Street lighting can affect your health, mood and sleep

While lights may make our streets safer after dark, artificial light at night has been shown to pose a range of health risks.

Dr Margaret Grose, senior lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, argues urban planners need to consider the health implications associated with street lighting, as well as the safety and environmental issues.

“Artificial light at night (ALAN) disrupts the production of melatonin in the human body, which regulates everything from our sleep/wake cycle to our mood, energy and appetite. According to the American Medical Association it’s a sleeping giant,” she says.

Medical concern about ALAN has grown since a ground-breaking 1980 study published in Science, which showed that light suppresses melatonin secretion in humans. Melatonin acts as an anti-carcinogen for a variety of tumours, and production of the hormone naturally increases in the human body between 9pm and 7am, hours traditionally associated with darkness.

Inher paper published in the Health Promotion Journal of Australia last year, Dr Grose wrote: “In 2007, the World Health Organisation declared that ALAN (artificial light at night) is a carcinogenic...