In a piece for The Atlantic, Eric Scigliano stumbles on a natural experiment in his Seattle neighborhood: residential blocks built, unusually, with no streetlights. He compares the crime rates on these blocks and nearby lit blocks and investigates what cities around the world have found when they changed light levels. Scigliano reports on how lighting might affect crime — both its commission and its reporting — how lighting affects residents, and why studies may have found such contradictory effects of lighting on crime rates. Photo: Dietmar Rabich via Wikimedia Commons
