Urban Lighting for People

Evidence-Based Lighting Design for the Built Environment

Navaz Davoudian

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000726688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Book Award Finalist for Urban Design Group Awards 2020

Lighting has the power to illuminate and enhance our experience within the built environment. The light that enables people to travel around their neighbourhood or their city; the light which they see themselves and their neighbourhood under. Research into the effects of urban lighting on behaviour, environmental psychology and social interaction is developing at a rapid rate. Yet, despite the affect it has on our daily lives, the practical application of this research is a relatively untapped resource.

This book explores the needs and experiences of people at night and how these can be addressed by public lighting. It will give readers the confidence to develop more sophisticated lighting plans and add value to their projects. Case studies provide in-depth analysis of real-life projects and will help the reader to understand lighting designers' own experiences, including post-installation observations. Written in an accessible style by an array of experts, this is an essential book for practitioners, academics and students alike, that will enable you to put the research in to practice and develop better lighting for better places.

Part 1
Night, City, Society

Chapter 1:
The Social Study of Urban Lighting

DR ELETTRA BORDONARO

DR JOANNE ENTWISTLE

DR DON SLATER

INTRODUCTION Light is a universal part of social life. All human activity takes place in some degree of light and dark, and all forms of light, whether daylight or artificial, give shape to the routine social practices through which different social groups move through social space. This is our starting premise: urban lighting provides a critical infrastructure of everyday life and interaction. This social centrality of lighting is topicalized through a range of issues: lighting involves huge economic and ecological costs; it is closely associated with matters of risk and safety, health and wellbeing; it connects with other modern urban ills like light pollution and the loss of night; and it configures sociability and lifestyle. Moreover, as light is so important, the social knowledge and assumptions of lighting professionals, planners and architects impact urban life and built environments in important ways. As part of their everyday practice, lighting professionals need a clear idea of what is involved in understanding the social aspects of light, and how to integrate these into their work.

What is ‘The Social’?

‘The social’, from a sociological perspective, refers to the practices, beliefs, relationships and institutions that structure collective life. It is therefore about the ways in which people organise themselves in different places to carry on a way of life. It also refers to the particular forms taken by things and materials in specific places and social worlds.

The social is therefore – necessarily – a mass of disparate stuff interrelated in complex and changing ways. Think of all the interconnected things that make up what we call a street or an office, and about the arrangements that allow a street or an office to keep its shape, more or less, over time. Because ‘the social’ is basically a very messy complexity, it is useful to think of it as an ‘assemblage’: we understand a street or an office not through abstract definitions or statistics but by understanding the way things are assembled or put together, and how they hold together (or fall apart) over time.

All this should make it clear that ‘the social’ does not refer to particular places that are, for example, deprived (‘social housing’) or problematic (places with ‘social problems’) or that appear to be ‘communities’ (‘neighbourhoods’ as opposed to commercial centres). All spaces used by people are ‘social’, involving public lighting in the interplay of the many different understandings, actors and interactions that make up a specific public space. Social life can be differentiated by factors such as age and class and ethnicity, as well as many finer distinctions that may be crucial: whether someone is a night worker, dog walker, teenager, homeless or a drug user and so on might be important in terms of how people inhabit the city after dark.

There are three more issues that are important for understanding ‘the social’ in relation to design. Firstly, people often talk about ‘the social’ versus ‘the technical’ or ‘material’. In fact, it is more useful to assume that ‘the social’ does not include only humans and their relationships but also materials, technologies and objects. Social assemblages like streets and offices clearly involve integrated relationships between materials, technologies and social practices and people. This is crucial for lighting design: we do not simply light a social space, or respond to social needs. Rather, our lighting designs are part of constructing assemblages: we make ‘the social’ as much as we respond to it.

Secondly, ‘the social’ is different from ‘the psychological’ or ‘the economic’. Psychology and economics are largely concerned with individuals – both might ask, ‘How do individual people choose or decide?’ and both might add up those individual decisions to identify ‘group behaviour’. Social research assumes that individuals are not the best starting point. Individuals do indeed populate the social world but they do so as members of families, subcultures, communities, cities and nations. If we focus solely on the individual’s choices we can learn only so much about social uses of design. In fact, the things that appear to make us ‘individuals’ are very much shaped by our identity and membership of our particular ‘social’ world. Understanding ‘the social’ means paying attention to the shared social characteristics shaping individuals’ use of things and the shared and located social context of design use.

Thirdly, there are complicated questions about how to connect social knowledge and lighting design, and, above all, questions about what kind or form of social knowledge is most useful for design work. The many different uses of the terms ‘evidence-based design’ and ‘research-informed design’ (as well as the huge literatures on participatory design, design anthropology and studio studies) all hinge on different analyses of what kind of knowledge enters or should enter into design work. The social research in design approach we use in the Configuring Light research programme (based in the Sociology department at LSE) aims to produce site-specific ‘evidence’ or knowledge that helps designers take design decisions based on a clear and research-based social rationale: i.e. good social reasons, based on evidence, for their lighting interventions. We therefore focus on deploying the most rigorous and creative social research methodologies to learn about a specific place or site – how its diverse users understand, use and imagine the past, present and future of this place. The approach also focuses on how to integrate social and design thinking over the course of a project. It is therefore closer to ‘research-based design’ or ‘research-informed design’.

For us as sociologists, ‘research’ or ‘evidence’ means reliable knowledge of a place and its stakeholders. By contrast, much evidence-based design defines ‘evidence’ as the findings of generic research, conducted elsewhere, which can be applied by designers to their site. For example, the impact of light on circadian rhythms or on hospital treatments, it is claimed, can be studied through experiments or surveys, and the results can take the form of general laws or causal links between light and behaviour that designers can then apply locally. While designers clearly should be aware of the latest findings from such research, they equally need to research their site, and they need to understand how these ‘general laws’ are mediated and modified as light operates in different social contexts, on different social groups with very different conditions and requirements. At the same time, we all need a healthy scepticism regarding scientific claims about the invariant effects of lighting on any behaviour; good evidence usually takes the form of a good understanding of the dynamics of the particular social world you have been entrusted to light.

What is ‘the social’ in lighting design?

We can get a better sense of ‘the social’ by looking at the two writers who have most influenced lighting designers (as well as architects and planners) in this area of work – urban planner Kevin Lynch and architect and planner Jan Gehl. Though it is notable that their major writings come from as early as the 1950s, both Gehl and Lynch focus on the ‘social’ aspects of public space and display a sociological imagination when it comes to their methods for studying the built environment. They see design as an intervention into this ‘social’ life, entailing ethical responsibilities including a responsibility to understand this social world better. Yet the social world they see themselves designing for, and the social life they see within it, is a day-lit world untouched by night.

Gehl’s examination of the built world speaks directly to the sociologist: in describing the ‘life between buildings’, the importance of the built environment for facilitating social interaction is made apparent.² His polemic starts from the basic premise that ‘people come where people are’.³ The built environment can either support this desire to be sociable or it can hinder it; quite simply, well-designed built environments enable social interaction and poor design hinders it. Gehl’s call to planners and architects to create ‘lively’ cities that facilitate interactions is also a direct critique of modernist functionalisms that allow little space for encounters, with ‘lifeless’ buildings, streets and cities designed for cars, not people. Hence, Gehl believes in the power of the built environment to shape social life and interaction; architecture here serves the purpose of ‘the social’. Gehl makes the call for ‘public life studies’ to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how diverse and complex public life is, acknowledging the changing temporal features and many social dimensions that shape public space: ‘design, gender, age, financial resources, culture and many other factors determine how we use or do not use public space’.⁴

In How to Study Public Life, Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre are concerned with how architects and planners might come to know these patterns of social life and argue for a qualitative approach to understanding urban life.⁵ Their publication is a methodological ‘how to’ design book that is akin to a sociological or anthropological text, asking multiple questions about the use of public space: how many, who, where, what happens in it? Thus the urban planner is much like an ethnographer who adapts qualitative methods pragmatically to each setting but for whom observation uses all the senses. They write:

Direct observation is the primary tool of the type of public life studies described in this book. As a general rule, users are not actively involved in the sense of being questioned, rather they are observed, their activities and behaviour mapped in order to better understand the needs of users and how city spaces are used. The direct observations help to understand why some spaces are used and others are not. ⁶

Through this observational data, the qualities of urban design and its role in facilitating social encounters can be examined. Equally, Gehl acknowledges the importance of qualitative analysis, much like the sociologist’s qualitative interpretation, arguing that ‘the ability to evaluate is the most important function,’ with careful attention paid to social difference and to disaggregating ‘people’, much as any ethnographer or sociologist might do.

But what of ‘life between buildings’ at night? What aspects of design and planning might enable the social interactions of the day to continue during the evening and night? The ‘life between buildings’ after sundown is neither discussed nor planned for, yet clearly what happens after dark will also depend partly on the design of public space, including lighting. Why is night and night-time design (principally but not solely artificial illumination) not part of Gehl’s analysis? What aspects of the nocturnal built world might influence, encourage or discourage the possibilities of movement, social interaction, events and recreational activities after sundown?

Kevin Lynch’s work takes up similar issues.⁷ His masterwork, The Image of the City, developed a still cutting-edge methodology for eliciting from people their personal and collective images of the city in the form of self-drawn maps of their recollected urban practices, mainly their routes and pathways. In this sense, Lynch attended, unlike Gehl, to people’s own understandings and representations of their practices rather than relying largely on observation of behaviours. His methodology, using observation, interviews and mapping, is directed towards understanding wayfinding in cities by uncovering ‘the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual’, an image that serves a ‘social role’ and promotes ‘emotional security’.⁸ From this commitment to the image of the city as a ‘vivid setting’, Lynch develops his language of ‘nodes’, ‘networks’, ‘viewpoints’, ‘pathways’, ‘edges’ and ‘borders’, which is the basis for his planning methodology to create memorable, legible and navigable cities.

Lynch’s aim is thus to generate a typology of the kinds of information that urban actors engage with to construct ‘images’ as stable patterns. The problem, from a sociological perspective, is the aggregation of these many pathways and viewpoints into a single ‘image of the city’. A sociologist, by contrast, is more keen to disaggregate, to take account of social differences. A sociologist wants to recognise the differences and conflicts that c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION TO URBAN LIGHTING AND EVIDENCE-BASED LIGHTING DESIGN
• PART 1: NIGHT, CITY, SOCIETY
• PART 2: EXPLORING THE NIGHT CITY
• PART 3: POST-PROJECT EVALUATION
• AFTERWORD
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• IMAGE CREDITS
• INDEX