Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

installation and usage of artificial lighting. Illumination that is often thousands of times
greater than in natural nighttime is thereby imposed progressively on parkland and its
wildlife. 105
Meanwhile the push for more light at night goes on, not just in parks but everywhere. More
buildings, bridges, monuments, symbols, theme parks, shop windows, car parks, flags, paths,
trees and airfields are lit or more brightly lit. Existing floodlighting may be ‘upgraded’ or
‘modified to current standards’, meaning ‘made brighter’. More and brighter outdoor sports
lighting is installed and usage has to increase to help manage the higher costs. ‘Improvement’
of street and public lighting is a constant replacement process circulating through successive
areas supposedly to increase safety, ie to reduce an unacceptable level of crime. Advertising
companies make their signs bigger and brighter to compete. Where bigger is not an option,
the signs are simply made brighter and brighter.
Large windows and glass walls in tall buildings are often left uncurtained or are designed
specifically to be uncurtained so that the buildings self-advertise as ‘pillars of light’ at night.
This trend also results in more and more light escaping outwards at night, adding to ambient
illumination, light trespass and artificial skyglow. 106 Almost any view of a city at night will
show that the effect is not trivial. Architects and other professionals involved often take pride
in the energy savings achieved by natural lighting through large windows and skylights in
daytime but seem oblivious of the nuisance and wastage involved when useful indoor light
escapes at night in the opposite direction. 107 None of this should be ignored or regarded as
acceptable. Large areas of glass also pose increased risk in terms of natural disasters,
accidents and terrorism.
8.3.2 Lighting limits as a development control
Rather than immediate outright elimination of all non-essential urban lighting as a knee-jerk
reaction to excessive crime levels, at least in the early stages of rectification it would seem
more reasonable to aim at moderation of ambient outdoor light sources at night while
monitoring the effects on metropolitan development as well as crime. It may be that lighting
controls by themselves can be used to hold urban intensification to any desired rate, including
zero.
Capping of outdoor ambient light would appear to sidestep many of the difficulties that
accompany existing poorly effective methods of development control including unpopular (ie
loss that many cause in quality of life through loss of public open space is often overlooked or
deliberately ignored by the responsible authorities. In the context of this document, the key
issue is that most of them are accompanied by more lighting, or demands for it, in a place that
would otherwise be dimly lit or dark.
105 Even since Part 1 was published, politicians have promised extensive new lighting of
parks “to make them safe for our children”.
106 The occupants of such buildings pay for more indoor lighting than is actually made
available to them. They are therefore the ones who pay for the indiscriminate and inefficient
advertising by waste light on behalf of the building owners. This is a hidden form of rent.
107 Perhaps skylights, at least, should not be permitted in future unless they are fitted with
internally reflective automatic night shutters having closure on failure.
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