Dark skies are becoming increasingly rare as the residency of human population shifts from rural to urban areas, with 55% of the world’s population living in urban areas today (United Nations, 2018). While natural light can at times obstruct our views of dark skies, it is not the main deterrence. Instead, our views are most often obstructed by artificial light sources; creating a permanent (urban) sky glow at night (Plumer, 2016). Moreover, the Milky Way is no longer visible to approximately one-third of the world’s population. For example, 80 per cent of Americans and 60 per cent of Europeans are no longer able to see the Milky Way (Plumer, 2016). As a result, locating accessible sites for night sky viewing has become increasingly difficult in cities. The Canadian Space Agency characterizes ideal sites across Canadian cities to be within isolated parks and reserves, distanced from light pollution (Scotti, 2018). However, public safety concerns may arise when attempting to access these isolated areas, especially at night. Therefore, it is critical to consider sites for dark skies in conjunction with public safety risks.

Public safety is multifaceted and highly context-dependent. Consequently, there are various ways to conceptualize measures for safety with respect to relevancy. In our project, we will examine safety through two distinct measures for the City of Vancouver: (1) street lighting and (lack of) crimes; and (2) land use hierarchy by crime. For our first measure, occurrences of crime and street lighting are used to capture perceived safety. While there is a lack of scientific evidence that street lighting deters crime – and thus, our reason for including crime data along with street lighting, extensive research has been conducted to investigate the association between street lighting and safety in urban areas. For example, illumination of public spaces, such as parks, beaches, and roads, can transform perceptions of safety at night by “provid[ing] reassurance to some people … in their use of public space” (Riggs, 2014). However, since street lights in part contribute to light pollution, we chose to examine another measure for safety by utilizing land use types. Research states that specific land uses and locations have varying levels of crime risks and present different relations to crime (Stucky & Ottensmann, 2009; Song, Andresen, Brantingham & Spicer, 2017). Furthermore, these studies have found higher rates of crimes to be more frequent in non-residential areas such as commercial areas. This was consistent with our statistical findings and subsequent rankings as commercial and transit-oriented land uses had the highest crime rates, respectively. This is in part explained by the theory of routine activities which suggests daily routine activities to place offenders and targets in proximity. For example, offenders may identify targets en route to their frequent destination.

It is important to note that we chose to identify two distinct measures for safety not only to capture different conceptualization methods, but also to emphasize how different perceptions and theorizations of safety may impact our rights to public spaces (and cities) at night. Urban design, which includes coordination of the illumination of public spaces and of land use patterns, is a critical factor that enhances, or compromises, our rights to access cities and engage in activities in public spaces at all hours. Considering this, we chose to explore the following research questions: Which parks are ideal for safe sky viewing at night within the City of Vancouver? Do different conceptualizations for measures for safety change the identification of safe sky viewing locations?

Hypothesis: Expect to identify more locations through our second measure for safety, i.e., land use hierarchy by crime, as street lighting not only contributes to accessibility but also acts as a source of light pollution. As well, land use will likely classify larger units of area into varying levels of crime than crime (point) density.