Under the Bell Jar: The Impact of Urban Planning on Women

Article by Meera Mohankrishnan

“To the person in the bell jar – the world itself is a bad dream” 

It is a common experience for women to be told to stay vigilant in certain parts of a city in ways that men rarely are. Indeed, multiple surveying studies by International Organisations show that most women feel that cities are inherently biased against them, and that without careful planning on their part, urban spaces are often unsafe. 

Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” provides a comparative analogy for this form of fear, reinforced by societal structures. While Plath coined the “bell jar” to describe severe mental illness, further critical perspectives have interpreted it as a metaphor for gendered constraint and enforced passivity. The image captures the emotional numbness produced when external systems distort perception and restrict freedom. For many women navigating cities not designed with their safety in mind, that distortion is inherently perpetuated through architecture and urban culture. 

Bassam in her book, ‘The Gendered City’, justifies this foundational concern with urban planning, noting that cities have historically been designed to maintain gendered power dynamics. At the start of the 20^th century, modern urban theories began reshaping how cities were imagined. No longer just centres of commerce, cities were planned with a movement-based logic, implemented through a rational order linking homes, workplaces and public spaces. The focus was on moving traffic efficiently, placing residential areas on larger plots, and, where needed, building taller apartments around green spaces on the outskirts of cities. Meanwhile, commercial hubs, offices and services remained at the centre, positioned for easy access by workers and the public. 

This dominant model does not reflect how many women actually navigate cities on a daily basis. It assumes a single, linear pattern that is inherently patriarchal. Research consistently shows that men’s weekday travel is more likely to follow a simple home to work commute. Women, by contrast, tend to move through cities in more complex and continuous ways, making multiple daily trips: from home to work, to children’s schools, to shops, medical appointments and social engagements. This pattern overtly demands more time, coordination, and physical mobility. 

As Bula highlights, creating safe cities for women requires prioritising shorter journeys and clustering essential services within a smaller travel radius. When cities fail to do this, women are forced to travel further and spend more time in transitional spaces designed primarily as corridors of movement rather than places of presence. These areas – often quiet, underused, and poorly supervised – can feel particularly unsafe. In India, for example, efforts to improve urban safety through “beautification” have sometimes backfired. The removal of footpath vendors and informal markets, intended to declutter public space, has instead produced emptier walkways. Women report that these quieter, male dominated spaces heighten rather than reduce their sense of vulnerability. 

This “Bell Jar” is not only constructed through the physical limits of urban planning; it is sealed by the pervasive “geography of fear” that shapes how women engage with cities. The result is a constructed environment that is fundamentally gendered. Feminist geographer Gill Valentine argues that women’s everyday use of urban space is structured by the anticipation of male violence – an expectation embedded not in individual experience alone, but in the design of the social regulation of a city itself. 

Within this framework fear is not abstract. It clings to specific places: dark streets, underpasses and empty transport platforms. Under the bell jar, these spaces feel especially airless, enhancing women’s sense of fear and contracting their choices. Crucially, this fear often exists without the direct experience of violence. It is socially produced and constantly reinforced through media narratives, policing practices, and gendered socialisation. Consequently, from an early age girls are taught to avoid quiet streets and late-night travel, absorbing the message that public space is conditional and contingent. 

The effect is structural rather than incidental. Emotional vigilance becomes a routine part of everyday life, growing from childhood to early adulthood. Reporting by The Guardian illustrates the scale of this constraint: a Girlguiding UK survey found that 56% of girls aged 11 to 21 feel unsafe travelling alone, while 86% avoid going out after dark to stay safe. 

For many women, the psychological toll of navigating unsafe urban spaces is cumulative. Living in unsafe cities, or commuting through areas perceived as dangerous, can mean heightened anxiety, depression and chronic stress. Like Plath’s bell jar, this perceived enclosure does not always manifest as panic. More often, it drains the air from everyday life, leaving behind a quiet emotional numbness shaped by constant self-monitoring. In Geneva, public authorities have attempted to counter this climate of fear through targeted initiatives. During November, a series of events focused on preventing sexism and harassment in public spaces, emphasising a collective right to move through the city safely. Measures such as mixed-use zoning and visible community presence can make public space feel lived in rather than empty – challenging the norms that quietly govern women’s movement. 

Beyond prevention focused measures, a post pandemic shift in urban planning has begun to emphasise active, gender-sensitive design. The focus on the reimagination of public parks is a clear illustration of this. As girls grow older and begin moving through the city alone, many quietly withdraw from these spaces, which overtime become increasingly male dominated, especially at night. In Brussels, this is being tackled through a project titled “Girls Make the City”. This initiative aims to reimagine a skate park in the city centre by involving girls aged 16-26 in its redesign. The inclusion of girls in the development of the park rather than treating their safety as an afterthought is a pivotal step in fostering a cultural shift in urban planning. 

Calls for a structural change in urban planning are growing, yet creating gender-sensitive cities remains a complex and entrenched challenge. Urban redesign must be paired with mental wellbeing initiatives and community programs that make public spaces genuinely accessible for women. Without a comprehensive approach, the risk is that women’s experience of the city — shaped by fear and exclusion — turns even ordinary movements into a “bad dream”.