Abstract
Urban street lighting plays a transformative role in nocturnal placemaking, public safety, and micro-scale pedestrian mobility, particularly within dense historic fabrics. This study evaluates the deployment of an adaptive smart street lighting network in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter (Barri Gòtic), examining its dual effects on perceived safety and pedestrian flow dynamics. Utilizing an integrated empirical methodology, we deployed edge-computing optical and passive infrared (PIR) sensors across four high-density medieval street corridors over a nine-month period, capturing continuous pedestrian volume, velocity, and trajectory distributions alongside dynamic lux and correlated color temperature adjustments. Sensor data were coupled with in-situ experiential surveys (n = 432) assessing nocturnal fear of crime, perceived spatial legibility, and environmental visual comfort across diverse demographic cohorts. The findings indicate that dynamic illuminance scaling (ranging from 15 to 45 lux based on real-time pedestrian presence) generated a 31.4% improvement in subjective safety scores among female and solo nocturnal pedestrians. Concurrently, sensor tracking revealed a 22.8% increase in effective walking speed variance and a spatial redistribution that mitigated corridor crowding bottlenecks without inducing visual glare. Furthermore, the adaptive system yielded a 38.6% reduction in municipal energy consumption compared to static high-pressure sodium fixtures. These results demonstrate that responsive, sensor-driven lighting infrastructure can harmonize heritage preservation objectives with human-centric urban safety and mobility management in complex urban morphological settings.
