Research Insights

Urban Lighting for health and wellbeing: new guidelines

These guidelines have been developed within the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 ENLIGHTENme project: Innovative policies for improving citizens’ health and wellbeing addressing indoor and outdoor lighting. It represents the result of the collaborative endeavour involving 22 partners from different EU and non-EU countries. It aims to advance the understanding of how indoor and outdoor lighting affects health and wellbeing, particularly in elderly populations. It presents innovative, evidence-based guidelines and policies for measures, technologies, and interventions that can be implemented with a dedicated Decision Support System to help both citizens and city leaders improve public health and wellbeing.
Please note: an updated format of the Guidelines has been prepared by LUCI Association for publishing and distribution. Both versions are available on Zenodo: Version 1 is the original and Version 2 is the updated format for publishing.

Policy brief #1 - Social lighting for ageing cities

Policy brief #2 - Integrating health and wellbeing-conscious lighting in urban policies

Policy brief #3 - Making an economic case for investing in outdoor and indoor lighting interventions

Policy brief #4 - Social lighting for quality of life in public space

Policy brief #5 - Community engagement for designing innovative urban lighting solutions

Polic brief #6 - Health and wellbeing impact of indoor lighting interventions

Policy brief #7 - Ethics in lighting

Report on ENLIGHTENme Common Operational Language

This report describes the common operational language to be used across the different disciplines involved in the ENLIGHTENme project. Given the multidisciplinary nature of ENLIGHTENme and the need for approaching lighting policies through a transdisciplinary perspective, the common operational language aims to facilitate the communication among researchers representing the different disciplines involved as well as stakeholders and citizens interested in the project and/or involved in the project activities, such as the Urban Lighting Labs.

Report on City Level Lighting and Health Maps

The ENLIGHTENme platform has the aim to gather and systematise existing knowledge about the impact of lighting policies and innovative interventions, both indoors and outdoors, on people’s health and wellbeing. This knowledge is available on the Urban Lighting and Health multiscale platform, a WebGIS-based platform organised into three levels: a worldwide open ATLAS of best practices, city level urban lighting and health maps and district level 3D models of the target districts.

This report describes the maps generated for the three ENLIGHTENme cities; Bologna in Italy, Amsterdam in The Netherlands and Tartu in Estonia, to visualise indicators and correlations related to the following domains:

• socio-economic determinants
• urban/lighting patterns
• lighting detection from satellite
• population health status and mental wellbeing

These maps will allow the identification of the shortlist of districts that will be used as the base for the selection of the target districts.

The maps are also available here.

ENLIGHTENme Global Level Open Atlas

The ENLIGHTENme platform has the aim to gather and systematise existing knowledge about the impact of lighting policies and innovative interventions, both indoors and outdoors, on people’s health and wellbeing. This knowledge is available on the Urban Lighting and Health multiscale platform, a WebGIS-based platform organised into three levels: a worldwide open ATLAS of best practices, city level urban lighting and health maps and district level 3D models of the target districts.

This report describes global level ENLIGHTENme open Atlas representing existing knowledge about evidence and good practices on urban lighting for health and wellbeing.

Establishing ULLs in selected target districts

Central to the evidence building phase of ENLIGHTENme is the establishment of Urban Lighting Labs (ULLs) in each of the target city districts in the three ENLIGHTENme cities.

The concept of an urban lab is to provide a structure and local identity for ENLIGHTENme activities, serving several interlinked functions in the overall project:

• qualitative social research into the lives and experiences of older citizens and their carers which can support evidence-based design and best practice guidelines for urban lighting.
• community engagement with a wide range of stakeholders to support co-design workshops leading to outdoor lighting installations and to help recruit participants for the ENLIGHTENme study.
• a base for community consultation and qualitative social research assessment during the public lighting installation period.

Substantively, the umbrella term ‘ULL’ covers a range of activities such as interviews, observation studies, design workshops, public consultations, night walks and more, that allow for research, engagement and co-design supporting conclusions about effective and generalisable urban lighting policies and guidelines. Because of the selection of cities and districts, localisation of research and design through ULLs also promotes a strong comparative dimension to the work.

Read more about the Urban Lighting Labs in this report.

Outdoor Lighting Design Report

This report outlines the outdoor lighting designs, including technical installations details and product specifications, as it was implemented in of the ENLIGHTENme project. The lighting designs were based on qualitative research and engagement with the local community of each of the three ENLIGHTENme cities as part of the established Urban Lighting Labs.

Protocol for qualitative interviews on health and wellbeing, postlighting intervention

This report outlines the preparation of tools to make qualitative assessements of the ways in which the lighting innovations impact on the quality of life and wellbeing of the older adult populations in the three ENLIGHTENme cities.

Biomedical protocol to assess the impact of electric light on circadian rhythms entrainment

This report describes a biomedical protocol to assess the impact of electric light on circadian rhythms entrainment.

Report on the full establishment and completion of the Board of Lighting Companies

Ethical analysis

This report identifies and assesses ethical issues of urban lighting policies with regard to human health, society, and the environment through a theoretical analysis.

Guidelines for the collection and the use of data

These Guidelines outline a Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) compliant framework for the specific areas of ENLIGHTENme that include data resulting from clinical studies and other activities involving extensive data collection through different levels of phenotyping, life movement and lifestyle monitoring, as well as bio-sample.

Policy model for the assessment, governance and long term use of the biosamples and datasets

This document outlines a Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) compliant framework for the specific areas of ENLIGHTENme that include bio-samples and datasets resulting from biomedical studies. The policy aims to provide internal guidance on some specific ethics and legal requirements the project must comply with .

Health City Manager Training Programme

This report outlines the Health City Manager training programme which aimed at creating awareness and promote knowledge sharing at local level and at reinforcing them within the consortium itself. It introduced a first edition HCM training programme that focuses on the impact of light on health and wellbeing in local communities, according to the ongoing experience of the three pilot cities and to the public policies spectrum that the single administrations are carrying on. Based on the existing literature references and the experience of the Health City Institute, a devoted two-day training programme was conceptualised and implemented.