5 minute read
Illuminating the City: Leni Schwendinger's Vision for Urban Nightscapes
from Oct/Nov 2025
By Randy Reid
Leni Schwendinger has dedicated more than two decades to reshaping the way cities look and feel after dark. A published, award-winning authority on urban lighting, she has built an international reputation for her innovative practice of nighttime design urbanism—a discipline that brings together infrastructure, art, safety, and community engagement.
Through projects around the world, she has demonstrated how light can transform not just the appearance of a city but the way people use and experience it.
At the core of Leni’s work is her NightSeeing™, Navigate Your Luminous City program. Trademarked more than 20 years ago, NightSeeing™ is a rigorously planned nighttime walk where participants explore the city at civil twilight—when daylight fades and the character of artificial light takes over.
These walks, which take an hour to cover what would normally be a 10-minute route, are designed to make participants acutely aware of lighting conditions, safety, and ambience. “Walking and talking is so productive,” she explained. “I point out every phenomenon, and I elicit feedback and questions from people on the walk to get them involved.”
This participatory method was central to the Myrtle Beach NightSeeing™ and Night Lighting Masterplan. The project was coordinated by the Business Improvement District of the Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance, which sought to integrate lighting into a larger vision of housing, zoning, economic development, and public art.
Leni and her team worked with residents, businesses, and utility providers to develop recommendations for safer and more engaging nights. Although adoption of the plan depends on municipal decision-makers, it has already raised awareness and spurred smaller projects and peer reviews.
“One of the differences between lighting design as we’ve known it and urban lighting design is the client,” she said. “If the client is the city or a public-private partnership, the timelines are longer, the approvals are more difficult, and there’s a lot of convincing and teaching.”
In New York, her collaboration with the Department of Transportation produced the Sunset Park “Elevated” Underpass Pilot. This project explored how to transform neglected and often intimidating spaces under elevated highways.
The pilot used striking white light to replace sodium fixtures, incorporated the angled bridge columns, canted posts and curving beams, and even tested horticultural lighting to see if greenery could thrive under the structure. The planting experiment was not successful due to maintenance challenges, but Leni views that as part of the process: “Here we are, lighting designers as scientific investigators—lessons learned. Welcome to the real world.”
Her artistic sensibility is also evident in Dreaming in Color, a public art commission that transformed light into a storytelling medium, and in the Queens Garage and Community Space project, which elevated a utilitarian structure into a safer, more welcoming public amenity. These projects demonstrate her ability to balance technical function with poetic impact—a theme she often expresses as “replacing fear with poetry.”
On the West Coast, the North Embarcadero Vision Plan in San Diego showcases the role of lighting in shaping civic identity. Leni designed custom spiral poles, 30 feet tall, that cast light both upward into palm fronds and downward onto the street. Initially, she doubted the radical design would be approved, but the community embraced it. Since domestic manufacturers declined to produce the poles, they were fabricated in Poland and shipped to California.
Installed along the waterfront, the poles have since become recognizable features of the district. “The city wanted something that would speak of identity,” she recalled. “And if you ask people who know the Embarcadero, they will recall these poles.”
Beyond her projects, Leni plays a significant role in advancing urban lighting as a discipline. She draws careful distinctions between outdoor, public, and urban lighting, arguing that the latter reflects a holistic understanding of city life: people, sidewalks, storefronts, and cultural behaviors all shaped by illumination. “Urban lighting encompasses the bigger picture of how citizens can get around at night without fear,” she explained.
Her influence extends internationally through LUCI—Lighting Urban Community International—where she serves as U.S. Ambassador. LUCI is a global network of cities and lighting professionals promoting sustainable urban development through light. With members across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, LUCI fosters what she calls a “cross-pollination of ideas and outlooks.”
American cities have been slower to join, but she believes that light festivals and public art projects are helping shift perspectives, bringing the U.S. closer to valuing light as a civic and cultural tool.
Leni also maintains ties to academia and policy. She was a visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she works with boroughs to audit nighttime conditions and recommend strategies. In New York, as a Design Trust for Public Space Fellow, she continues to influence planning and policy, ensuring that lighting is not an afterthought but an integral part of urban design.
Her commitment to research extends to exploring the links between lighting and safety. She notes that while studies are inconclusive, what often matters most is whether a community shows visible signs of care—well-maintained sidewalks, upright poles, and clean façades—rather than simply the brightness of the lighting.
Through all of this, Leni demonstrates that urban lighting is both art and infrastructure. It is about creating identity, safety, and delight in the darkened hours of the city. From Myrtle Beach to San Diego, from New York to London, her work continues to prove that when the sun sets, cities don’t have to go dark.
With thoughtful design, they can shine.
