Assessing outdoor lighting as a relevant urban feature for just and liveable cities. First insights from ENLIGHTENme project

Outdoor lighting is an element featuring the urban environment that is becoming more and more relevant for urban planning, both in terms of influencing citizens’ health and wellbeing as well as the inclusiveness of people living in cities. While urban studies have already extensively investigated urban quality and liveability, there is still little attention on urban lighting as a relevant feature for ensuring high quality urban realms. Moreover, urban lighting can affect health and wellbeing of people and especially of the most vulnerable group of older adults. They suffer more than others not only of the lack of basic services such as public transport, but also of the inappropriate urban lighting that affects their social life, health and wellbeing. The paper describes a method for including urban lighting as a factor for assessing urban quality, basing on the selection and mapping of key and easy to use indicators. The selected indicators have been tested in three European cities with different features in terms of latitude (that influence natural lighting and therefore the amount of exposure to artificial lighting), urban environments and lighting systems: Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Bologna (Italy), and Tartu (Estonia). The selection has been affected by data availability especially in the lighting domain, highlighting the need of deepening the composition of key lighting indicators at different urban scales. The developed method allows to support policy makers in taking decisions about where and how to redesign the public lighting systems introducing health and wellbeing as a transversal issue to consider in every public policy.