Spatial Justice, Safety & the Politics of Public Space with Deborah Saunt

Designing Justice: Who Are Cities Really Built For

There's a moment in my conversation with Deborah Saunt where she describes walking through Belgravia at 14 and feeling like she shouldn't be there. Not because anyone told her to leave - but because the space itself communicated it. The streets were emptier. The buildings grander. The gardens, private. The message, unspoken but unmistakable: this isn't for you.

Deborah is now the founding director of DSDHA, one of London's most respected architecture and urban design practices. She has spent over 25 years designing public spaces, parks, streets and buildings across the city. And yet that feeling - of being quietly excluded from the fabric of urban life - is not just a personal memory. It's the engine behind some of her most important work around spatial justice.

I sat down with Deborah for Episode 26 of Talking Place, and walked away with a page of notes, a renewed urgency, and a fundamentally sharpened understanding of what spatial justice actually means.

'Public' Doesn't Mean Inclusive

The term spatial justice gets thrown around in design circles, but Deborah cuts through the abstraction fast.

“There are self-policing bits of the environment that encourage or discourage certain people to feel that they can use them - even though they're public.”

The most obvious examples are stark: poor doors, where residents of affordable housing in a mixed-tenure building are routed round the back while private buyers walk through the front. Mayfair, historically underserved by buses, designed on the tacit assumption that everyone arriving has a car. Streets lit to move traffic quickly, not to make pedestrians feel safe.

These aren't accidents. They are, as Deborah argues, design decisions - often made without any consultation with the communities who will live inside them.

Community Is Context - Not a Box to Tick

DSDHA has a foundational principle: community is context. It sounds simple. In practice, it's transformative - and, Deborah admits, rare.

“People are wanting to tick boxes. Clients, authorities, to be seen to go through the process. But whether they're really prepared to listen and have that honest communication is sometimes missing.”

At DSDHA, grounded research means talking to at least 100 people before any design decision is made. Not a focus group. Not a public exhibition board with a feedback form. A genuine, recorded, story-driven engagement with residents, workers, students, explorers — anyone whose life intersects with the space.

“From a story, you could find out so much more from one person's journey than from any amount of data. You uncover what the local needs are. You reveal what's not being said.”

The recently completed Crabtree Fields restoration in Fitzrovia is a case study in what this looks like across decades. Originally designed in the mid-1980s through one of the earliest co-design processes Deborah had encountered, DSDHA was appointed 40 years later to restore it. They engaged specifically with women and girls, who identified sightline problems, the need for visible exit routes, and the psychological discomfort of not knowing whether they could get out if they needed to. Small changes. Radical difference.

Designing for Safety: Movement, View, and the 'Dot to Dot'

When I asked Deborah whether we can design out danger from our public realm, her answer was unequivocal: yes.

“We can go a huge way towards reducing the threats that face us.”

And her method is elegantly straightforward. Movement and view. As we move through space, we are constantly calibrating where we are, what we can see ahead, what we have just left. Deborah calls it 'a dot to dot of one safe space to the next.' As a woman, she says, 'you are hypersensitive to this in a way that most men are just completely unaware of.'

She points to the work of Make Space for Girls as transformative in opening her own eyes - even after 25 years studying public space - to the reality of the default male in design. Most public parks, playgrounds and recreational spaces are built around boys and young men. Hire bikes are sized for average male hands. Street lighting is positioned for drivers, not pedestrians. DSDHA now designs every drawing at true eye level.

“None of this kind of, oh well I just thought it looked better from here perspective. 95% of designers do not use eye level design.”

Who writes the brief?

Perhaps the most important idea in our conversation is the simplest: who writes the brief?

Deborah's RIBA-funded research ‘Towards Spatial Justice’ is, at its core, a toolkit for embedding co-design not just in the consultation phase, but all the way through - from the initial idea to occupation, reinvention and long-term maintenance.

“Who authors it. Who funds it. Who makes those decisions after the public consultation event. How do we keep people involved. How do we empower people to run and maintain those spaces after.”

Her answer to what she'd embed in every urban design brief from now on is regenerative design - and the deceptively simple principle that underpins it:

“We have to be a good ancestor.”

Not just sustainable. Not just carbon-neutral. Regenerative - giving back, restoring, thinking in circles rather than lines.

What I Took Away

Deborah’s frustration with the status quo - with underfunded public transport, with lighting designed for cars, with consultation as theatre - is channelled into rigour: better research, better questions, better briefs, better buildings. Her conviction that we can build safer, more just, more genuinely shared cities is not optimism for its own sake. It's backed by 25 years of actually doing it.

“You want a good city, you have to pay for it. It doesn't come for nothing.”

Everything costs something. The question is who bears the cost - and who gets left outside. Projects are not products. They are ecologies. They will change whether you plan for it or not. The question is whether you have designed with that in mind.

Listen to the full episode with Deborah Saunt on Talking Place, Season 3 Episode 26, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and all major platforms.

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Tanisha Raffiuddin is Creative Director at Concept Culture and host of Talking Place. Conversations on placemaking, branding, sustainability and culture across the built environment.