What do people talk about when they talk about experiencing safety?

Current discussions on the ways people experience safety in urban public spaces are often characterised by a negative view—the absence of unsafety—and rarely include positive sensations related to the safety experience itself. Some scholars have argued that this could be an artefact of more or less standardised methods used in the field. In fact, perceived safety and fear of crime are most often studied as disconnected from people’s everyday lives and practices, with little room provided for research participants to formulate what safety actually means to them in their circumstances. Although standardised approaches provide us with an intensity of the safety experience, all underlying ideas, meanings, sensations and perceptions are commonly forced into a single numerical rating. In order to gain insight into these aspects of the safety experience, we present the results of a bottom-up explorative approach in which participants were asked to freely describe what it means for them to feel safe. We detected three main themes: the absence of negative aspects, the presence of positive aspects and not having to think about safety. In our final section we reflect on the importance and usefulness of these findings for management, policymaking and academia.