Who Is the City Built For? A GIS Analysis of Walkability and Women in San Diego
A short reflection on the GIS analysis, written now.
The walkability index crashed my laptop twice. I spent two days trying to fix it, adjusting parameters, restarting, waiting. It never ran. I submitted the paper anyway, with a note explaining exactly what happened and why, and moved on.
That detail stayed with me — not as a failure, but as a useful lesson in what quantitative analysis actually requires. Data science and GIS work are not just about having the right methodology; they are about having the right infrastructure, the right data, and enough time for both to cooperate. When they don't, the honest move is to say so and document what you did manage to produce. The visualizations I generated were still informative. The literature review was solid. The proposal for San Diego was grounded in real findings. The project did what it could with what it had.
What drew me to the women and walkability question was straightforward: safety in public space is something I think about, and something that urban development has historically failed to design around. The research is clear — from the age of eight, public spaces are dominated by boys to eighty percent, and girls report feeling significantly more excluded. That gap doesn't close as women age; it calcifies. A city that doesn't account for the experience of women in public space is not a well-designed city. It is a city designed for a subset of its population, presented as universal.
San Diego is not an exceptional case. It is a useful one precisely because it is unremarkable in this regard — a mid-to-large American city with reasonable transit infrastructure, a significant female population, and the same unexamined assumptions baked into its planning as most others. The correlation between transit stops and crime, the underserved southern regions, the relationship between community space access and neighborhood safety — none of these findings are surprising. What is useful is seeing them mapped, spatially, in relation to each other.
GIS as a tool is interesting to me because it sits at the intersection of data and design — it makes quantitative findings visually legible in a way that invites planning decisions rather than just academic conclusions. That intersection is where I want to work: not just understanding what is wrong with a city, but having the analytical and visual language to argue for what should change and why. The walkability project was an early attempt at that. The laptop crash notwithstanding.
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