Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society

Josiane Meier, Ute Hasenöhrl, Katharina Krause, Merle Pottharst, Josiane Meier, Ute Hasenöhrl, Katharina Krause, Merle Pottharst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317602460
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

After decades "in the shadows", urban lighting is re-emerging as a matter of public debate. Long-standing truths are increasingly questioned as a confluence of developments affects lighting itself and the way it is viewed. Light has become an integral element of place-making and energy-saving initiatives alike. Rapidly evolving lighting technologies are opening up new possibilities, but also posing new challenges to planners, and awareness is growing that artificial illumination is not purely benign but can actually constitute a form of pollution. As a result, public policy frameworks, incentives and initiatives are undergoing a phase of innovation and change that will affect how cities are lit for years to come.

The first comprehensive compilation of current scientific discussions on urban lighting and light pollution from a social science and humanities perspective, Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society contributes to an evolving international debate on an increasingly controversial topic. The contributions draw a rich panorama of the manifold discourses connected with artificial illumination in the past and present – from early attempts to promote new lighting technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to current debates on restricting its excessive usage in public space and the protection of darkness. By bringing together a cross-section of current findings and debates on urban lighting and light pollution from a wide variety of disciplines, it reflects that artificial lighting is multifaceted in its qualities, utilisation and interpretation.

Including case studies from the United States, Europe, and the UK, Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society is one of the first to take a serious assessment of light, pollution, and places and is a valuable resource for planners, policy makers and students in related subjects.

Part I
Lighting up the City

Perceptions and Practices

Introduction

Beate Binder

Nothing seems more natural than the existence of night and day. Yet the way we experience this shifting of light—and, above all, the new life to which the city wakes up at dusk, when worlds of leisure and consumption begin to constitute what we call nightlife—is fabricated by social practices. In other words, night spaces are socially mediated. As Robert Williams notes, night spaces “do not exist prior to, or apart from, human practices and the attendant social relationships that seek to appropriate, even control, the darkness in its myriad human uses and meanings” (Williams, 2008, p. 514). Above all, the abundance of light is crucial for our experience of city nights. Brilliantly illuminated from dusk till dawn, it is the brightness of the night that allows for the city to never sleep and seems to guarantee ‘real’ urbanity. In this sense, the history of artificial lighting calls forth a story of not only technical, but also of changing social practices and imaginations. It is moreover crucial to keep in mind the other side of this coin: the brightness of the night comes in the form of a multitude of work and services performed mostly invisibly. Above all, it costs the experience of—what we imagine as—‘real’ darkness: nights lit only by the moon are as rare as a glimpse of any but the brightest stars while living in cities.

Most histories of artificial lighting provide a story of ever-growing brightness. As light colonises the night, it allows for the well-known topographies of leisure, pleasure and service to develop. But from the beginning, city nights were constituted by social struggles about the heavily disputed question of what should happen and where in the night—and what should not. From different perspectives and with focus on different periods and localities, the authors in this section show how night-life and artificial lighting developed side by side, both taking part in the production of modern urban life and the imaginary of urban nights.

As Jane Brox depicts, it is only in the past 200 years that the evolution of light and the generous illumination of nights has shaped and transformed nightlife. While in earlier times artificial light was a precious and scarce good which was handled with great care, the amount of light people considered sufficient increased with the spread of illumination. Jane Brox’s “Out of the Dark: A Brief History of Artificial Light in Outdoor Spaces” allows us to imagine the world without electric bulbs and neon—without any electric light at all. But it is not a romantic picture that the impenetrable nightly darkness evokes; instead, Brox offers a lively description of the practices necessary to organise everyday life without the possibility of switching on lights to brighten the night. It is worth noticing that even though night was dark and people were mostly forced to stay at home, officials had to make significant investments in policing in order to control the night. All strategies, from curfews to laying chains across the streets to hinder people walking around at night, provoked—nearly self-evidently—tactics geared towards undermining the nightly rules and routines of locking oneself in one’s home.

Since the beginning of public lighting, security has been one of the most efficacious arguments for investing in new techniques to control the night. Since the 18th century, this argument was accompanied by the desire to enhance commercial activities—and the search for ever more bright and stable night light began. With the technical possibilities of lighting, with gas and electric devices, the connection of light and nightlife became stronger. But even though the history of artificial light is organised around the notion of an ever-growing brightness of the night, foremost driven by technological progress and pressured by economic and municipal interest groups, a closer look offers a more complex picture. This history consists of as many side steps and detours, contestations and experimentations as it does linearity towards more and more brightness. The search for an appropriate and suitable way to make use of inventions was always accompanied by dispute and struggle about light itself, and even more so about the changing world artificial light seems to bring with it. Thus, the critique of too much or too bright light belongs to the history of lighting as does fascination with and admiration of the possibility to light the night. David E. Nye leads us to some of these experiments. He shows how different ideas about lighting the city with electric light emerged between 1880 and 1915. More interesting than the experiments themselves are the affiliated discussions about cities and urbanity in general. While the ideas may appear odd from today’s perspective, they show impressively that the making of the illuminated night and the modern city were two inseparable intermingled processes. The largely forgotten attempts tell about struggles between different concepts of urban (night) life. Each allowed for new experiences of public space and took part in the formation of routines and aesthetics, pondering private interests, common values and the taste of a critical public, which loved the spectacles of light, but concurrently insisted on exercises of moderation.

In sum, these experiments hint at the contingency of the development of cities and concepts of urbanity. Such processes do not follow an abstract rationality; rather their rationality is construed in experience and experiment. Of course, economic interests were always a driving force, but the public as consumers and voters played an important role, too. As Nye points out, there are two differing principles that are contentious throughout this history—on the one hand, the wish for a centralised lighting plan and, on the other, the uncontrolled competition of effects to attract special attention.

Practices of illumination also change daily routines: each lighting system, from the single oil lamp to the elaborated electric system, depends on technical, material and bureaucratic infrastructures and the allocation and distribution of resources. At the same time, each lighting system brings special dangers and casualties with it, be it the danger of hunting whales for blubber or gas explosions with their destructive force or blackouts. Each breakdown reveals the dependency on technologies and fuels the discussion on the pros and cons of societal as well as technical developments. As light and lighting systems were discussed in public and became entangled with more general assumptions about the changing society and the benefit of progress, these discourses also found their way into art. As Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring demonstrate, literature refers not only to light itself but takes part in negotiating the ever-shifting symbolic and metaphoric meanings artificial light has. A close reading of texts ranging from Shakespeare to contemporary authors allows us to go beyond the established dichotomy of light and darkness as associated with good and evil. The authors convincingly argue that the night as social and metaphorical space is mutually constitutive and inseparably connected to daytime. Imagined as a source of demonic temptation and transgression, as a time of confusion, disorder and transformation or even as a space of healthy contemplation, the night was perceived as both a time of infinite melancholia and serious reflection on mortality and faith. As literature impressively shows, the effect of light goes far beyond mere illumination. It is involved in the fabrication of social situations, atmospheres and individuals’ moods. The more the illumination of the night becomes an everyday experience, the less literature is interested in this matter. Even today, light plays an important role in shaping different realities and social characters. But it is only in 20th- and 21st-century fiction that the different metaphors and symbolic meanings of light and darkness exist side by side, and that even discourses on sustainability and light pollution begin to find their way into literature.

At its heart, the story of artificial lighting is—as most dominant histories—constructed around a Eurocentric view of the world. What is valued as progress in Western cities began to expand as a measure far beyond the Western European context, as Avner Wishnitzer’s exploration of “Shedding New Light: Outdoor Illumination in Late Ottoman Istanbul” highlights. His overview of the development of nightly Istanbul points to similarities as well as differences regarding Western cities. Indeed, the nights during the Ottoman regime were dark and quiet as well, and marked by comparable restrictions for being outdoors. However, in Istanbul, an extravagant culture of leisure created space for stigmatised and even illegal activities such as drinking, gambling and illicit sexual relations. Here, to secure the night was perceived as a task of self-policing deployed by decentralised neighbourhoods and local authorities. The desire to illuminate the night steadily evolved much later than in Western cities. While new techniques build on older traditions of nightlife, the wish to take part in progress—as defined in the West with its references to knowledge, development and civilisation—gained influence and diminished the plurality of cultural traditions in the long run.

That light still might fabricate sociality and spaces of belonging is the point made by Tim Edensor. His analysis of festivals of light shows that light still has the ability to enchant and de-familiarise night-time spaces. Light festivals offer environments and atmospheres in which it is possible to reconfigure and reconsider the perception of the built environment and urban nature. By objecting to the more pessimistic assumption of a growing importance of spectacles driven by economic interests and offering only superficial amusements, he stresses the lucid and playful dimensions of light festivals that allow an experience of conviviality—aspects which do not fully converge with economic and political gains. From this perspective, light can still be extraordinary in its design, quantity and/or quality. In recalling moments of amazement and fascination, light festivals offer what Victor Turner called “liminoid spaces,” that is, spaces which have the potentiality for creativity and cultural change (Turner, 1982).

As all authors show, the lighting of the (city) night is accompanied by an ongoing discussion about the how and where of nightlife. Moreover, they highlight normative as well as social orders of cities and, in more general terms, society. The lighting of the night contributes to the construction of social hierarchies; it speaks of inclusion and exclusion, about the gain and loss of agency. Thus, considering this history of ongoing negotiation, it is also necessary to ask about the social effects of contemporary debates. What is the hidden agenda in terms of social difference and normative orders when light pollution is set at centre stage? Who will lose and who will gain, what will happen to sociality and social hierarchies in urban night spaces when the quality and quantity of light are more restricted?

References

Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Art Journal Publications.

Williams, R. (2008). Night Spaces: Darkness, Deterritorialization, and Social Control. Space and Culture, 11 (4), 514–532.

Chapter 1
Out of the Dark

A Brief History of Artificial Light in Outdoor Spaces

Jane Brox

We’ve lived for so long now in an age of illumination that it may be difficult to imagine a time when artificial light was scarce and precious. But our abundance is hardly more than 200 years old—for most of human history, artificial light barely made a mark in the enormity of night. For one thing, it was difficult to keep—candles and lamps were a chore to light and keep lit; they stank and they smoked; they needed constant tending. Because illumination depended on animal or vegetable fats, fuel could also be used for food, which meant that for all but the wealthy light was considered precious and was meted out sparingly. As well, the danger of conflagration from open flames was so high in thatched and wooden cities that officials often ordered cooking fires be extinguished soon after the evening meal. The word “curfew” comes from the Old French covre-feu, meaning “cover fire.” During the evening many people lay in their houses sleeping and dreaming out the hours. If by chance on a clear, moonless night they stepped out of their intimate dark and looked up to the heavens, the stars would have been so many, as Chekhov once said, “one could not have put a finger in between them” (Chekhov, 1985, p. 49).¹

Not only was light within meagre, prior to the 17th century street lighting was almost non-existent everywhere in the world. Even powerful societies lived with the dark of night. Renaissance Florence had no streetlights, nor did Imperial Rome, of which Jérôme Carcopino writes:

No oil lamps lighted [the streets], no candles were affixed to the walls; no lanterns were hung over the lintel of the doors, save on festive occasions when Rome was resplendent with exceptional illumination to demonstrate her collective joy, as when Cicero rid her of the Catilinarian plague. In normal times night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger. … Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance. The shops fell silent, safety chains were drawn across behind the leaves of the doors; the shutters of the flats were closed and the pots of flowers withdrawn from the windows they had adorned.

(Carcopino, 1940, p. 47)

The same absolute dark fell over Europe during the Middle Ages, when the close of day was announced with the tolling of the curfew bell. In the early Middle Ages it sounded just after dusk; in later centuries, especially in winter, it rang several hours after sunset, but always it held an unwavering meaning: at curfew much of the day’s labour stopped. Blacksmiths lay down their bellows and goldsmiths ceased beating out metal. The sounds of clinking harnesses, creaking wagons and the plodding tread of oxen decayed into silence as almost everyone—per order of the authorities—returned to their dwellings, locked their doors and shuttered their windows.

In the time before street lighting or organised police forces, the only way to maintain order was to strictly control the comings and goings of citizens. If inhabitants of fortified cities and towns found themselves beyond the gates at the sound of curfew, they made true haste because officials, to prevent intruders from entering under the cover of dark, locked the perimeter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• The New Visibility of Lighting: An Introduction
• Part I Lighting up the City: Perceptions and Practices
• Part II Dimming It Down: Lighting Conflicts and Regulation
• Part III Counting the Costs: Evaluating Light and Darkness
• Towards a Brighter Future? Conclusions for Lighting Research and Policy
• Index