What makes a place feel safe, scary, or even threatening? Glasgow’s distinctive passageways: tenement closes, lanes, and underpasses seemed to lend themselves to this kind of study. I conducted an online survey asking my course-mates to share the scariest places they had experienced in Glasgow. Most responses noted a lack of people around and inadequate lighting as major contributing factors to the feeling of fear.

Fear is, according to dictionary.com, “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.” To gain a large-scale understanding of fear or crime in Glasgow, I accessed police data recording the number of reported assaults per city region in a year. I noticed that the highest numbers of assault were mostly in the city centre or large shopping centres. To gain a first-person perspective of spaces around the city centre, I decided to use the Subway as a case study examining the difference in day and night conditions.

Key Themes: Perception, Well-being