5 minute read
The Role of Light in Restorative Cites
Gary Thornton, director of Nulty, says we need to say no to overly illuminated urban environments that do little for our sense of wellbeing.
Too bright, too dim, too much glare, we have all been exposed to bad lighting in a city –you do not have to be a lighting designer to call it out. Conversely, we have all experienced good lighting, even if we were only faintly aware of it at the time. Why do we naturally gravitate to the old town on our travels? Because people crave visually interesting architecture, with soft, human-scale lighting that works in harmony with the streetscape.
Poorly lit urban environments are a byproduct of the modern age. Somewhere along the way, architecture ceased to be the subject and wrongly became a canvas to be illuminated. Public realm lighting became a dispassionate and disjointed art form, with lighting designers often brought in as an afterthought.
‘A more holistic approach to lighting design would improve the lived experience of a city’
Where did this lead us? Cities became progressively overly illuminated and over saturated. Buildings began competing with their neighbours to stand out, usually at the expense of quality of light.
With the UN predicting that 68 per cent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, the role of developers, urban planners, architects, landscape designers and lighting designers as guardians of well-designed cities has come into focus.
As cities have swelled to accommodate more people, quality of life, community and wellbeing have been drastically overlooked. The magnitude of the built environment has superseded the needs of the individual, and cities have been an unhealthy reality for the people that visit and inhabit these spaces.
In recent years, city-wide masterplans with specific lighting strategies have begun to alleviate these issues.
Paris set a strong precedent with its Plan Lumière, developed by Concepto Agency under Roger Narboni. This high-level lighting strategy focused on addressing transitions between different districts and reconnecting the outlying areas with the main city centre after dark.
The overall goal was to give each individual district its own sense of character at night, while achieving a unifying identity for the ‘City of Light’.
Similarly, the City of London has made a concerted effort to overcome a legacy of uncoordinated lighting design. Led by Speirs Major Light Architecture, its lighting strategy aims to create legible public spaces and improve connectivity across the city to promote permeability.
A key focus of the masterplan is to readjust the hierarchy between cars and pedestrians, creating a more human-centric environment and improving the night-time economy.
It is encouraging that the notion of a unified city with an overarching design strategy no longer feels like a luxury – this is especially evident today in the Middle East, where entirely new cities are emerging from the ground up.
Free from the traditional constraints that come with a city already inhabited by people, buildings and infrastructure, designers are being given the scope to embed cohesive lighting strategies into the fabric of a city.
These pioneering developments demonstrate how light can be an integral part of urban life, helping to enhance culture, wellbeing and connectivity after dark, particularly important in a region where the climate creates a need to socialise and exercise in the evening.
Cities should provide a positive experience for their inhabitants. While progress has been made, we need to look beyond exacerbating the negative effects of poor lighting design. Given the high number of people living and visiting cities, our benchmark for success cannot be to simply ‘do no harm’. We need to go further by actively supporting physical and mental health through our designs.
This point leads us nicely onto the concept of a ‘Restorative City’, an idea that I was introduced to courtesy of Restorative Cities: Urban Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing (Jenny Roe and Layla McCay, 2021).
The book outlines a framework for urban design, centred around the principle of a restorative city, which helps us regulate emotion and mental wellbeing. It is a captivating concept that paves the way for a new paradigm, where designers pledge to move beyond neutral by designing cities that are actively positive for all.
To realise this ambition, we need greater collaboration across disciplines. Light needs to be woven into every pillar of a city where people come together to connect, socialise and play.
While light is not one of these pillars, it can sit across each strand and help bring them together in the spirit of a more cohesive city.
In an urban environment light should operate across many levels, helping to define identity and scale, aid navigation, highlight points of interest, humanise public spaces, and foster connection. Every single intervention should enrich the lives of the people spending time in these spaces – bright and uniform is not the way to do it.
