Young female participants’ perceived safety responses in nighttime urban pedestrian spaces: a controlled VR-based experiment in the old town of Licheng, Zengcheng District

Abstract As urban design increasingly focuses on higher-order human-centered needs, women-friendly cities have become an important topic in urban governance and spatial planning. Assessing perceived safety during nighttime walking is therefore crucial for understanding how urban pedestrian environments are experienced by women. This study examines perceived safety responses among young female participants in nighttime urban walking spaces, with a focus on identifying spatial factors associated with subjective safety evaluation and physiological arousal under controlled VR-based conditions. By combining semantic segmentation, BWS-based subjective evaluation, virtual reality environments, and multimodal physiological signal detection, the study explores how nighttime spatial attributes are associated with participants’ arousal, attention, and perceived safety responses. The findings provide exploratory evidence and design implications for gender-sensitive nighttime pedestrian environments. These findings should be interpreted as evidence from a controlled VR-based experiment with young female participants, rather than as population-level conclusions about all women or direct measurements of real-world nighttime risk perception.