safe Yerevan,” urging us to reflect on how we live, feel, and share space—how we reject or accept, ignore or care. This critical gaze toward the environment compels us to continuously interrogate the city, to deconstruct its hardened spaces, to imagine and then reimagine the city as a space of safety, inclusivity, and care.
Sources
Bows, H., & Fileborn, B. (Eds.). (2022). Geographies of gender-based violence: A multi-disciplinary perspective. Policy Press. https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/book/46022
PINK Armenia (2016). Hate crimes and other hate-motivated incidents against LGBT people in Armenia: From theory to reality. Pink Armenia. https://pinkarmenia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/hate-crime-monitoring-2016_en. pdfPink Armenia+3The Armenian Weekly+3The Advocates for Human Rights+3
Numbeo.com (2025) Crime Index by City . https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books.
Jacobs, J. (1992). Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage
Քոչարյան, Ա․ (2019) «ՀուԶԱՆՔ ու ԶԱՆԳ» նախագծի ահազանգը. Հետք https://hetq.am/hy/article/109409
Tronto, J. C., & Fisher, B. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. In Circles of care (pp. 36-54). Suny Press. https://www.scribd.com/document/330973025/Fisher-Tronto-Toward-a-Feminist-Theory-of-Caring-1