This study identifies and applies methods for evaluating the human response to pedestrian lighting applications intended for future use by the municipality of Malmö, Sweden. The methods employed provide a supplementary perspective to that given by the photometric properties of the lighting applications. The study involved 89 participants from two age groups (Young: N: 43, 19–31 yrs.; Elderly: N: 46, 62–77 yrs.). Data were collected in a full-scale laboratory using a mock-up pedestrian pathway. Three lighting applications (one ceramic metal halide and two LED) were presented and the participants’ behavior (walking speed), perception (ability to perform visual tasks–recognize facial expressions, detect obstacles, read street signpost), affective response, and evaluation of the lighting quality were assessed.The three lighting applications significantly differed with regard to the human response. The facial expression recognition distance, sign reading distance and the obstacle detection task, along with the evaluation of lighting quality and level of arousal, distinguished one of the LEDs (Correlated Color Temperature: 3810, Color Rendering Index: 75, Scotopic/Photopic ratio: 1.48) from the other two lighting applications–the participants performed better on the visual tasks, and the lighting was perceived as brighter, more arousing and less pleasant. Methods to capture human perception, evaluation and behavior in relation to outdoor lighting, provide a valuable perspective that should be systematically applied when municipalities consider different pedestrian lighting applications.

Walking as a means of transportation is a key feature in sustainable urban design, but few studies have examined the influence of micro-level environmental features, such as vegetation and street lighting, on perceived safety and people’s choice to walk. This study applied a non-explicit approach to examine the relationship between greenery, street lighting, perceived safety, and walking in an urban context. Participants from three neighbourhoods in Malmö, Sweden, took part in focus group discussions concerning neighbourhood qualities related to walking.A qualitative analysis revealed four inter-related themes relevant for perceived safety after dark: avoidance, entrapment, presence of others, and prospect (visual overview of the nearby surroundings). The quality of urban greenery and street lighting impacted people’s route choices after dark, and some participants felt compelled to make detours. Entrapment, partly due to unkempt greenery in combination with darkness, contributed to avoidance, whereas the presence of other people had the opposite effect. The results indicate that urban greenery and street lighting must be considered together, since their interaction influences perceived safety and impacts the walkability of the neighbourhood.

This study assessed whether methods for capturing the pedestrian experience of outdoor lighting, previously evaluated in a full-scale laboratory, were applicable in a real-world setting. It applied an approach capturing the human response to outdoor lighting in a systematic way, by assessing perception, evaluation and behaviour in the lit environment. The study involved 81 participants from two age groups (Young—n: 48, mean age: 26, 63% women; Elderly—n: 33, mean age: 69, 67% women) and was carried out on a pedestrian path in a park in the centre of Malmö, Sweden, in the evenings during wintertime. Two LED lighting applications, differing in light distribution, uniformity and horizontal illuminance, were presented, and the pedestrians’ perception (facial expression recognition and sign reading), evaluation (arousal, valence and perceived outdoor lighting quality) and behaviour (pedestrian flow) were assessed. The results from the perceptual tasks differed significantly between the lighting applications, in favour of the lighting application with greatest uniformity and horizontal illuminance. There was a significant difference in sign reading distance between the two age groups. The methods applied in this study are feasible to administer and could be used to assess lighting solutions in order to capture the needs of vulnerable groups.

Landowners' choice of management practices will directly affect the conservation of biodiversity in large-scale productive landscapes such as forests and agricultural areas. Using the value-belief-norm theory, this study identifies the extent to which landowners differ regarding the psychological variables antecedent of a moral obligation to protect local biodiversity after participation in conservation programmes. A survey was carried out among 280 landowners who had to varying degrees participated in either voluntary forest preservation or wetland restoration. The results showed that the landowner groups did not differ in fundamental value structure and ecological worldview. Landowner groups that had participated in the projects tended to be more aware of consequences, ascribing more responsibility to themselves and expressing personal norms obligating them to participate in local biodiversity conservation more than landowners who did not participate. Local biodiversity conservation could benefit from addressing the psychological antecedents of the moral obligation among landowners in parallel with removing structural barriers.

Accurate assessment of people’s preferences for different outdoor lighting applications is increasingly considered important in the development of new urban environments. Here a new method of random environmental walking is proposed to complement current methods of assessing urban lighting applications, such as self-report questionnaires. The procedure involves participants repeatedly walking between different lighting applications by random selection of a lighting application and preferred choice or by random selection of a lighting application alone. In this manner, participants are exposed to all lighting applications of interest more than once and participants’ preferences for the different lighting applications are reflected in the number of times they walk to each lighting application. On the basis of an initial simulation study, to explore the feasibility of this approach, a comprehensive field test was undertaken. The field test included random environmental walking and collection of participants’ subjective ratings of perceived pleasantness (PP), perceived quality, perceived strength, and perceived flicker of four lighting applications. The results indicate that random environmental walking can reveal participants’ preferences for different lighting applications that, in the present study, conformed to participants’ ratings of PP and perceived quality of the lighting applications. As a complement to subjectively stated environmental preferences, random environmental walking has the potential to expose behavioral preferences for different lighting applications.