The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim at providing a healthier planet for present and future generations. At the most recent SDG summit held in 2019, Member States recognized that the achievements accomplished to date have been insufficient to achieve this mission. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of 227 documents contextualizing outdoor lighting with SDGs, showing its potential to resolve some existing issues related to the SDG targets. From a list of 17 goals, six SDGs were identified to have relevant synergies with outdoor lighting in smart cities, including SDG 3 (Good health and well-being), SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), SDG 14 (Life below water) and SDG 15 (Life on land). This review also links efficient lighting roles partially with SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy) and SDG 13 (Climate action) through Target 7.3 and Target 13.2, respectively. This paper identifies outdoor lighting as a vector directly impacting 16 of the 50 targets in the six SDGs involved. Each section in this review discusses the main aspects of outdoor lighting by a human-centric, energy efficiency and environmental impacts. Each aspect addresses the most recent studies contributing to lighting solutions in the literature, helping us to understand the positive and negative impacts of artificial lighting on living beings. In addition, the work summarizes the proposed solutions and results tackling specific topics impacting SDG demands.

Lighting technologies have been rapidly developing in recent years together with the advancement in digital and connected technologies. Nevertheless, while achieving quantitative goals with the help of technical developments, there is always a need to correlate them with their impacts on users’ experience. This paper focuses on the changes in human behaviour whilst walking under an artificially lit outdoor environment. A systematic literature search was conducted from which three groups of a pedestrians’ behaviour were identified, namely walking (including activity levels and walking patterns), microscopic mobility (including walking speed, gait characteristics and use of walkway space) and gaze behaviour. An additional round of a literature search was done for each of the group mentioned above. Final set of the articles consisted of 41, 13 and 12 papers for walking, microscopic mobility behaviour and gaze behaviour subgroups respectively. The existing knowledge on possible changes in pedestrian behaviour caused by various artificial lighting settings was summarized. In addition, the methods to gather data about these changes applied in the selected papers were reviewed, and the perspectives for video-based analysis and online public participation geographic information system methodologies were discussed.