Light Pollution
Artificial illumination has had profound and far-reaching impacts on the design and use of cities after dark, bringing many benefits. However, the adverse costs and effects of light pollution have emerged as a pressing environmental issue, intertwined with pivotal challenges of the 21st century: climate change and the energy transition, biodiversity loss, and unprecedented urbanisation. Yet, despite a growing recognition of light pollution, our nights continue to get brighter.
It is increasingly accepted that urban lighting needs to adapt and change, given unsustainable energy consumption patterns and ecological impacts. What is urgently needed are creative approaches that take into account the full range of social and environmental values at stake, before we become locked into a new generation of outdoor lighting that exacerbates negative impacts. This goal can be aided through developing new strategies for engaging with the qualities of urban nights, to investigate how and why we choose to illuminate our cities after dark.
Dark Design
The research team has been pioneering the concepts of dark design and designing for darkness, a novel approach to urban lighting that argues we should actively design with darkness rather than against it, fostering and promoting dark infrastructures within our cities and experiences. This includes raising awareness of the adverse impacts of light pollution, understanding the positive values associated with darker nights, and ultimately developing innovative lighting strategies. To advance the theory and practice of dark design, this project sees the ‘rewilding’ of nights not as the absence of humans or artificial light, but a synergistic alignment of urban technologies with ecological and cosmological rhythms and processes. Environmental sensors allow us to access dimensions of urban nightscapes outside of our regular attention and experiences. The creative interpretation of this data can open new ways of understanding and engaging with the conditions and temporalities of cities after dark, offering new perspectives on sustainable (nighttime) urban futures.
Interdisciplinary Approach
We take an explicitly interdisciplinary approach — both in terms of content and collaborators — to bring together the different bodies of knowledge and modes of inquiry needed to re-imagine urban nights.
