REIMAGINING THE NIGHT

By Roger Narboni

For several years now, in most dense cities around the world, new urban and mobility policies have been put in place to reduce the place of the car in the city and the speed of vehicles.

This, in turn, has created a major challenge of redistributing the public space gained to promote public transport, ‘soft’ modes of transport (such as cycling) and pedestrians. In this scenario, there is an argument that functional street lighting as we know it could soon become archaic, even useless.

The planned deployment of electric cars, then autonomous vehicles that will no longer need drivers, will make the separation between sidewalks and carriageway we’ve all got used to obsolete, as well as the presence of streetlights regularly at the edge of it. Public lighting, as we have known it for decades, may need to be totally rethought as a result.

In the Middle Ages, the streets did not offer a demarcation between vehicular and pedestrian traffic. And for many centuries pedestrians were in the majority on such streets anyway, while horses, chariots, carriages and carts were very much the minority.

In France, the first sidewalks appeared on the streets of Paris just before the French Revolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, these had become relatively commonplace on both sides of the roadway. Then, gradually, car traffic and parking became privileged at the expense of the space reserved for pedestrians, which in turn gradually became more and more restricted.

The lighting on these streets, initially placed on the façades of the buildings or suspended down the centre, followed this traffic-first evolution. It, too, gradually became installed on the sidewalks to allow the road to be ever-more devoted to vehicles.

The installation of functional street lighting accelerated after the Second World War, with advances around accommodating and improving night vision for drivers, so as to avoid pedestrians. This was the start of street lighting, as ILP members well know, becoming one of the most familiar sights on our highways and streets, arranged at the edge of the road so as to ensure continuous and uniform lighting.

The result has been millions of light points around the world, lights that have built the night image of our cities, leading in turn to passionate debate around light pollution at night and night aerial vision.

As car technology evolves, however, and especially against the backdrop of the climate crisis fuelling this switch away from conventional vehicles, will this very classic approach become obsolete? And perhaps sooner than we might assume?

I’d argue the major urban changes we are seeing – even though, as yet, they are at small scale – should encourage us to revolutionise the way we think about public lighting in cities at night. I’m now going to suggest four ways that I think our illuminated public realm could change as a result.

Obviously, predicting the future can never be exact, but I believe it is plausible to argue that at least some of these changes may in time become as familiar as the conventional road/pedestrian dichotomy that we have all become used to for so many years.

In this scenario, streets could be radically reimagined to offer (as in Medieval times) a continuous thoroughfare from building façade to façade.

So, free of a pedestrian/traffic delineation, free of linear columns of lighting running down each side and free of photometric constraints. On this last point, because there would be much less need to be

differentiating the illuminance between the sidewalk, bike path and roadway, there would be more freedom and flexibility around uniformity of illuminance or tonalities of light.

It is not simply a question of rethinking pavement lighting or pedestrian lighting but of going well beyond that and rethinking the whole space: studying and developing innovative ways to light environments for public spaces.

This, in turn, could become more closely linked to the nocturnal mobilities that will, in all likelihood, still be important – bus stops, access points to stations and so on. Lighting will be used to facilitate and encourage greater use of public transport at night, the safety of local night travel, the need for us all to have a social and eco-responsible approach to lighting, and the implementation of an inclusive night city.

One element within this could be ‘night lounges’, or illuminated public spaces (outdoor and covered) where people could pause on their night journey or whatever they’re doing.

The lighting in these spaces would need to be flexible, varied, user-friendly and interactive. It could perhaps be controllable or adjustable to accommodate different nocturnal uses as well as work to improve the wellbeing of city dwellers at night. So it would be about lighting that encourages social connection, reduces stress, is linked to our biological rhythms and so on.

Of course, as well as lighting, these night lounges would need to offer users all the possibilities of the smart city currently either already available or soon to be available in the future. So, internet or Wi Fi connection, electric or device charging, sound diffusion and so on.

They would be places where citizens could, if they wish, interact with users or passers-by; places where they could control and choose their lighting atmospheres from a cocktail of scenes or scenarios (intensity, colour, patterns and textures, types, distribution in the space and so on).

They would be reassuring, protective spaces, either from simply the noise and hustle and bustle of a city at night or literally protective, for example if, say, someone was feeling vulnerable in the street.

The social role that urban lighting plays, already, in our everyday lives is well established. In an urban environment, attractive and welcoming lighting can help to break the isolation of city life, especially for those who are less well off economically and so perhaps don’t have access to their own private spaces. The decline of streets based around traffic versus pedestrians could in that scenario encourage a more sensory and restorative urban approach.

Alongside this, the consideration of gender in the planning of public spaces – especially safety and vulnerability – must be an important part; it must be something systematically planned-for within the new nocturnal ‘normal’ of the urban world.

This image, and following all by Noémie Riou. Last image by Juliette Maricourt

Building on the idea of night lounges, the increasing controllability of light through our smartphones has great potential in this new urban night economy.

If we’re no longer constrained by having to light the road and then the pedestrians, and in a way that keeps them both apart, interactivity and participation by citizens in the nightscape becomes much more possible. In effect, urban and public realm spaces can become ‘democratised’ at night.

So, as we’ve already highlighted, in night lounge spaces city dwellers might be able to modify the nocturnal image of a place for a given period of time and according to preset scenes or scenarios. But this interactivity via light could be extended to other spaces – parks for example or even retail centres.

The democratisation of the lighting of public spaces could enable city dwellers to regain control over their nocturnal environment, allow them to create lighting environments they want and which work for them. Citizens will finally be able to free themselves from the stranglehold of city technicians and lighting engineers who have always decided on and functionally designed the lighting of the world’s cities without real citizen debate or input.

These nocturnal lounges must be thought of and designed as modular structures (with simple and robust elements) that make it possible to create different types of spaces depending on the size and shape of the public space to be occupied.

They can be installed and fixed autonomously in the public space, but also perhaps hung from an existing mast or joined to a nearby façade.

Some types of lighting can be integrated from the outset, other lighting can be added on demand. Accessories (mini-projectors, colour filters, night lights, garlands and so on) can also be made available to personalise or decorate these spaces according to the evolution of the space and/or the desire of those using them.

It is not a question necessarily of creating new types of urban furniture but thinking about these spaces in the context of light, conceiving them as places capable of transforming and shaping their nearby nocturnal environment and of offering city dwellers interactive, original, and innovative lighting atmospheres.

Covid-19 of course also showed the importance of outdoor space at nightfall. In the wake of this pandemic, and in view of the major role that terraces of bars and restaurants are still playing today as well as other types of extensions in public spaces, lounges can be a way of using light more creatively in the public space, in either a temporary or permanent way.

Wellbeing, stress reduction and rejuvenation could become the driving forces in the design of urban lighting – rather than needing to see or be seen by traffic. This includes of course the greater use and facilitation of nocturnal sports in the streets and parks.

We’re all only too aware that global warming means we must reduce our energy use. The best way to do that is, very simply, to switch off more. Global warming will lead to a greater need for, a greater imperative for, darkness; the need to rediscover the night and its freshness in the city after sunset.

In this new night-time urban environment, darkness – rather than simply being a by-product of an otherwise illuminated city – will need to be organised, spread and developed deliberately and gradually. As well as the drive of climate change, the necessary preservation of nocturnal biodiversity, currently in great danger, will be another important motivator here.

Public and private lighting must in this scenario be redesigned – designed and implemented to limit light pollution and respect the environment.

This may mean considering ‘dark infrastructure’, darkness preservation, building darkness into architectural and lighting design, delineating areas of darkness (partial, temporary or permanent), how darkness connects and intersects with light and lighting in the public realm, the role of darkness within vulnerability, safety and inclusion at night. And ‘considering’ here means ensuring consultation processes are carried out with rather than just for inhabitants.

When darkness is no longer synonymous with sometimes irrational fears or feelings of insecurity, new urban scenarios can then be imagined in response to energy crises. Without having to worry so much about roads versus pedestrians, darkness can become a key tool in the global will to fight climate change and reduce air pollution, in the rediscovery of the night in the city, and in the invention of new ways of lighting.

We may end up with a scenario where a city has zones of darkness that gradually expand to contain and limit at night the bright islands formed by the megacities. These large new dark ‘territories’ will allow the human eye to rediscover its night vision, to see the stars and heavens anew, and to encourage city dwellers to readjust mentally and psychologically to wandering in the dark night.

Urban populations’ use of autonomous, portable lights could pave the way for night learning and new therapies based on the pleasure of being and moving around the city in deep darkness.

While walking around today with a smartphone – with its bright, glary screen –has become ubiquitous at night in many cities, the nocturnal urban space of the future will, I’d argue, gradually transform.

One way will be through the appearance, use and (and this may be the bit that takes time) the acceptance of portable and autonomous lanterns that can enable users to control their movement and their close nocturnal environment according to their needs and wishes.

These rechargeable luminous objects, and their interconnection when everyone is using them, will allow passers-by to reconstitute a collective ‘luminous space’, or even to illuminate on demand an element of architecture or landscape. Urban lighting will then no longer be just public but shared.

Within this, we could see more use of integrated bioluminescence and phosphorescence. The bioluminescence of certain plants, fungi and even animals has long been known and while, up to now, their application and take-up has been limited, this could change.

I’d go so far even as to say they could augur a new revolution in energy-efficient urban lighting, with lighting better able to adapt automatically and in real time to new urban uses

New controllable luminous materials, new ways of illuminating will appear and transform our vision of the nocturnal public space and surrounding architecture.

Streets will be able to be illuminated using these luminous materials, perhaps on the ground or the first levels of the built fronts. This could fundamentally change how we perceive the city at night.

None of this change is going to happen overnight – cars (even autonomous ones) are not going to disappear from our streets anytime soon.

But, if you pardon the pun, the direction of travel is clear. Once cities genuinely start to ‘move on’ from a traditional car/pedestrian-based approach, the possibilities are endless. We could, in time, be seeing a profound rethinking and reshaping of urban spaces and the public realm at night, and how it is lit and illuminated.

One final point, however. This rethinking and reshaping has to be done as a real consultation with citizens. This need to be something that happens through codesign, co-construction and active participation of inhabitants in the development of future lighting strategies.

The urban night, which has always of course represented 50% of a city’s time, will – I hope – eventually become a springboard to totally new thinking and approaches. Reimagining the city at night in this way will also allow us – us all – to better respond to changes and evolutions in our lifestyles and how we use cities at night.

Image by Gaia Lemmens

Image by Floriane Deléglise

Roger Narboni is a French lighting designer with CONCEPTO