The research, published in the journal Ambio, surveyed 754 residents of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, two adjacent port and resort cities in central Chile that rank second and fourth nationwide in artificial light at night. Both cities hold more than 300,000 residents and sit within a two-hour drive of Santiago, making them popular weekend destinations where bright waterfronts are part of the urban identity. The team, led by Olivia Raquel Rendon Thompson of Plymouth Marine Laboratory together with colleagues at Universidad Andrés Bello and other Chilean institutions, conducted in-person tablet surveys that began at the coastline—starting near intense light sources such as the port, a stadium and the famous Viña del Mar casino—and worked inland, sampling every tenth household where residents were available.

The survey’s design was deliberately comprehensive. It probed respondents’ connection to the sea, their awareness of the brightest light sources in their city, their views on the benefits and harms of nighttime lighting for people and marine life, their trust in and support for nine specific mitigation measures, and their sociodemographic characteristics. A pilot round of 100 surveys tested the questions before the final data collection, and the results were analysed in R using descriptive statistics alongside two multinomial logistic models—one explaining concern about light pollution’s impacts, the other predicting support for more or fewer mitigation measures. The authors note that the analytical framework can be replicated in other coastal cities worldwide, adjusted to local contexts.

What emerged first was a portrait of a population deeply engaged with the coast but largely blind to light as a pollutant. Sixty percent of respondents were female, the average age was 45, and nearly nine in ten reported non-economic marine activities such as enjoying the view, coastal recreation, wildlife watching or beach sports. Yet when asked an open-ended question about the top three threats to the marine environment, respondents overwhelmingly named solid waste, plastics and oil spills. Sewage, chemicals and noise barely registered, and just one percent of respondents spontaneously identified artificial light at night as a threat at all.

The asymmetry deepened when the researchers probed perceptions of lighting itself. Respondents identified public street lighting as the brightest source in their city, followed by advertising lights, and correctly noted that the most intensely illuminated zones sit on or beside the waterfront. When asked about benefits, personal security dominated—mentioned by 48 percent in the open-ended question and ranked as very important or important by the overwhelming majority in a follow-up list that also included safer transport, property security and increased scenic beauty. By contrast, 83 percent of respondents could name no negative impacts of nighttime lighting at all when asked directly. Even with prompting, only traffic accidents and loss of the starry sky crossed the 50 percent importance threshold, and every other harm was rated important by fewer than 30 percent of respondents.

Perhaps most tellingly, when presented with a list of eight potential negative impacts of artificial light on marine wildlife, more than 70 percent of respondents rated every single one as important or very important—with a suspiciously uniform response pattern across the board. The authors interpret this flat distribution cautiously: rather than reflecting deep domain knowledge, it suggests respondents were agreeing with plausible-sounding statements they had never considered before. The true public understanding of how artificial light penetrates the water column and disrupts the navigation, predation, reproduction and daily rhythms of marine organisms—from species that rely on lunar cues to sessile creatures that cannot move away—remains limited or unknown, the team concludes.

Support for mitigation followed a clear logic of preserving benefits while trimming waste. The measures winning more than 60 percent support were reducing brightness in protected areas, installing motion sensors on outdoor lights, and fitting directional panels that redirect light toward the ground. Measures perceived to touch everyday benefits—dimming urban streetlights, shortening operating hours, switching from white to yellow light—hovered around 50 percent, while lowering the height of light poles attracted support from only a third of respondents. Respondents were notably decisive, with fewer than three percent answering that they did not know. The regression analysis showed that supporters of stronger mitigation tended to have higher education, work in services or professions, perceive more negative impacts on humans and wildlife, and report high concern about lighting in their city.

Two demographic findings stood out. Women were significantly less likely to support mitigation measures—an inversion of the pattern seen in most environmental research, where women typically express greater ecological concern. The authors suggest this reflects differing priorities around the social functions of lighting, particularly perceptions of personal safety during nighttime movement through public spaces, rather than lower environmental commitment. Meanwhile, respondents from medium to high socioeconomic groups were also less supportive, and the highest and lowest socioeconomic classes were effectively absent from the sample due to refusals and safety-related exclusions in fieldwork. Responsibility, respondents agreed, lies overwhelmingly with government: 48 percent pointed to local authorities such as municipalities, 24 percent to central government, while only 17 percent named electricity companies and four percent private firms.

The study arrives at a politically opportune moment. Chile’s Decree No. 1/2022 established national emission limits for outdoor lighting, with explicit provisions for areas of special biodiversity protection, while the Convention on Biological Diversity has encouraged parties to manage light pollution’s impacts within national strategies. Yet no international treaty treats artificial light at night as a pollutant, and the Chilean research is the first social study of the issue to focus on coastal-marine impacts or to be conducted in a low-to-middle-income country—a significant gap given that roughly a quarter of the world’s shorelines and a quarter of its population are exposed to coastal light pollution.

The authors argue that the path forward runs through governance rather than engineering alone. Because acceptance hinges on protecting valued benefits, policies that pair ecological goals with safety assurances—shielded fixtures, motion-activated lighting, dark zones in protected areas—are most likely to succeed. Environmental education should target the specific ecological consequences for coastal and marine ecosystems, where awareness is weakest. And because residents see lighting as a public responsibility resting with municipalities, expanding that framing to include utilities, businesses and communities could unlock collaborative approaches. Framed as a social-ecological challenge rather than a technical lighting problem, the study suggests, dimming the night may yet win the public over—one well-aimed, motion-triggered lamp at a time.

Subject of Research: Public perceptions of and support for mitigating artificial light at night in coastal cities

Article Title: Public perceptions and (lack of) support for mitigation of artificial light at night in coastal cities

Article References: Public perceptions and (lack of) support for mitigation of artificial light at night in coastal cities. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02478-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02478-9

Keywords: artificial light at night, light pollution, coastal cities, marine ecosystems, Chile, public perceptions, environmental literacy, mitigation measures, urban lighting, environmental governance, biodiversity conservation, Valparaíso

The research team set out to test a proposition that urbanists have debated for decades: does changing the built environment actually change how safe people feel, and does it do so equitably across genders? Rather than relying on a single case study, the investigators synthesized evidence on design interventions, ranging from improved lighting and sightline management to the activation of vacant spaces and the redesign of pedestrian routes, and evaluated how these measures influenced reported fear of crime among men and women. Their analysis points to a consistent pattern: well-executed interventions reduce fear, but the size and character of that reduction depend on the specific needs and experiences of the users being considered.

At the technical heart of the study lies the distinction between crime itself and the perception of crime. Official victimization statistics capture only a fraction of the ways in which insecurity structures urban life. Fear of crime operates continuously, altering route choices, compressing the hours during which people feel comfortable outside, and imposing what researchers call a mobility tax, an invisible cost paid disproportionately by women. The study emphasizes that fear is not irrational; it is shaped by cues in the environment, including darkness, enclosure, visual isolation, signs of neglect, and the absence of other people. Because fear responds to environmental cues, it is, in principle, modifiable through design.

Lighting emerges as one of the most robust levers. The evidence reviewed indicates that improvements to the quality, uniformity, and placement of lighting can substantially lower fear, particularly along walking routes, transit access points, and underpasses where darkness compounds other stressors. But the authors caution against treating lighting as a panacea. Uniformly bright floodlighting can create glare, deepen shadows at their edges, and signal that a space is dangerous enough to require fortification. Gender-sensitive design, by contrast, treats lighting as part of a broader legibility strategy: illuminating the paths people actually take, lighting entrances and vertical circulation in parking structures and stations, and ensuring that light reaches eye level, where faces become recognizable and social presence becomes perceptible.

Sightlines and spatial configuration form a second pillar of the findings. Enclosed, convoluted spaces with limited visibility, under bridges, behind walls, along blank facades, reliably generate higher fear scores, especially among women respondents. Interventions that open up views, remove visual obstructions, introduce passive surveillance through overlooking windows and active street frontages, and avoid dead-end configurations reduce the sense of being trapped or unobserved. The study frames this in the language of prospect and refuge: people feel safest where they can see and be seen, while potential threats thrive in spaces that offer concealment. Design that maximizes prospect while minimizing anonymous refuge aligns the geometry of a place with the psychology of its users.

A third strand concerns activity and social presence. Vacant lots, boarded storefronts, and empty plazas communicate abandonment, and abandonment is read as risk. Interventions that activate space, through markets, food vendors, community programming, or simply through design that invites lingering, such as seating, shade, and accessible amenities, populate places with the ordinary social traffic that reassures passersby. The study notes that this mechanism is deeply gendered: women’s fear often centers on social disorder and the absence of help rather than on the statistical probability of assault, so interventions that increase the visible presence of other people, and especially of people likely to intervene, deliver fear reduction that lighting alone cannot achieve.

What distinguishes this analysis is its insistence that interventions be evaluated through a gender lens rather than assumed to be gender-neutral. Women and men report fear of crime at different intensities, in different locations, and in response to different cues. Men’s fear tends to concentrate around specific hotspots and nighttime contexts, whereas women report a more diffuse, ambient insecurity that shapes everyday routines, including during daylight hours. Interventions that reduce fear for men may leave this ambient anxiety untouched if they address only the most conspicuous hazards. The study therefore advocates participatory safety audits, in which women residents walk routes, identify stress points, and co-produce design responses, as a methodological complement to top-down planning. Gender-sensitive urbanism, in this framing, is not a niche concern but a diagnostic discipline that reveals where generic design fails.

The policy implications are considerable. Fear of crime suppresses the use of public transport, discourages walking and cycling, and depresses the economic life of streets after dusk. Because fear concentrates along predictable spatial patterns, poorly lit transit approaches, isolated underpasses, blank-walled corridors, municipalities can target investments with precision, achieving fear reduction at costs far below those of major infrastructure projects. The study’s gender-sensitive framing also gives cities a defensible basis for prioritizing interventions: if women’s mobility is constrained more severely than men’s, then design that disproportionately benefits women’s freedom of movement produces the largest gains in aggregate urban access and equity.

The authors are careful to delineate limits. Fear reduction is not crime reduction, and the two must not be conflated. Design interventions can redistribute offending toward less protected targets, a displacement effect that requires monitoring, and they cannot substitute for policing, social services, or the structural reforms that address violence at its roots. Moreover, perception studies must be interpreted with care, since reported fear reflects cultural context, media exposure, and personal history as much as physical environment. Yet the core result stands: when cities change the cues that environments emit, the people who move through them report feeling measurably safer, and the benefits can be tracked and differentiated by gender.

Ultimately, the study reframes fear of crime as a designable variable rather than a fixed feature of urban life. Streets that are lit where people walk, legible where they turn, watched where they linger, and animated where they pass through are not merely more pleasant; they extend the practical freedom of the people, and especially the women, who have long paid the mobility tax of urban insecurity. In an era when cities compete for density, sustainability, and livability, the evidence assembled here makes the case that gender-sensitive urban design is one of the most cost-effective instruments available for reclaiming the public realm for everyone.

Subject of Research: Gender-sensitive effects of urban design interventions on fear of crime in public spaces

Article Title: Urban design interventions reduce fear of crime in public spaces in gender-sensitive ways

Article References: Navarrete-Hernandez, P., Schlesser, T., & Luca, D. (2026). Urban design interventions reduce fear of crime in public spaces in gender-sensitive ways. Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00494-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44284-026-00494-0

Keywords: urban design, fear of crime, public spaces, gender-sensitive design, urban lighting, perceived safety, women's mobility, sightlines, placemaking, Nature Cities, urban planning, social surveillance