Urban Lighting for People-Evidence-Based Lighting Design for the Built Environment [1 ed.] 9781859468210, 9780429345678, 9781000699104, 9781000698749, 9781000698381, 9780367814588, 9781000726688, 9781000726442, 9781000726206

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EVIDENCE-BASED LIGHTING DESIGN FOR THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

EVIDENCE-BASED LIGHTING DESIGN FOR THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

EDITED BY

DR NAVAZ DAVOUDIAN

© RIBA Publishing, 2019 Published by RIBA Publishing, 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT ISBN 978 1 85946 821 0/ 978 1 85946 822 7 (PDF) The right of Dr Navaz Davoudian to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 77 and 78. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Commissioning Editor: Alex White Project Editor: Daniel Culver Production: Jane Rogers Designed and typeset by Ashley Western Printed and bound by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter Cover image: Will Scott Photography While every effort has been made to check the accuracy and quality of the information given in this publication, neither the Author nor the Publisher accept any responsibility for the subsequent use of this information, for any errors or omissions that it may contain, or for any misunderstandings arising from it. www.ribapublishing.com

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO URBAN LIGHTING AND EVIDENCE-BASED LIGHTING DESIGN XII Dr Navaz Davoudian

PART 1: NIGHT, CITY, SOCIETY

PART 2: EXPLORING THE NIGHT CITY

CHAPTER 1: THE SOCIAL STUDY OF URBAN LIGHTING Dr Elettra Bordonaro, Dr Joanne Entwistle and Dr Don Slater

CHAPTER 5: WAYFINDING AND THE HIERARCHY OF URBAN ELEMENTS AT NIGHT 79 Dr Navaz Davoudian

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CHAPTER 2: URBAN LIGHTING MASTERPLAN – ORIGINS, DEFINITIONS, METHODOLOGIES AND COLLABORATIONS 19 Dr Karolina M Zielinska-Dabkowska

CHAPTER 6: THE INTERACTION OF PEOPLE, LIGHT AND PUBLIC SPACE – THE CHANGING ROLE OF LIGHT 93 Isabel Kelly and Dr Navaz Davoudian

CHAPTER 3: STREET LIGHTING AND OLDER PEOPLE Dr Navaz Davoudian

PART 3: POST-PROJECT EVALUATION

CHAPTER 4: LIGHTING FOR REASSURANCE Dr Jemima Unwin

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CHAPTER 7: LESSONS LEARNT FROM DESIGN PROJECTS Dan Lister and Emily Dufner

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AFTERWORD 153 GLOSSARY 155 NOTES 163 IMAGE CREDITS 169 INDEX 171

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

DR NAVAZ DAVOUDIAN Navaz has been a researcher in Light and Lighting over the past 14 years at UCL and Sheffield University. Navaz is a trained architect and her main expertise is urban and street lighting research, including pedestrian lighting and street lighting glare. Apart from academic research, Navaz has undertaken consultancy projects for commercial and non-commercial organisations. She employs a multidisciplinary approach in all her researches and integrates behaviour studies and psychophysical methodologies, in addition to technical lighting methodologies.

DR ELETTRA BORDONARO Dr Bordonaro is founder at Light Follows Behaviour, a lighting design studio with the aim to design with people and for people. Elettra has background as an architect and has since focused her attention on light and worked as lighting designer consultant on masterplan, exterior and public realm lighting. She has been teaching at the University of Rome, Milan and Turin and is also co-founder of the Social Light Movement (SLM) with aim to bring lighting to less affluent communities.

EMILY DUFNER Emily joined Arup’s lighting department in London in 2001 and has concentrated her career on developing an extensive range of lighting skills that focus on conceptual design, public buildings, and urban masterplanning. Her best-known projects include the National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) in Beijing, China; the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco; St. Pancras Chambers, London, UK; the London 2012 Olympics Athletes Village and Olympic Lighting Design Advisor in London, UK; and the Msheireb Lighting Masterplan, Doha, Qatar.

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DR JOANNE ENTWISTLE

DR DON SLATER

Joanne is a co-founder of Configuring Light/Staging the Social and Reader in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London. She has worked on a number of different projects, including with Speirs+Major’s masterplan for the city of Derby, the Social Lightscapes workshops, and consultancies for Lendlease. She has previously published extensively on the sociology of fashion, dress and the body and aesthetic markets and economies.

Don is Associate Professor (Reader) in Sociology in London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research programme, Configuring Light/Staging the Social, explores the ways in which light, as a material, is configured into urban and public realm infrastructures, spaces and practices, and has a core concern with the ways in which sociologists and designers can collaborate in configuring material culture.

ISABEL KELLY

DR JEMIMA UNWIN

Isabel Kelly is a lighting designer with Arup (Dublin). Isabel joined Arup Dublin’s specialist lighting team after completing a MSc in Light and Lighting at University College London following on from a BSc in Landscape Architecture from University College Dublin. Isabel has keen interest in designing for the urban night-time environment. Isabel’s research examines the interaction of people and lighting in public spaces, based on observational approaches.

Jemima is a Lecturer in the area of Light and Lighting with ten plus years of lighting practice. She is currently Programme Leader for the MSc in Light and Lighting. Her journey into academia started with architecture studies at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art. She qualified as an architect in 2005. Since the inception of her practice in 2008, the art and science of lighting has been an integral aspect of her building projects, ensuring a healthy, symbiotic relationship between practice and research.

DAN LISTER

DR KAROLINA M. ZIELINSKA-DABKOWSKA

Dan is an Associate with Arup, a firm he has joined since graduation in 2000. Dan has a broad range of experience in electrical and natural lighting design for building, infrastructure and consultancy projects including public realm for Hull’s City of Culture year (UK) and the Reid Building (UK). He has also held expert roles for the local organising committees for London 2012, Lima 2019 and Qatar 2022. Dan is a firm believer in using technology to improve lighting design; actively encouraging lighting professionals to incorporate or develop new tools that will progress our understanding for future projects.

Karolina is a chartered RIBA architect and awardwinning practicing lighting designer. She is also an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland, where she conducts research on various aspects of light and lighting in the built environment. She was part of the Speirs + Major team involved in preparing the lighting vision for King’s Cross Lighting masterplan, Granary Square and the Granary Building façade lighting concept.

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A B O U T TH E CO N TR I B U TO R S

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“A distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience” KEVIN LYNCH

INTRODUCTION TO URBAN LIGHTING AND EVIDENCE-BASED LIGHTING DESIGN DR NAVAZ DAVOUDIAN Urban lighting and illuminated nights have become a necessity for many regions around the world and street lighting is now considered a basic infrastructure in developed countries. Owing to its wide scope, urban lighting has always been a popular topic in the field of lighting design. Issues that receive the most attention include lighting for urban monuments, architectural lighting and themes around urban beauty and aesthetics, as well as lighting for drivers and visual performance. Another theme that has raised significant interest in recent years is light as a part of people’s daily lives: the light that enables people to travel around their neighbourhood or their city on a daily basis; the light that allows them to see themselves and their neighbourhood. This book looks at pedestrian lighting from environmental psychology, behavioural and societal points of view, explaining different issues around the subject. It explores the needs and experiences of people regarding the night streetscape and looks at how these needs can be addressed by public lighting. The focus of this book is evidence-based design: the chapters explain what constitutes an evidence-based approach and how it can be used in lighting design. While the book has been written by experts, it is intended for a wide audience. The results of academic research are usually used to create new standards and guidelines for lighting designers and local authorities. However, when it comes to ‘soft’ topics such as people and the lit environment, there are many factors involved, which cannot necessarily be simplified into a guideline booklet. The design equation becomes much more complicated when it takes into account who will be benefiting from the street lighting, what they will be doing, where and why. This book emphasises

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how the design context and environment can affect the way guidelines can be used and aims to enable designers and policy makers to make informed decisions in their projects.

EVIDENCE-BASED LIGHTING DESIGN Evidence-based design (EBD) is a research-based approach designers use to understand how people interact with the built environment and how the built environment influences behaviour. It is adapted from evidence-based medicine, where scientific research supports decisions about the most effective and efficient treatment. EBD emerged in the health sector in the 1980s, when designers made use of a credible body of research linking design to improved patient safety and faster healing. For example, single hospital rooms are consistently proven to reduce infection compared to wards. When applied to lighting, the evidence-based approach found that lighting does indeed affect human health and wellbeing. Studies exist about the psychological effects of lighting, carpeting and noise on critical-care patients, and evidence links a well-designed physical environment with improvements in patient and staff safety, wellness and satisfaction.1 Architectural researchers have studied the impact of hospital layouts on staff effectiveness2 and social scientists have studied guidance and wayfinding.3 Architectural researchers have conducted post-occupancy evaluations (POE) to provide advice on improving building design and quality.4 While the EBD process is particularly suited to healthcare, it is also useful in other fields of design. So how can EBD be applied to create a sense of safety and security in urban spaces at night, to make a

neighbourhood more legible after dark and to encourage a more inclusive night city?

What is evidence-based design? Evidence-based design is a process for the judicious and conscientious use of current best evidence from research and practice when making decisions about the design of an individual project. EBD is also known as researchinformed design, although some experts define these two terms differently. They argue that because the literature for research-informed design comes from education and not from the healthcare disciplines, research-informed design differs from EBD.5 For further details, see George Baird’s Building Evaluation Techniques.6 Evidence-based design does not consist of ready-made answers to complex problems. Instead, it is a process whereby the designer and the client find the answers themselves. EBD is the integration of practical design expertise, the client, the project, the user requirements and preferences, and the best research evidence into the design decision-making process (see Figure 0.1). An evidence-based approach simply means that we look beyond the limitations of our own knowledge for reliable information upon which to base our design process. The aim of EBD is to create a bridge between research and design practice, augmenting the existing knowledge of organisations, communities, designers, their clients and

Practical Design Expertise

Best Research Evidence

EB D

Figure 0.1 Integral components of evidence-based design (EBD)

Client, User, Project Requirements / Preferences

end users with available evidence about the ways in which people interact with the new and complex environments that we now occupy. Reliable information about anthropospatial behaviour can inspire new thoughts and ideas. Evidence-based lighting design does not tell you the exact product to choose, or the illuminance and luminance and distribution of light. But the process of turning to credible research and experience may offer a pathway to answer these questions, which most certainly will not come out of a standard manual. EBD is an approach to assist designers to make decisions about design solutions based on the available knowledge about the impact of those solutions on people, costs and management, among other factors. Now the question is are research outputs the only source of evidence?

What is evidence? The etymology of the word ‘evidence’ goes back to the concept of experience, relating to what is manifest and obvious.7 The Oxford English Dictionary gives a number of definitions for the word ‘evidence’, such as clearness and obviousness, facts making for a conclusion, information tending to establish fact, etc. A unifying theme in all definitions of evidence is that it needs to be independently observed and verified. This highlights the importance of ensuring that the evidence used to inform practice (and policy) has been subject to scrutiny. However, what counts as evidence and in what circumstances? Evidence is considered to be knowledge derived from a range of sources. Knowledge has been defined as ‘an awareness or familiarity gained by experience, a person’s range of information’. Knowledge can be categorised into two types: propositional/codified and non-propositional/personal.8 In reality, the relationship between the two sources of knowledge is dynamic; however, propositional knowledge has gained higher prominence. Propositional knowledge is formal and derived from research and scholarship and is mainly focused on generalizability. Non-propositional knowledge is informal and comes primarily from practice. It forms part of personal knowledge linked to the life experience and cognitive resources that a person brings to the situation to enable them to think and perform.9 In order to practise evidence-based design, practitioners need to employ and integrate multiple sources of both types of knowledge, informed by a variety

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of evidence bases that have been critically scrutinised. Furthermore, these processes are context related within a complex, multifaceted design environment.

Different sources of knowledge The characteristics of knowledge generated from four common types of evidence available for use in practice are described below. Knowledge from research evidence Research evidence has been ranked as the priority over other sources of evidence in the delivery of evidencebased practice. Additionally, research evidence tends to be perceived by some as providing final answers to design questions. However, such evidence is rarely constant and may change as new research develops. Therefore, research evidence needs to be viewed as provisional. The production and use of evidence is a social as well as scientific process, which does not allow it to attain the required level of ‘objectivity’. Thus, there is no such thing as ‘the’ evidence. Research evidence is socially and historically constructed.10 It is not certain, acontextual and static, but dynamic and eclectic. Finally, research evidence, although crucial to improving design process, may not on its own inform practitioners’ decision-making. Knowledge from professional experience Knowledge accrued through professional practice creates the second part of the puzzle in the delivery of EBD. This knowledge is expressed and embedded in practice and is often implicit and instinctive. Practitioners not only act on their own professional knowledge, but also resort to the expertise of others to inform their practice. This type of knowledge can usually be attained through post-design evaluations of different projects. However, it can be argued that such sources of knowledge, if not generated systematically, are subjective, biased and lack credibility. In order to avoid this problem, such knowledge and reasoning requires integrating the four different types of knowledge discussed here within the contextual boundaries of the design environment. While practical knowledge is an important source of information, the interaction of practical knowledge with research is not straightforward or linear. Therefore, its role in, and contribution to, evidence-based practice requires to be revealed and articulated.

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Knowledge from clients and users The third source of evidence that contributes to practice is the personal knowledge and experience of users and clients. This source of knowledge can be collective or individual. Collective involvement is about the participation of groups or communities in the design and planning process. In contrast, individual involvement concerns individual clients and users and their encounters with individual practitioners during the process of design and delivery. Using collective knowledge from clients/users is a common practice in policy-making and usually has justifiable methodologies and approaches. However, the gathering and incorporation of individuals’ values, experiences and preferences into evidence-based practice is a complex issue and melding these with other sources of evidence into design decisions requires expertise. Knowledge from design context and environment In addition to knowledge that comes from research, professional experience and clients/users, the design context and environment contains sources of evidence. In the process of design, practitioners may draw on local surveys and information, knowledge about the cultural and social aspects of the project’s setting, the views of stakeholders, local and national policy and so on. While locally available data sources clearly have a role to play in the development of evidence-based practice, attention needs to be paid to whether the data is systematically collected and appraised, how it is integrated with other kinds of evidence, and how such data can inform the current design project.

WHY IS EBD SO IMPORTANT? The use of evidence is important because information about the impact of design solutions on users and maintenance may influence the way design evolves. Disconnected pieces of evidence should not be mistakenly used as EBD to justify bias within design solutions. Rather, evidence should support decisions and, whenever possible, designers and planners should collect relevant information from completed projects in order to update the evidence base. In other words, this means checking whether or not their decisions efficiently and effectively improved the quality and use of

the space. Currently there are limitations in maximising the utilisation of EBD. These are related to the lack of explicit cause-and-effect relationships, the fragmentation and sparseness of the available information and methodological limitations. However, the use of systematic reviews can mitigate those problems and bring strength to EBD. EBD is evolving fast, with a rapidly growing body of evidence. Moreover, the implications of EBD to the design process have not yet been deeply explored. However, issues related to changes in the configuration of the design team (for example, by considering the participation of a researcher) and the provision of evidence to designers have started to be explored. Furthermore, discussions about whether EBD aligns with or contradicts new design and production theories and methods (such as lean design and production) and the link between parametrical design and EBD are also emerging. Finally, studies linking the built environment with its effects on people involve a considerable number of variables that can be organised in different ways.11 With the advance of lighting technology and its consequent lower cost, every year we can observe a steady increase in the use of artificial illumination in the outdoor built environment. The importance of the quality of social interaction in our daily lives is well recognised as a significant driver in the design of environments. However, the question is what we base our speculation on this evolving social context. Lighting research evidence usually comes into practice through the creation of new guidelines and standards. These are particularly useful in technical matters; however, when it comes to ‘soft’ issues like how people interact with the lit environment, guidelines alone cannot reflect the vast nature of human perception and behaviour in every setting. Urban lighting design is a very complex issue which requires a holistic approach by urban lighting designers and planners.

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ALL ABOUT? A key issue is how methodical research can be translated into practice and design. There are quite a few challenges that stand in the way of lighting design being more research-based. Research methods may not be fully understandable to lay people, with results normally

published in academic papers, using jargon that is not very friendly for design practitioners. There is a culture clash between the way research is set up using a very scientific approach and designers who have been trained to work quite differently. On the one hand there is method, rigour and science, and on the other hand there are practising lighting designers who have intuition, experience and judgement and who are working with their clients’ expectations. This book initiates a bridge between the world of academics/lighting researchers and that of lighting practitioners, by reviewing lighting studies. It is a new resource for lighting designers, planners, local authorities and their clients, and, indeed, anyone who wants to learn more about the ways in which people interact with the lit environment. In seven chapters, academic experts and practitioners from the field of urban lighting present case studies, definitions, methodologies and research related to cities and their inhabitants. The views covered range from a societal and municipal standpoint to a pedestrian’s experience of the city, drawn from observations and evaluations of completed projects, as well as examinations of the legibility and walkability of public spaces. Each chapter begins by identifying an issue and considering its significance for the built environment and ends with a valuable summary and specific design suggestions (as a list of bullet points) to enable the generation of appropriate, original, human-friendly lighting solutions for urban areas outside daylight hours. The concepts put forward in this book aim to address some of the concerns surrounding urban lighting for people after dark. There are other solutions, of course. My intention is to raise basic issues regarding how people interact with spaces and the lit environment and how urban settings must be carefully analysed for both daytime and night-time use by people according to their day-to-day lives. It must be noted that those engaging in urban lighting design ought to proceed with an awareness that not even the best lighting design can correct all problems intrinsic to urban settings – perhaps they can only minimise them. Note on the reproduction of images in this book: the colour of the images is representative of genuine light conditions and has not been colour corrected by RIBA Publishing.

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PART 1 NIGHT, CITY, SOCIETY

CHAPTER 1:

THE SOCIAL STUDY OF URBAN LIGHTING DR ELETTRA BORDONARO DR JOANNE ENTWISTLE DR DON SLATER

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INTRODUCTION

Light is a universal part of social life. All human activity takes place in some degree of light and dark, and all forms of light, whether daylight or artificial, give shape to the routine social practices through which different social groups move through social space. This is our starting premise: urban lighting provides a critical infrastructure of everyday life and interaction. This social centrality of lighting is topicalized through a range of issues: lighting involves huge economic and ecological costs; it is closely associated with matters of risk and safety, health and wellbeing; it connects with other modern urban ills like light pollution and the loss of night; and it configures sociability and lifestyle. Moreover, as light is so important, the social knowledge and assumptions of lighting professionals, planners and architects impact urban life and built environments in important ways. As part of their everyday practice, lighting professionals need a clear idea of what is involved in understanding the social aspects of light, and how to integrate these into their work.

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WHAT IS ‘THE SOCIAL’? ‘The social’, from a sociological perspective, refers to the practices, beliefs, relationships and institutions that structure collective life. It is therefore about the ways in which people organise themselves in different places to carry on a way of life. It also refers to the particular forms taken by things and materials in specific places and social worlds. The social is therefore – necessarily – a mass of disparate stuff interrelated in complex and changing ways. Think of all the interconnected things that make up what we call a street or an office, and about the arrangements that allow a street or an office to keep its shape, more or less, over time. Because ‘the social’ is basically a very messy complexity, it is useful to think of it as an ‘assemblage’: we understand a street or an office not through abstract definitions or statistics but by understanding the way things are assembled or put together, and how they hold together (or fall apart) over time. All this should make it clear that ‘the social’ does not refer to particular places that are, for example, deprived (‘social housing’) or problematic (places with ‘social problems’) or that appear to be ‘communities’ (‘neighbourhoods’ as opposed to commercial centres). All spaces used by people are ‘social’, involving public lighting in the interplay of the many different understandings, actors and interactions that make up a specific public space. Social life can be differentiated by factors such as age and class and ethnicity, as well as many finer distinctions that may be crucial: whether someone is a night worker, dog walker, teenager, homeless or a drug user and so on might be important in terms of how people inhabit the city after dark. There are three more issues that are important for understanding ‘the social’ in relation to design. Firstly, people often talk about ‘the social’ versus ‘the technical’ or ‘material’. In fact, it is more useful to assume that ‘the social’ does not include only humans and their relationships but also materials, technologies and objects. Social assemblages like streets and offices clearly involve integrated relationships between materials, technologies and social practices and people. This is crucial for lighting design: we do not simply light a social space, or respond to social needs. Rather, our lighting designs are part of constructing assemblages: we make ‘the social’ as much as we respond to it.

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Secondly, ‘the social’ is different from ‘the psychological’ or ‘the economic’. Psychology and economics are largely concerned with individuals – both might ask, ‘How do individual people choose or decide?’ and both might add up those individual decisions to identify ‘group behaviour’. Social research assumes that individuals are not the best starting point. Individuals do indeed populate the social world but they do so as members of families, subcultures, communities, cities and nations. If we focus solely on the individual’s choices we can learn only so much about social uses of design. In fact, the things that appear to make us ‘individuals’ are very much shaped by our identity and membership of our particular ‘social’ world. Understanding ‘the social’ means paying attention to the shared social characteristics shaping individuals’ use of things and the shared and located social context of design use. Thirdly, there are complicated questions about how to connect social knowledge and lighting design, and, above all, questions about what kind or form of social knowledge is most useful for design work. The many different uses of the terms ‘evidence-based design’ and ‘research-informed design’ (as well as the huge literatures on participatory design, design anthropology and studio studies) all hinge on different analyses of what kind of knowledge enters or should enter into design work. The social research in design approach we use in the Configuring Light research programme (based in the Sociology department at LSE) aims to produce site-specific ‘evidence’ or knowledge that helps designers take design decisions based on a clear and research-based social rationale: i.e. good social reasons, based on evidence, for their lighting interventions. We therefore focus on deploying the most rigorous and creative social research methodologies to learn about a specific place or site – how its diverse users understand, use and imagine the past, present and future of this place. The approach also focuses on how to integrate social and design thinking over the course of a project. It is therefore closer to ‘research-based design’ or ‘research-informed design’. For us as sociologists, ‘research’ or ‘evidence’ means reliable knowledge of a place and its stakeholders. By contrast, much evidence-based design defines ‘evidence’ as the findings of generic research, conducted elsewhere, which can be applied by designers to their site. For example, the impact of light on circadian rhythms or on

hospital treatments, it is claimed, can be studied through experiments or surveys, and the results can take the form of general laws or causal links between light and behaviour that designers can then apply locally. While designers clearly should be aware of the latest findings from such research, they equally need to research their site, and they need to understand how these ‘general laws’ are mediated and modified as light operates in different social contexts, on different social groups with very different conditions and requirements. At the same time, we all need a healthy scepticism regarding scientific claims about the invariant effects of lighting on any behaviour; good evidence usually takes the form of a good understanding of the dynamics of the particular social world you have been entrusted to light.

What is ‘the social’ in lighting design? We can get a better sense of ‘the social’ by looking at the two writers who have most influenced lighting designers (as well as architects and planners) in this area of work – urban planner Kevin Lynch and architect and planner Jan Gehl. Though it is notable that their major writings come from as early as the 1950s, both Gehl and Lynch focus on the ‘social’ aspects of public space and display a sociological imagination when it comes to their methods for studying the built environment. They see design as an intervention into this ‘social’ life, entailing ethical responsibilities including a responsibility to understand this social world better. Yet the social world they see themselves designing for, and the social life they see within it, is a day-lit world untouched by night. Gehl’s examination of the built world speaks directly to the sociologist: in describing the ‘life between buildings’, the importance of the built environment for facilitating social interaction is made apparent.2 His polemic starts from the basic premise that ‘people come where people are’.3 The built environment can either support this desire to be sociable or it can hinder it; quite simply, well-designed built environments enable social interaction and poor design hinders it. Gehl’s call to planners and architects to create ‘lively’ cities that facilitate interactions is also a direct critique of modernist functionalisms that allow little space for encounters, with ‘lifeless’ buildings, streets and cities designed for cars, not people. Hence, Gehl believes in the power of the built environment to shape social life and interaction; architecture here serves the purpose of

‘the social’. Gehl makes the call for ‘public life studies’ to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how diverse and complex public life is, acknowledging the changing temporal features and many social dimensions that shape public space: ‘design, gender, age, financial resources, culture and many other factors determine how we use or do not use public space’.4 In How to Study Public Life, Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre are concerned with how architects and planners might come to know these patterns of social life and argue for a qualitative approach to understanding urban life.5 Their publication is a methodological ‘how to’ design book that is akin to a sociological or anthropological text, asking multiple questions about the use of public space: how many, who, where, what happens in it? Thus the urban planner is much like an ethnographer who adapts qualitative methods pragmatically to each setting but for whom observation uses all the senses. They write: Direct observation is the primary tool of the type of public life studies described in this book. As a general rule, users are not actively involved in the sense of being questioned, rather they are observed, their activities and behaviour mapped in order to better understand the needs of users and how city spaces are used. The direct observations help to understand why some spaces are used and others are not.6 Through this observational data, the qualities of urban design and its role in facilitating social encounters can be examined. Equally, Gehl acknowledges the importance of qualitative analysis, much like the sociologist’s qualitative interpretation, arguing that ‘the ability to evaluate is the most important function,’ with careful attention paid to social difference and to disaggregating ‘people’, much as any ethnographer or sociologist might do. But what of ‘life between buildings’ at night? What aspects of design and planning might enable the social interactions of the day to continue during the evening and night? The ‘life between buildings’ after sundown is neither discussed nor planned for, yet clearly what happens after dark will also depend partly on the design of public space, including lighting. Why is night and night-time design (principally but not solely artificial illumination) not part of

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Gehl’s analysis? What aspects of the nocturnal built world might influence, encourage or discourage the possibilities of movement, social interaction, events and recreational activities after sundown? Kevin Lynch’s work takes up similar issues.7 His masterwork, The Image of the City, developed a still cuttingedge methodology for eliciting from people their personal and collective images of the city in the form of self-drawn maps of their recollected urban practices, mainly their routes and pathways. In this sense, Lynch attended, unlike Gehl, to people’s own understandings and representations of their practices rather than relying largely on observation of behaviours. His methodology, using observation, interviews and mapping, is directed towards understanding wayfinding in cities by uncovering ‘the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual’, an image that serves a ‘social role’ and promotes ‘emotional security’.8 From this commitment to the image of the city as a ‘vivid setting’, Lynch develops his language of ‘nodes’, ‘networks’, ‘viewpoints’, ‘pathways’, ‘edges’ and ‘borders’, which is the basis for his planning methodology to create memorable, legible and navigable cities. Lynch’s aim is thus to generate a typology of the kinds of information that urban actors engage with to construct ‘images’ as stable patterns. The problem, from a sociological perspective, is the aggregation of these many pathways and viewpoints into a single ‘image of the city’. A sociologist, by contrast, is more keen to disaggregate, to take account of social differences. A sociologist wants to recognise the differences and conflicts that can take place over social spaces, which involve different people with very different ‘images’ and maps of the same space (for example, drug users and the homeless move alongside mothers of young children and dog walkers). Any attempt to aggregate these different images of the city to produce a single design will do a disservice to one or other social group. The challenge of good design is generally to keep all this difference and conflict in mind and still come up with a single design that optimises the space of disparate and opposed users. Notably, Lynch says as little as Gehl about the images of the nocturnal city, even though the issue of ‘legibility’ is even more critical after sundown: the city would dissolve into an illegible Hogarthian nightmare were it not for the

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infrastructure of city lighting, originally powered by oil, then gas, and now electricity.9 In fact, it is notable that both Lynch and Gehl are readily adaptable to designing nocturnal space.10 Socially activating our night-time spaces means using light to increase the meaningful legibility of these spaces, and the possibilities of social interaction and encounter. This gives a clear focus for lighting, but also a requirement to understand people’s different maps and movements.

WHAT IS SOCIAL RESEARCH? Architects, designers and other professionals concerned with urban lighting clearly rely on social knowledge and understandings of the spaces they intervene in. The issue is how secure and rigorous that knowledge is, and how it is integrated into design and planning. To begin with, designers generally start from a spatial analysis of plans and maps: they use their experience and training to make social interpretations of spaces. The assumption, too often, is that just by looking at a plan they can know what paths people are likely to take, or which areas are fragmented or problematic. Some methodologies (for example space syntax) assume that you can (at least initially) infer social patterns from the spatial form or geometry of a space rather than from observation of actual social use. These resulting interpretations of a space may be right or wrong, or right for some stakeholders and not for others. We can know only by engaging with actual users of the space, observing and interviewing them, rather than projecting our own assumptions or those embedded in our methodologies. Moreover, we cannot know how different people interpret the same space – older people might take entirely different paths to teenagers, or dog walkers, or homeless people. A vivid example highlights this. During a social-researchin-design workshop, held at the Peabody Trust’s Whitecross Estate (see Figures 1.1 to 1.4), a group of designers was asked to develop a lighting design strategy for a part of the site, a row of six-storey mansion blocks at the edge of the estate whose facades faced both an external street and a green space internal to the estate. The group started with a plan of the site, which they assumed could easily be translated into a confident social understanding of the space. They felt it was clear that, because the mansion

Figure 1.1 Whitecross Estate workshop, October 2014, London, Configuring Light Team: view of Whitecross Estate by night

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blocks fronted onto the street, the residents would feel somewhat cut off from the main estate; moreover, the frontage was largely fragmented parking space. The solution would have to be a lighting strategy that emphasised the identity of the blocks and their connection to the estate. It took not much more than an hour of interviews to discover that the facade the designers believed to be the front of the buildings was in fact the back as far as the residents were concerned: they used the ‘back’ entrances to access their homes, did not feel cut off from the estate at all, and mainly wanted the lighting to emphasise what was actually their ‘front’ so that passers-by would understand,

Figure 1.2 Whitecross Estate workshop: conducting social research by interviewing residents Figure 1.3 Whitecross Estate workshop: lighting mock-up Figure 1.4 Whitecross Estate workshop: a night walk with the residents, prior to the workshop

acknowledge and respect their entrances. This story highlights a simple but very common problem: designers’ professional ways of reading a space tend to draw on interpretations and assumptions that need to be challenged by the actual social practices and understandings of the people they design for. Secondly, designers are generally supplied with various kinds of social data, often with their initial briefing, such as survey data, footfall counts and crime statistics. This can be useful background but needs to be interpreted and contested rather than accepted as indisputably true. Often this data is best for raising questions that can then be followed up: Can we get a clearer picture of what kinds of people make up a total footfall figure? Why are these people in this place at this time? Can we relate different people’s experience of safety in a space to the actual kind and quantity of incidents in that place? Both this kind of background data and the sociospatial assumptions that designers make are also closely connected to the issue of standards. Standards are important as attempts to define best practice by

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categorising different kinds of spaces (for example, exits, pavements, pathways and so on), usually identifying them with different kinds of risks and tasks, and then setting average and minimum light levels and other parameters, such as uniformity, glare and colour rendering as consistent indexes (CRI). What is generally forgotten is that these different spaces are in fact social spaces, and therefore cannot be so easily categorised, or treated as the same for different stakeholders in different contexts. At the Whitecross Estate, the 1960s buildings had walkways on each storey that passed in front of the flats’ front doors and were lit by harsh bulkhead lights at 150 lux, suited to internal corridors or interior spaces. The reason for this lighting was definition of the space as external passageways not private entranceways. However, for residents, the walkways were virtually part of their private spaces; indeed, some residents had to tape black bin liners over their windows so that they could sleep at night or use their living rooms. Had designers followed the residents’ definition of this social space, the light levels could have been set as low as 1–5 lux (by applying the standard for emergency exits, for example). This was not simply a matter of ‘over lighting’; it was a question of social knowledge, understanding and voice. Who gets to define a social space? Moreover, standards have an ambiguous legal and professional status: while designers, architects and planners sometimes hide behind standards to legitimise their decisions (I had to follow the standards), they also know in practice that choosing and applying a standard for a specific and unique space actually requires careful understanding and interpretation. In other words, social research and knowledge can help to generate an understanding of what kind of space this is and who uses it. Thirdly, and often most usefully, designers rely heavily on anecdotal and ad hoc information gathered from site visits and casual conversations with both residents and officials. This is the all-important ‘getting a feel for the place’, and in practice these impressions are usually key to design decisions: design professionals become adept at bringing their experiences of many specific places to bear on each new site, enabling them to quickly seize on socially significant features, issues and potentials. The problem is that they rarely have either the time, money or training to build up their knowledge, or follow these hunches and insights, with the danger of sticking with views that are

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shouted loudest or that fit their own preconceptions. A major task of social research in design is to find ways to help develop and structure designers’ ways of knowing and understanding the spaces they work with. Fourth, and finally, the problems noted above apply also to public consultations, which are the most frequent means by which planners garner understandings of social space. From a sociological perspective, consultations produce material that is often eloquent and rich but anecdotal, ad hoc and skewed. Part of this is the problem of the ‘usual suspects’: certain types of people, and indeed specific individuals, can be extremely vocal, motivated and omnipresent, and their views can push design thinking in specific directions, particularly if they are either voicing politically sensitive issues (for example, crime) or if they fit what the designers or clients wanted to do in the first place. Consultations may appear to represent ‘the people’ or ‘the community’, whereas in fact many types of people and points of view simply do not enter into this political process. The aim of social research, by contrast, is to go out into the community to find and represent the widest range of impacted stakeholders, including types of people that may not have been recognised by those in the design process. For example, in the case of Whitecross, there was a gardening group on the estate whose members were very vocal and present on tenant committees, but other perspectives – those of children or of the many nonresidents who passed through the estate every day – were not organised or vocalised. A major issue is the confusion between consultation as a vital tool of engagement, mobilisation and democracy as opposed to consultation as a tool for building a social understanding of a space. In fact, consultations work best when they are linked into good social research so that the voices raised in consultations can be contextualised and interpreted within a much wider range of stakeholder views. In this way the issues raised in consultations can be used to guide further research. All four of these sources of social understanding and knowledge are useful and – most importantly –available to some degree to designers and architects. The problem is normally how to structure them more rigorously, use them to raise more questions and issues to investigate, and then interrelate them to build up a more design-oriented basis for lighting – and all this within the time, money and institutional constraints of actual design work. For all these reasons, it is

useful to think about social engagement and understanding of a space to be lit in terms of four overarching issues that any lighting design needs to address, but to address in ways that are specific to that place: • Diversity: we need to identify and then understand the different types of social actors that make up this space. The social life of an urban space does not comprise either ‘people’ or ‘the community’: it is made up of young mothers, old couples, dog walkers, retailers, commuters, teenagers, and so on. The social research job is to make sure that we know about all these people, and in as much depth and complexity as our resources and clients allow. • Practices: what are all these people doing or what do they want to do (but can’t)? Can we map the diverse movements, activities and events of diverse gatherings in this space – and understand enough of why people are doing these things and what they mean to them? • Places: the same space will be a different place for different people, and each possible design will produce a different kind of place for people in the future. Social research needs to look at the identity of a space for its different stakeholders, what it means, how it feels, what atmosphere it has, and what conflicts and commonalities it gives rise to. • Connections: how does this space connect to other spaces and other times – to different histories; to adjacent or even remote other places; to wider political and economic processes? How do different users connect this space to others through their everyday itineraries, or their memories and identities? There is a useful way of relating these four points to urban lighting design decisions, of directly connecting all this wide-ranging social research to specific lighting choices and placements. This way of putting things comes out of another social research tradition: material culture studies. We can say that – from a social point of view – decisions about what to light and how to light it are decisions about what is of value to people in an urban space. Deciding to light this bridge rather than that facade may be a decision

about the features that are crucial to wayfinding, or about the historical significance of a building, or the atmospheric feel of the space, or about memories or fear of crime, or some combination of all of these; and it may relate to only some, not all stakeholders. But lighting decisions surely need to be informed by knowing what is valued by different types of people wanting to carry out their practical lives in a meaningful place. So far we have said little about social research methods. There is some remaining mystique about research methods, as if disciplines like sociology and geography have, or should have, specific technical tools or approaches – akin to taking light readings or mapping spaces. Sometimes this equates to fixing on surveys and quantitative social measures such as opinion polls and footfall measures. We would rather promote a more fluid and flexible approach that is oriented to understanding spaces and that is more appropriate for the different practical ways of ‘knowing’ that we listed above. This is often, but not exclusively, associated with an ethnographic approach to social research. Ethnography involves a commitment to understanding a social world initially in terms of the diverse people who inhabit it. These diverse groups, and the spaces they inhabit, are unique, meaning that we need to develop methods and combinations of methods to understand place, much as a designer starting a brief knows that whatever commonalities they might find with previous experiences, a specific place has to be understood in its own terms. For example, a location may have very different meanings to long-term residents as opposed to others who might pass through it, rarely stopping. Different means may be required to ensure that both kinds of people are captured by the researcher; we will need quite different ways of accessing and learning about these different groups and each is likely to raise quite different questions. Having said this, social researchers generally start from fairly recognisable types of methods, though they may have to reinvent each type for particular purposes (for example, interviews can take as many different forms as there are conversations between different people). These types of methods include: • Interviewing: structured conversations, with individuals or groups, preferably in situ, aiming to raise and explore themes in participants’ own terms.

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• Observation: watching, listening, experiencing and participating in a social scene to understand how it works for those who interact in it. • Photography and video: documenting social and spatial organisation of a space, and distribution of lighting within it, across different times of day, week and year, both for close textual analysis and as an aid in interviews and discussions. • Demonstrations and installations setting up lighting displays, situations and experiments, mock-ups and simulations to explore the complex socio-material interactions of light in a real space and to expand and explore stakeholders’ understanding of lighting. • Workshops, consultations and public engagement including night walks: using action research events in which participants can interact with lighting and space, generating both public engagement and crucial research material on their understanding of both light and their space. • Published data including statistics, media reports, maps and historical material: online and published data on the site in question, including documents concerning its wider economic and political context; increasingly this includes ‘big data’ and social analytics produced by social media, smart systems (including smart lighting) and open source data. Finally, we have been focusing largely on situationspecific research – who is doing what and why in this space. It is nevertheless an important part of social research to locate a space in ever-wider networks that connect this place spatially and temporally to everwider contexts. Sometimes the issues are fairly obvious: perhaps we cannot understand how to light a particular high street without understanding how it fits into wider pathways, recognising its relationship to surrounding neighbourhoods and acknowledging the different kinds of people who use it – for example, hipster cyclists and middle-class gentrifiers coming into a formerly workingclass or immigrant area. This can take us into sensitive

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territory: the meaning of a place for many stakeholders may be caught up in long histories of political disputes, historical traumas, crimes and tragedies, ethnic conflict and so on. A development site in a big city may reference major concerns about gentrification, globalisation, ethnic cleansing and inequality. Clearly, lighting professionals may have limited professional (as opposed to personal) capacity to intervene. Nonetheless, ignoring the wider histories and interconnections of a place by implementing a generic lighting design, or simply trying to light for pure function or aesthetic attractiveness, may well be a recipe for the social failure or unsustainability of a space.

SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE DESIGN PROCESS The following case study of a public realm design project in Hackney, London, explores ways in which lighting designers and social researchers can work together to develop more insightful and responsive understandings of the complex and often conflictual social lives they are intending to light. Social research identified both shared attitudes (most stakeholders were proud of both the diversity of the area and its ‘village’ feel) and differences (such as widely different issues regarding safety concerns). Social research can be involved in a dialogue with design processes, not simply providing facts or evidence to which designers must respond, but also developing or reframing questions such as ‘What is the problem with cycling, and for whom?’ in ways that allow for creative design approaches – which may then throw up further social questions to be researched.

CASE STUDY

N A R R O W WAY LO N D O N

rchitects are not usually trained in social research. Though some may consider it important, they commonly see it as too slow, difficult or academic a process, resulting in reports that are not easily rendered into practice. To exemplify how social research can practically support more effective planning in urban regeneration projects, this section analyses a case study that illustrates the transition from social research to urban – and specifically lighting – design. Social research can produce different design results, by providing different methodologies and targeting the specific social issues and aspects of the place itself, studied in situ. Our approach therefore starts with observation of the space and how it is used, in order to identify the questions that need answering and the

A

methodological strategies that might provide answers. A place is never just a space: it is constantly signified and re-signified by its residents’ social and cultural practices, and each place requires a bespoke research strategy. The lighting designer was commissioned by Hackney Council in 2015 to develop public realm design for Narrow Way. The council’s concern with the social complexity of this high street required an additional commission to bring social researchers from Configuring Light into the project. Hackney has a strong social identity that is on the cusp of major changes. It was historically a largely working-class area with cheap housing stock that attracted various waves of immigrant communities. In recent years, Hackney has become a very popular area to

live and work, very much tied to the gentrification (or ‘hipsterisation’) processes that London, like similar cities, is experiencing. This gentrification is radically changing the social composition of entire neighbourhoods. Narrow Way is a relatively short and narrow high street and, at the time of our work (2015), was in an unregenerated and underdeveloped area (see Figure 1.5). It had been recently pedestrianised, but had few independent shops and many chains, such as McDonald’s, Poundland and Coral, the betting shop. However, its southern part had recently been affected by gentrification: house prices had greatly increased in the previous year and some independent shops were beginning to open, alongside trendy cafes and restaurants and fancy roof-terrace lounges. The north side of Narrow Way ends with the Pembury Estate, a very large social housing area owned by Peabody. Pembury received much media attention in 2011 for the riots that erupted in the area following the death of Mark Duggan.11 Following the riots, a project for a Hackney Fashion Hub was promoted – a £1.5 million plan to ‘develop Hackney’s status as the creative heart of London and as a retail hub for the Borough’s fast-growing fashion industry’.12 The situation was therefore very complex in terms of the area’s history Figure 1.5 Existing conditions of Hackney Narrow Way

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and future, and any intervention that did not take these social dynamics into account risked early rejection and failure. As early as 2012, just a few months after the riots, an architectural team was appointed by the council to propose a regeneration project for the area. The architects presented a photorealistic image showing the new scheme – but exclusively representing white ‘hipsters’ as the future of Hackney, forgetting both Hackney’s roots and its more recent history. The public consultation that followed unsurprisingly rejected the project for fear of gentrification and social cleansing. This reaction led to the dismissal of the architects, and acknowledgement of the complexity of Narrow Way led the council to ask Configuring Light to lead a piece of social research alongside the development of the lighting design. The lighting designer was involved as much as possible in the research process. The research took place in May and June 2015 and included evening morning and afternoon visits to the neighbourhood. Configuring Light used a mix of methods to capture different users’ experiences, including commuting, shopping, eating and socialising practices on Narrow Way. The methodology was qualitative, largely based on semistructured interviews (with individuals and groups), both in situ along Narrow Way and in a council meeting room, as well as participant observation with photo-elicitation throughout the day and into the night. Of particular value were interviews with market vendors, customers, buskers, local retailers and church leaders, as well as stakeholder representatives, estate agents, the fashion hub and the council. In addition, we conducted some group discussions

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with a mothers-and-toddlers group and a senior citizens’ bingo club, and attended a meeting with local resident committee members in St Augustine’s Tower. The aim was to ensure that we heard the widest range of views from people with a stake in, as well as knowledge of, the street and area. The picture that emerged looked something like this: Narrow Way’s pedestrianisation meant that buses, which had once travelled along the narrow street, were now routed elsewhere, significantly altering the street’s character and generating much less footfall. A few shopkeepers expressed sadness that there was less hustle and bustle than before and trade was noticeably slower. In addition, without a clear route to follow, cyclists now sped down the street, making pedestrians feel less safe. Nonetheless, pedestrianisation had made the street a more attractive and pleasant place to walk along. Many interviewees testified that Narrow Way lacked an identity. For example, one person stated that despite attempts to ‘move upmarket’, Narrow Way had ‘no sense of purpose’ and there was ‘no real reason to go there’. In its current configuration it had become neither a shopping destination nor a leisure/eating one. Despite the relatively minimal retail and leisure offering, many users saw much potential for the street. There is widely felt pride among Hackney residents in the community spirit of the area – it was described by one local businessman as being like a ‘village’ – and Narrow Way was potentially the heart of this village. Everyone was profoundly aware of gentrification processes, combining a fear of displacement with a generally

welcoming attitude to newcomers as yet another new addition to Hackney’s cosmopolitanism. Interestingly, the plans for a Fashion Hub in the vicinity were little known among ordinary residents and shoppers on the street and it was felt that such an area would not be frequented by locals, but tourist shoppers.

Social research findings and the design process Configuring Light’s research threw up complex social findings that were valuable during the design process. The role of the designer is to effectively integrate responses to these findings into the design process, bearing in mind the ‘normal’ design constraints: costs, maintenance, standards, council policies and provisos, and the limits of the design brief and commissioning process. We explore three issues here to demonstrate the value of social research in design. First, a significant issue to emerge was how to retain Narrow Way’s vibrant diversity, proudly considered archetypally ‘Hackney’ in this respect. People of all classes and ethnicities articulated how they were open to change and redevelopment, including welcoming new businesses, gentrifiers and new ethnicities, so long as the mix and diversity was maintained, and provision and prices did not exclude people socially or financially. Thus, it emerged clearly from the data that people from all classes wanted to see Narrow Way ‘upgraded’, with provision of ‘nice’ shops with a wider offering, and a reduction of shops that attracted a rough and nonfamily-friendly clientele (such as betting shops and pawnbrokers).13 However, social research can also

throw up conflicting problems and requests. Thus a second, significant issue for Narrow Way (like many public spaces) concerned the use of benches and whether these are desirable (to allow people to gather) or undesirable (providing space for homeless people to sleep or antisocial groups to hang around). At the Pembury Estate end of the road there were reports of antisocial behaviour, mostly by a group of homeless men who liked to gather and drink at the corner. At this end, there was resistance by retailers to benches being installed. Further along the road, however, parents of young children wanted benches, and even a few activities in the centre of the space, where they could gather and spend time. In other words, there was strong resistance to the installation of seating, but a positive response to installing activities (even if seating was involved). A third issue concerned safety. Since pedestrianisation, the lack of pavement to separate pedestrians and cyclists made the space difficult to navigate. In fact, research showed two separate problems where the council had only identified one: firstly, commuting cyclists, including new local families, who raced through the street and were hazardous for pedestrians, and secondly teenagers hanging around the street on their bikes. Both were regularly mentioned but as part of different problems, and symbolising different tensions: for example, when older people referred to the ‘problem’ of cyclists, they meant teenagers; the council assumed they were talking about commuters. It took some careful interviewing to find out what ‘the problem’ was and for whom. Clearly, disrupting movement down Narrow Way

with street furniture would deal with the first but not the second of these problems. Moreover, older people linked cycling to a range of mobility and safety issues: the current pavements are difficult for both mobility vehicles and older pedestrians; older people rarely use the street at night, are afraid of both kinds of cyclists, and are more concerned about crime. As these examples illustrate, including social research in the design process makes for a more complex and richer understanding of a public place. It highlights social issues that the designer should at least address, if not target, in their design. Ultimately, the designer’s role is to translate this complexity into effective designs that can be implemented. What is different about this process, as opposed to public consultations or other user engagements, is that design decisions have a basis in the real-world issues of the place itself; they are responses to the realities of the space rather than presumed interpretations – ‘best guesses’ or ‘common sense’ – of the designer, and thus can be defended with evidence from the data. Moreover they acknowledge that these issues and realities are likely to be very different for different types of stakeholders. The social research identified Narrow Way as an area characterised by both conflict and a ‘village’ feel, with a strong sense of local pride. This set a task for lighting and other design: to acknowledge difference while supporting the inclusiveness that most stakeholders agreed to be key to regeneration. Although lighting cannot resolve all the many social issues of a place, good lighting design, supported by social research, could help enhance

Narrow Way’s visual identity. In particular, many of the local people interviewed identified and valued specific architectural features, and the generally interesting and unique appearance of Narrow Way (for example the design of the upper storeys above the shops, and a large tree at the southern end of the street). Lighting that emphasised such features could be very effective in changing the perception and value of the street in general, as well as with wayfinding. Of course, social research findings do not settle aesthetic design choices; they do not tell the designer what to do but only what diverse social realities their choices will engage with. In the case of Narrow Way, they pointed to some very general design directions, in particular, the manifestation of pride for the ‘village’ feel of the area, especially for a lighting project. The ‘village’ feel was translated into lighting design: soft and warm light was chosen to provide a cosy environment, with uplighting to trees and light close to benches. The main architectural features, such as the clock tower, were enhanced and highlighted at night. The choice of lighting system also reflected the ‘village’ feel: a catenary system with a random composition of lanterns to recall the aesthetic of a more humanscale environment. The lanterns are shaped in an old-fashioned style but with an insertion of copper mesh to create a very warm light and give the sense of historical value (see Figure 1.6). Highlighting some of the main historical features was a central design decision, which incorporated the clock tower (see Figure 1.7) and some of the historical painted advertisements signage on buildings, with plans for

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Figure 1.6 Sample of the style of lantern, with copper mesh, chosen for Narrow Way

Figure 1.7 Mock-up of the lighting on the clock tower

Figure 1.8 Narrow Way’s market area

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lighting the facade of the Old Town Hall (currently the Coral betting shop) when the council gets the lease back (with an undertaking not to lease it to another betting shop). The idea of using a catenary system also came from the desire, expressed throughout the research, for a space that would accommodate as many activities as possible. Hence it was important to declutter the space from obstructive columns and free it up for people. Moreover, the catenary wires were structurally calculated to host temporary lighting for special events, such as Christmas and any other events the community proposes. The paving reflects the idea of a village as well: warm bricks in an informal layout to allow activities and a shared ground for pedestrians, cyclists and children. The idea not to have dedicated cycle lanes was agreed with the council in order to prevent conflict zones: a shared pedestrian space should encourage everyone to be conscious of and responsible for the other users. The trees are uplit to give a sense of direction and to integrate lighting in the urban elements. This is an approach normally used to create pedestrian zones and public space, in opposition to crude street lighting where the only focus is the street and vehicular traffic. Uplit trees are widely understood to signify enjoyable pedestrian spaces like parks. The idea of an ‘urban lounge’ for everyone provided the other main design idea. The design therefore included different public elements, from benches to water fountains to trees for shade. The furniture proposed can play different roles, including seating but also street games, urban chess

water features, and places to read and exchange books, as well as phone charging stations and free wifi to attract teenagers and students. In the end, the discussion about having seating and benches was successful. A very long journey through the community groups and the council was needed to get approval to install benches and create aggregating points. No water fountains or structural games could be integrated into the scheme due to budget constraints, but it was a major achievement to convince the council to ‘force’ the bench issue and create a space for everyone to sit and enjoy. Another important issue was the existence of one or two stalls in the little square at the southern end of Narrow Way (see Figure 1.8), close to the betting shop. This area was clearly underused and presented a very good opportunity to create various activities. We suggested hosting more stalls during the day and also promoting some night markets. This suggestion has been taken into account by the council. In social research/design collaborations, designers (and social researchers) need to take strategic decisions about which findings they can and should deal with, and at what level of complexity. In the case of Narrow Way, several social research findings were relegated to the margins. For example, it was decided not to take into consideration the fact that Narrow Way is not a lively place by night, as this was implicit in the minimal social and retail activity. The lack of connection to the Fashion Hub was also not crucial to the design because it proved not to be an issue of concern to users. Whatever the council hoped for in terms of a connection with the surrounding area,

the design intervention was focused solely on Narrow Way. The suggestion that Narrow Way could become a place for families was important, but not as important as the need for it to be a place for everyone. Rather than targeting one specific group of users we opted instead for activities that would be attractive and accessible to most users (we observed many teenagers in the area) and to have affordable/free activities at different times of the day in order to bring the place to life by night, too. As with any design project, the outcome of the entire process will be

the result of an ongoing negotiation among many stakeholders, taking into account political interests, structural constraints, costs, maintenance issues and capabilities. Some of the ideas we initially proposed have been accepted, others have been refused due to cost or maintenance issues. Despite our role being limited to lighting design, it was evident that the social research had significant implications for the wider design context, and highlighted the ways in which lighting interventions were embedded in much wider social and material interconnections. Applied social research can be subversive

because it brings out issues that designers and planners may not want to see or talk about, which might otherwise be swept under the carpet. Ultimately, research of this kind pushes the designer/architect/ planner to question initial design ideas or preconceptions about a project and forces them to delve into the social life of the neighbourhood. As social researchers and designers, we are aware that our efforts alone will not solve complex social, cultural and economic issues, but our work can raise questions and provide opportunities for change.

CONCLUSION This chapter has focused attention on the potential role of social research within the design process. Social research helps to develop deeper understanding of social spaces, as well as to raise questions about social users and social practices that might not otherwise have occurred to designers

and planners who are committed to a more spatial approach. We have outlined some of the overarching principles and methods of social research, as well as illustrating, through a case study of Narrow Way, how these can be applied to develop more socially informed, socially aware designs.

KEY LEARNING POINTS

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Social research can work with spatial design to develop more complex, responsive and informed understandings of the social life of a public space, connecting lighting design to the widely different needs of different types of stakeholders, practices and contexts.

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Taking a more social approach can also connect lighting decisions more holistically to other aspects of public realm design and planning, ensuring that we do not simply light a design but rather use lighting to develop and support people’s use of an activated space.

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Social research can help lighting designers generate questions and consider issues and design approaches that might not have occurred to them from the standpoint of spatial analysis, technical specification or visual aesthetics.

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CHAPTER 2

URBAN LIGHTING MASTERPLAN – ORIGINS, DEFINITIONS, METHODOLOGIES AND COLLABORATIONS DR KAROLINA M ZIELINSKA-DABKOWSKA

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Jan Gehl1

INTRODUCTION Awareness of the significance and benefits of properly designed urban lighting masterplans has been growing since the early 21 st century. There are many factors driving this notable change, such as developments in lighting technology, energy conservation, city branding design and economics, environmental impacts, human health and wellbeing, and people-oriented sociological aspects.2 As the profession of ‘independent urban lighting designer’ is relatively new and still not fully recognised in certain parts of the world, it is essential to establish clear definitions relating to urban lighting masterplans that describe their nature, scope and meaning. In this chapter, with the help of graphics and diagrams, all the necessary steps in the design process and the methodologies used will be introduced. This will make it easier to inform clients, urban planners and other designers about the established approach, and facilitate sharing the work of projects and continuing professional development by disseminating existing research and practical knowledge in this new field. However, none of the above can be achieved if there is no proper process of collaboration in place between stakeholders and no common aim to create a magnificent piece of the city for its users to gather in. Collaboration is necessary in order to achieve creative results as well as to help generate appropriate, original lighting solutions for urban areas outside daylight hours. The intention of this chapter is that more and more city representatives, developers, urban planners/designers, architects, engineers and other members of the design team responsible for designing city lighting will understand that creating appropriate night-time illumination is a complex task, bringing with it enormous environmental and social responsibility. In order to come up with an approach that can minimise any negative issues and take into consideration all aspects of this multifaceted branch of design, cities must devise and fully implement urban lighting masterplans.

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS There are currently no clear and internationally accepted key terms, definitions and approaches for urban lighting masterplans. This is due to three reasons. Firstly, the field of urban lighting and lighting masterplanning is relatively new. Its origins can be traced back to the late 1980s, when the first such large-scale projects were created in France (for Lyon, Caen and Niort) and the UK (for Edinburgh). Secondly, different lighting-related professions were creating new terms, rather than building and drawing on experiences from other fields. Consequently, each lighting practice developed its own distinctive working approach, based on its professional background and unique project experience, and guarded it as intellectual property. Lastly, in each country the lighting community was establishing its own local vocabulary in its native language. Often, the meaning of a particular term varied in different languages. The language barrier often prevented sharing with designers from different countries. In order to facilitate the recognition and adoption of an urban lighting masterplan by local authorities, a proposal to standardise terminology and define the aim, structure and scope of work is proposed in this section. An urban lighting masterplan (ULM) is a comprehensive high-level strategic planning document that consists of both a creative and a technical part (see Table 2.1 for its detailed scope). It takes into account the geographical, environmental, historical, cultural and social context of a place, as well as human needs. The intention of the plan is to enable the creation of a visually attractive, comprehensive urban environment after the sun sets, with each separately designed, distinctive space having its own identifiable quality and atmosphere. Its practical aim is to guide artificial lighting development and to organise the coordinated nocturnal vision of the urban built environment – at the level of a city, district or site – for the foreseeable future in a systematic way. This process may take up to 20 years, depending on the size of the city/district, the programme and the technology used. The creative part of the masterplan proposes a creative concept in the form of graphical representation in order to communicate lighting design ideas in an understandable way. Additionally, it creates a framework (priority hierarchies) with clearly defined flexible rules that any project of illumination in

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the public realm (be it an old or new development) should follow. These are formulated based on background research so that the illuminations of individual elements (for example buildings, routes, squares, etc) do not compete with each other, but are in harmony with the urban and landscape vision. The technical part of the masterplan establishes lighting standards and criteria, supplemented with various technical recommendations and guidelines and a set of goals for the forthcoming development. This document includes enough detail to describe expected results but has sufficient flexibility to permit a number of creative proposals. Once designed, the objective is that the urban lighting masterplan will be officially approved and adopted by the local authorities and used by their technical departments and services, and external architecture and town planning practices to guide development decisions for the city at night. It is implemented through projects allocated to several urban lighting designers and overseen by the urban lighting designer – the author of the plan.

Urban lighting masterplan (ULM) = creative part (CP) + technical part (TP)

METHODOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL APPROACH As we saw earlier in the chapter, there are no established rules or guidelines governing how to design the creative part of an urban lighting masterplan. Each urban lighting designer or practice seems to come up with their own methodology and conceptual approach. The methods discussed below were identified and developed by the author and are presented in a more or less chronological order. With the development of the automobile industry after the First World War, towns and cities changed. The approach towards urban planning employed by the modernists made cars superior to pedestrians, who were forced to use pavements and crossings. Strategies, standards and laws were employed, designed specifically for car users.3 The forerunners of urban lighting masterplans were designed in France around 1965, based on functional requirements for vehicles and different route types. They used horizontal illuminance (a measure in photometry of how much the incident light illuminates the horizontal surface of a street) to differentiate route types. These were categorised in standards according to their traffic flow. The aesthetics of lighting columns (shape, mounting and height) formed the other key variable. These proposals were typically designed by electrical engineers.4

Heritage lighting and nocturnal city beautification Slowly, in the early 1990s, the approach to public lighting progressed from functional to cultural. French lighting designers, members of the Association des Concepteurs Lumière et Éclairagistes (ACE), contributed greatly to the establishment and acknowledgment of the importance of outdoor and urban lighting. One of the first public urban lighting masterplans taking into consideration heritage elements of the city is attributed to Lyon, in France. By the end of the 1980s, the city was looking to redefine its image and when its old town, with its historical and architectural landmarks, was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, historical tourism became its agenda by day and night. The urban lighting masterplan was designed in 1989 by Alain Guilhot, who proposed horizontal and vertical illuminance and different colour temperatures to enhance the routes, historic buildings, monuments and public spaces.5 This method allowed for the rediscovery of the city’s urban

structure and its morphology and, at the same time, made it possible to re-establish its heritage and cultural legacy by city beautification with light. With time, this approach of using a huge amount of light to highlight heritage buildings and structures seemed to be slowly dying out. A new more refined approach was emerging, which formed hierarchies between all the key elements in the city, allowing people to better navigate at night and generating a strong identity of the place.

Light + dark = legibility6 Kevin Lynch’s urban design theory of legibility, presented in the book The Image of the City,7 has become in recent years the starting point for many contemporary night-time illumination projects. The theory identifies important urban spatial elements that affect the way a city is perceived during the day. People need to be able to identify visually and organise these urban spatial elements into a logical pattern (a so-called ‘mental map’), which makes the surroundings familiar and easy to navigate. According to Lynch, ‘Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings.’8 When designing night-time illumination, according to Lynch’s theory, such elements of space management as edges, nodes, paths, landmarks and districts have to be taken into consideration. The illumination of all these components after dark affects the perception of urban space, as well as the atmosphere and quality of life of the inhabitants of modern metropolises. These changes in the way of understanding the city space initiated in the 1960s have been crucial for today’s concept of an urban lighting masterplan. In the early 1990s, lighting practices in the UK began to adopt Lynch’s theories to help create urban lighting masterplans, which included enhancing the principles with additional elements like gateways and distant, mid and close views.9

Hierarchy of different colour temperatures and brightness Developments in lighting technology triggered by the energy crises in 1973 and 1979 – including new, smaller light sources with different colour temperatures and various new optical light distributions of luminaires – gave European lighting designers new tools to enhance their design and push imagination towards new heights. Around 1994, a new approach for the lighting masterplan for the

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CATEGORY

APPROACH

BACKGROUND RESEARCH

URBAN LIGHTING MASTERPLAN (ULM) = CREATIVE PART (CP) + TECHNICAL PART (TP)

SITE ANALYSIS (to understand the site context): • • • • • •

photographic documentation of experience on site by day and night (legibility, atmosphere, etc) photographic documentation of existing lighting equipment (bad and good lighting examples) to help with a global audit measurement of existing illuminance and luminance levels identification of existing and future journeys towards and inside the site on foot, by vehicle and other means of transport identification of night-time patterns of activity for residents, visitors and tourists identification of existing key elements of the space (gateways into the city, boundaries and bridges, views and vistas, panoramas/skylines, meeting places, landmarks, routes)

CONSULTATION AND FEEDBACK: •

DESIGN [Qualitative]

• •

with the general public and public authorities, such as the local council, police, safety and accessibility groups, etc with core design team members with other experts, such as biodiversity consultants, ecologists, historians, site security and maintenance staff

CREATIVE PART (refers to the creative concept): • •

initial key ideas (high-level design) site-wide lighting-approach proposals for: pedestrian, cycling and vehicular routes, buildings and structures, squares and meeting places, landscape (hard and soft), the family of luminaires used throughout the site, the upgrading of existing lighting adjacent to the site, construction and security lighting, etc)

DELIVERY FORMAT: Multimedia visual presentation, presentation boards, hard-copy booklet, etc (varies according to project size and contract agreement)

Table 2.1 Scope of the urban lighting masterplan [ULM] – overview

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CATEGORY

APPROACH

DESIGN [Quantitative]

TECHNICAL PART (refers to various technical aspects): • • •

• • • • • •

• •

establishing ULM project phases and future development zones defining references to lighting policies, standards, procedures and guidelines defining the lighting design process based on country-specific architectural project stages (inception and feasibility, concept design, design development, detailed design and production, construction, focusing and programming) defining the proposal for the family of luminaires to be used throughout the site defining the lighting technique based on the direction of the light source defining the lighting technique based on the integration of lighting equipment defining light source types based on their technology defining luminaire types and their accessories defining technical criteria based on lighting standards and regulations in the specific country – horizontal and vertical illuminance, luminance (brightness), uniformity, colour temperature, colour rendering, glare, equipment location, equipment layouts and heights, maintenance (replacement and cleaning) defining environmental zones related to the site creating lighting guidelines for tenants, retail, commerce, illuminated signs and advertising/media facades, people with disabilities (inclusive design), sustainability and energy consumption, environment and ecology

DELIVERY FORMAT: Hard-copy documentation booklet with tables, diagrams, etc

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Civic District of Singapore was developed in France, using a combination of illuminance and colour temperature (defined in Kelvin) for streets, pedestrian paths, buildings, structures, parks, open spaces and landscaping, in order to highlight the identity of the area and establish a visual hierarchy.10 The concept for colour temperature and brightness rose from low-level, very warm white lighting of 2,200K to warm white lighting of 2,500K and 3,200K, medium brightness to cool white light from 4,000K to 5,000K and high brightness. Additionally, vehicular and pedestrian routes received different street lighting luminaires with regard to height, form and lighting distribution/optics based on their importance, location and character. Also, modern high-rise buildings and bridges were lit with cool white bright lighting of 5,000K, whereas traditional historical low-rise buildings were illuminated with warm white, gold and orange lighting of 2,200K. Typically, green areas were highlighted with cool white lighting of 4,000K to emphasise their green colour. The main objective of this new approach was to enhance the architectural and landscape elements of this part of the city with the use of artificial lighting at night. This determined and promoted the district’s night-time identity in a way previously unheard of in Asia.

Designing with shadow and colour Up until the beginning of the 21st century, urban lighting in Southeast Asia was influenced mostly by a western design approach whereby elements of the urban realm were emphasised with light, but the approach had very little to do with the location of the city, its climate or culture. Therefore, when a local approach to the urban lighting masterplan – which looked at the colour temperature and shadow scheme based on a tropical climate – was proposed in 2006 for Singapore City Centre, it was welcomed as something local people could relate to.11 As the city lies along the equator, there is a lot of heat, intense sunlight and humidity during the day. In this hot climate people tend to spend time outside in the evenings and late at night; therefore, tropical greenery was enhanced by means of light. The psychological effect of cool white and bluish light was proposed to create pleasant, refreshing evenings and nights. Also, as there is a lot of direct sunlight during the day, people tend to rest under the trees, which create an ever-changing pattern of shadows. This observation was applied to the urban lighting scheme, where

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rhythmical patterns of shadows to generate excitement and contrast were created by the use of gobo projectors. It is noticeable how different Asian cities look at night in terms of coloured, dynamic and bright light compared to European cities, with their low-level, static urban lighting. In many Asian cities, a signature skyline and waterfront, including interactive lighting and new technology, has been proposed. In Singapore the colour temperature concept relates to building height, with all buildings having warm white lighting at the building perimeter and street level, and cool white light starting from 4,500K to up to 6,000K at the crown of the building, from 150 metres onwards.

Journey through the site In the early 21st century, another methodology emerged, known as ‘journey through the site’, where the urban lighting designer looks at different users and their movements through the public realm and visually connected places, then uses light to enhance the experience of moving from place to place after dark.12 This approach was also employed for the case study presented later in this chapter, the King’s Cross Central urban lighting masterplan, where light was used to enhance the experience of moving from place to place. Proposed Journey No. 1 in the King’s Cross Central scheme can be taken by visitors from Station Square to Granary Square via the Boulevard (today’s King’s Boulevard) and Canal Square, Journey No. 2 from Maiden Lane Bridge to the Gasholders via the canal towpath, and lastly Journey No. 3 can be experienced from York Way to Canal Street via Goods Street and Lewis Cubitt Park.

Dark infrastructure Around 2010, the new ‘dark infrastructure’ methodology emerged. This approach was influenced by two main factors – firstly, the newly available technology, such as LED light sources and lighting control systems, which made it possible to control and dim urban lighting; secondly, awareness of the negative impact of artificial lighting on the natural environment, with darkness becoming something that needed to be protected. The idea was to create a new type of masterplan, similar to an urban lighting masterplan but this time with the use of darkness, bringing night and darkness back to the city and safeguarding nocturnal biodiversity. The idea behind it is ‘to understand the scale of a city where darkness should be observed, which zones

should be kept in darkness because they are natural areas, where darkness should be arranged or modified, and where lighting should be done in a proper way, i.e. where people live, and residential areas’.13 A number of lighting layouts show how darkness could evolve during the night, over the territory and according to the time of day. One could follow any of the approaches presented above but the question is: which one would be the most appropriate for our times and the most relevant from a human perspective? In my opinion, the most essential approach is place-making for people and inclusion of local context, but first, as Jan Gehl once advised, one has to ‘go out there and see what works and what doesn’t work, and learn from reality. Look out of your windows, spend time in the streets and squares and see how people actually use spaces, learn from that, and use it.’14 Additionally, we need to move what Kaoru Mende has described as ‘the extravagant energy waste and unnecessary light that characterized twentiethcentury lighting environments’15 in order to remind ourselves what the starry night looked like when we were children.

THE ‘THREE MUSKETEERS’ OF URBAN LIGHTING The future urban lighting scenario envisages three professionals sharing responsibilities with each other (see Figure 2.1). Each possesses a unique combination of lighting skills and/or project knowledge that enhances the possibility of delivering successful solutions on different levels of responsibility for a public realm in the city. An urban lighting designer (ULD) is an independent professional who works in the field of urban design at city level, focusing on the link between buildings and the spaces created in between. They have knowledge of urban spatial structure and physical design and the way in which cities work, knowledge of plan-making and project evaluation, and an understanding of local, state and government programmes, processes and regulations. In their work, while developing the overall urban lighting masterplan, or specific urban lighting project, the ULD, besides the creative aspect, must also consider a wide range of often conflicting issues, such as sustainability, light pollution, lighting technology, human health and wellbeing, environmental aspects, energy codes, legislation and zoning codes. In contrast,

an architectural lighting designer (ALD) is an independent professional who is concerned with the design of lighting systems at building level, including natural light and/or electric light, internally and externally, to serve human needs. Both the ULD and the ALD are characterised by full independence regarding the choice of products for a given project, including luminaires, light sources and lighting control, in order to come up with the most appropriate solution and tools. When joining the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) – the oldest internationally recognised organisation dedicated solely to the concerns of independent, professional lighting designers – practitioners are obliged to state in writing that they will not derive financial benefits in any form other than the remuneration provided for in the contract with the investor/client. They must not receive any reward from lighting manufacturers in exchange for bringing a specific lighting manufacturer’s products into the final design specifications. The final team player – the urban lighting planner (ULP) – works for an institution (such as the planning department in local government) or a planning organisation (such as a government-funded local Development Agency) and is responsible for policy-making at a high level, considering the regulatory framework that controls relations

Figure 2.1 Urban lighting – diagram explaining proposed shared responsibilities between the urban lighting designer (ULD), architectural lighting designer (ALD) and urban lighting planner (ULP)

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between public and private space. Ideally, they bring to the project considerable knowledge of the theory, principles and techniques of the planning profession and development process, as well as an understanding of state and local laws, and ordinances and codes pertaining to a wide variety of planning topics. They also evaluate planning-related legislation and are responsible for approving planning applications for urban and architectural outdoor lighting projects.

MEET YOUR COLLABORATORS Urban development projects are currently being led by large design teams and construction companies. As technologies become more complex across all industries and various disciplines, a project’s scope has been divided into narrower specialities. Consequently, design teams are expanding to include specialised designers and consultants/ experts whose professional profiles did not even exist several decades ago. Such an example is the involvement of

Figure 2.2 An organisation chart of the project team for an urban lighting project

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a professional, independent urban lighting designer (ULD). The research conducted by the author, as well as her professional experience in the lighting field, made it possible to develop an organisation chart of the project team for urban lighting as a design discipline (see Figure 2.2). The aim of this schematic diagram is to demonstrate the principles of collaboration for the proper development of urban lighting projects. It should be emphasised that all the members of the design process have different competencies, so the urban lighting designer should be a professional who is able to cross the boundaries of their own subject area according to current needs. As a specialist, they can develop an optimal solution for external illumination only if they work closely with other participants in the design process. Thanks to the use of innovative lighting technologies and their interdisciplinary knowledge, the urban lighting designer can support the artistic design visions of the urban planner, landscaper designer or architect and, at the same time, participate professionally in the project planning from inception to its final stage.

CASE STUDY

KING’S CROSS LO N D O N

he purpose of this case study is to position an urban lighting masterplan project into the context of a place and to show how it works in a real world situation, as opposed to presenting only its theoretical approach. The case study should also assist the reader with understanding what was accomplished within the design timeline and when, why and how this was done, together with providing insight into the services that were performed by lighting consultants, as multiple parties collaborated to create the end result. King’s Cross is a city regeneration development in the north-east of central London comprising approximately 27 ha of former railway land and industrial facilities. When it is fully completed after 2020, it will be one of the largest urban redevelopment schemes in Europe. It consists of both historic areas that are being redeveloped and also areas of new build. The space is adjacent to an urban nature reserve, Camley Street Natural Park, and Regent’s Canal runs through the middle of the site. This is also a communication hub, with national mainline train stations, an international high-speed rail connection to Paris and six Tube lines (see Figure 2.3). During the Victorian era, this place was an important railway goods yard, but it fell into decline in the 1970s. Before its recent redevelopment, which began in 2007, it was a dark area of London, both literally and metaphorically, with crime, antisocial

T

Figure 2.3 Location of King’s Cross development in London

behaviour, drug use and prostitution on the increase. However, at the same time, there was a romantic atmosphere thanks to the canal, the gasholders and the historic railway buildings. From very early on, the developer and client were aware of the exceptional value of the land, buildings and structures

and wanted to ensure that the new development did not lose the unique character of the area. The developer sought to create distinct public areas, each with its own atmosphere and sense of place, that would be animated throughout the day and into the evening.16

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The importance of public spaces for people Nowadays there are changes in the design approach for urban areas, with the aim being to move away from the ‘car city’ towards the ‘pedestrian city’ – people want to have everything close by, since time is of prime importance. They prefer to walk, ride a bike or use public transport instead of sitting in traffic jams and trying to find somewhere to park. The King’s Cross developer understood this need to design public places for people and this approach was wisely adopted by the development. The developer put people before traffic, with an emphasis on walking and cycling. Car usage was minimised by various means, for example by establishing links with public transport (trains, the Tube, buses), and there is only one essential road that cuts through the whole site in front of the Granary Building. There are some roads in the northern part of the development, but most of the rest of the site is a pedestrian area and the presence of cars is minimal. This is what makes the development unique and encourages pedestrians to spend time there. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from the south end of the site to the north. The developer also understood the newest tendencies in urban planning and the idea of creating a city for people’s enjoyment by addressing the matter of regenerating public life in public spaces. The developer has reported spending a lot of time thinking about the spaces in between buildings and, about how people would use these spaces.17 Consequently, it was decided that nearly 40% of the completed site would be public realm, with 10 new public squares.

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In order to create a vibrant and successful urban quarter and boost the number of people using the development during the day, at night and during the weekend, an increase in mixeduse development was promoted. This included commercial office spaces and other workspaces, housing (high- and mid-range residential alongside social housing and student accommodation), retail and leisure spaces, and hotel and educational facilities. Additionally, as the work on the project progressed, the client came up with a very unusual vision – introducing the University of the Arts London into the middle of this massive development. Putting an art school in the heart of the commercial development was vital in defining its lively and creative vibe. It would bring culture, young people, education, excitement and new life with it. From the client’s point of view, it was a clever strategy, which created an excellent opportunity for potential tenants. With this additional vibrancy and stream of young people, new tenants followed. Most probably this was one of the reasons why Google decided to build its European headquarters here, attracted to the quirky style and atmosphere of the new site. Already, the southern part of the site is busy with people, with many interesting temporary events to experience. If one goes there and walks around, there is always something going on in the realm of art and culture. In all the events and activities designed around the different user groups that took place during and after the construction phase, one could hear the echo of the words of Jan Gehl: ‘A good city is like a good party. People stay longer than really necessary because they are enjoying themselves.’18

These events obviously help to make the development an exciting destination and attract people. The aim is to ‘provide activities that are unusual and aren’t being done elsewhere in London’.19 Another notable aspect of the development is the fact that it is creating an active night-time economy, as well as a daytime destination. What helps is the transport hub at King’s Cross in the heart of the development, and bars and restaurants that are open until late. The vision is reflected in the urban lighting proposal.

Appointment of the urban lighting designer (ULD) Mark Major, an urban lighting designer on the project and principal of Speirs + Major has spoken about the lighting practice’s approach and experience prior to appointment. Collaboration and consultation is an important part of the process, where the designer should work with local authorities, police, safety and accessibility groups, as well as the many other stakeholders involved in these types of projects. Major explained: Each time you develop an urban lighting masterplan for an area you learn something new. As a result, the next one you are involved in is different. There is no strict formula for designing these projects, because otherwise nothing ever progresses. But there are certain common principles, common approaches that in a way are the same for all cities or their parts and they can be applied.20

The urban lighting masterplan came in two phases: firstly, the Lighting Vision was prepared in the form of a document and a multimedia presentation. It consisted of a specific high-level approach for key urban elements identified on the site: transition (quality of street lighting inside and outside the development), heritage, bridges and tunnels, water, landscape, streets and places (see Figure 2.4). Those working on the project also recognised that they needed to start to develop various technical aspects of this; to translate them into design codes, where they become much more specific but without designing actual lighting – like a guide, but not the final design. Consequently, a more detailed Technical Appendix was later developed, encompassing

design codes for each of the different streets and types of spaces, explaining the more technical criteria for the realisation of the lighting. Together with this, they also provided guidelines for retail and commerce, and such issues as accessibility for people with disabilities and environmental guidance in terms of light spills, light pollution and ecology. All these more serious technical and scientific issues were also considered as part of the lighting masterplan. What was important in the King’s Cross project was the evolution of an urban lighting masterplan over a longer period of time with a greater degree of collaboration and an understanding that the design was an ongoing process. The lighting designers were brought

Figure 2.4 King’s Cross Lighting Vision 2006 – an overview defining different layers of light and key ideas of the urban lighting masterplan

in relatively early – the projects were beginning to be formulated, but the design company’s work was completed prior to the other design proposals. Another element that was different for this particular development was the fact that the design company presented its proposals directly to the decision makers at all times, which made it possible to receive immediate feedback and facilitated discussion. When it comes to creating an urban lighting masterplan, it is a much more complex undertaking than a single outdoor lighting design project. You have to understand the context, consult

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with all the stakeholders, collaborate with everybody on the team and only then can you arrive at the solution. Otherwise, your design would be based on assumptions as opposed to something real. Without all of this previously mentioned work you cannot come up with a high-level approach. Major explains: Unless [we] are committed to really spending time going around the site at night, taking photographs and recording lighting levels, talking to everyone involved and getting much deeper knowledge and doing a lot of research, we are in no position to make any recommendations, because [we] would be doing it from the position of ignorance.21

Consultation and feedback – engaging the community The client saw this development as a ‘human city’.22 As a result, they set consultations at the centre of the project by putting in place a clear stepby-step process, taking both the method and its findings seriously. Between July 2001 and December 2002 they spoke to and presented the development and its design to more than 4,000 people, including representatives of more than 150 communities, businesses and other organisations in order to form consent with regard to developing design proposals and ideas. These included the London boroughs of Camden and Islington, English Heritage, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and the Greater London Authority (GLA), to name just a few.

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With the help of specialists, the client conducted interviews, questionnaires, exercises and workshops, and collected emails and feedback from its dedicated website.23 Typical questions included: ‘Which three words or phrases sum up the kind of place you would like King’s Cross to be?’, ‘Changing King’s Cross will take a long time. What do you think should happen first?’, ‘What are your social and economic priorities for this development?’ and ‘What are your environmental priorities for this development?’ They also actively engaged with children and young people, giving them a sense of belonging, as they may live or work in the development well in to the future. By involving local residents in the planning process they were able to avoid overlooking significant aspects that are of importance to the local communities, such as new routes and spaces to enhance the public realms. These are often overlooked as planners and designers do not usually live in the areas they design. They analysed an enormous amount of information and feedback and passed this information to the design team. From the point of view of urban lighting designers, consultations and presenting project ideas by doing mock-ups and/or demonstrating the effects of artificial lighting to a larger group of people are essential for the success of any development at night-time. Typically for private developments, social consultations with residents do not take place while the urban lighting masterplan is being designed, but the lighting consultants for King’s Cross were part of this consultation as they

talked to focus groups. In terms of individual involvement and consultation for King’s Cross, the lighting design company talked with Camden Council about the lighting of routes and open spaces, with representatives from the Canal and Riverside Trust in relation to Regent’s Canal, and with the people responsible for Camley Street Natural Park. Even though the latter is not part of the urban scheme, the lighting consultants believed it was important to take on board their feedback on the proposed urban lighting masterplan. They also had discussions with different groups, such as Broadgate Estates, who manage King’s Cross security and maintenance, even walking around the estate with them in the evening on a few occasions. They looked at the state of the functional and decorative lighting as it was installed and explained why certain things were being done in a certain way, thus starting a successful process of dialogue. Mark Major explains, ‘In the future, more engagement and consultation with the people who are going to manage the site will be important. A lot of the success of complex cities like London, Berlin, etc depends on if they are well managed or not.’24 According to Major, ‘There are two levels of looking at the city: the hardware (the buildings, the landscape, monuments, the art, etc) and the software (wayfinding, lighting, the information system). The things there are like a network of visual information that allows the city to work. Light is visual information; therefore, it affects every part of the city.’25

Safety and security Urban spaces at night can appear very different than during the daytime.

Often three-dimensional cues are lacking and people feel disorientated and ill at ease while walking. After the public consultations, it was clear that safety was one of the key priorities for the majority of local people.26 Urban lighting designers also need to respect lighting regulations and they should discuss these with the local authority, the police and other parties involved. In the King’s Cross development, they looked more at vertical luminance (surface brightness) rather than solely at horizontal illuminance (the amount of light falling onto a surface), the latter being prescribed by lighting standards. The reason for this is that humans perceive the external environment as a three-dimensional space, and the way they navigate it is by being visually attracted towards the brightest vertical surface in their surroundings. So providing enough light on the pavement would not necessarily encourage a person walking along that pavement to feel secure, as they might not be able to recognise the facial expressions, and therefore intentions, of passers-by. The urban lighting designer should try to explain to their clients, other consultants and the general public what is meant by the word ‘safety’ in urban lighting (it is to do with people not being run over, falling down steps or having an accident, etc) and ‘security’ (this is about everything from fear of crime, to cameras, to measures that are taken with lighting for security purposes). The proposed approach at King’s Cross was to light everything safely and securely but to maintain a balance and not over light it so that it lost its original character. King’s Cross has a very particular feel at night – it does not feel dangerous, it feels interesting.

Also, one of the key aspects was to keep the development ‘alive’ with no dead, dark zones of activity when workers and commuters leave. Therefore, none of the units at ground level were leased to commercial offices. The lighting design company created a special set of flexible, non-prescriptive retail lighting guidelines to ensure that lighting designed by or on behalf of owners and tenants, will make a positive contribution towards the overall development.

Methodology Legibility and the mental mapping approach, as expounded by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City 27, with journeys through the site, were important parts of the methodology. Also vital was consideration of a matrix of 13 ‘Lighting design criteria’ – amenity, ambience, legibility, image, accessibility, safety, security, cost, buildability, maintenance, environmental impacts, energy and sustainability. According to Major, ‘As a lighting designer you need to look into all of the above things and try to arrive at a balance. And it’s important that everybody involved in these elements is still considered.’28 With the urban lighting masterplan for King’s Cross, we have been given a powerful tool for guiding decisionmaking concerning the night-time built environment. It delivers vision, advice, references and the qualitative and quantitative tools for future urban city life. These contributions allow other lighting designers to devise lighting proposals that react to recognised social needs and enable them to make good decisions and design options, so that urban lighting projects can be continuously visualised and conveyed.

Relationship with the client and other team members In the King’s Cross project, as is the case with many projects, the lighting design company was directly appointed by the client, rather than the architect, urban masterplanner and/or landscape architect. This independence makes it possible to work together with other team members to come up with a unique solution. Sometimes the design team consists of a collection of different disciplines that do not relate to each other, whereas in other design teams the working relationships are very close. This is down to the client as they put the design team together and lead it. The behaviour of the person leading the team makes a huge difference to the culture of the project.

Current and future role of the urban lighting designer If there are questions from the lighting designers involved with projects on site, then the developer may suggest that they talk to the lighting design company to make sure the urban lighting masterplan is referred to. The lighting consultants monitor the contractors’ technical submissions for various projects – though not all – and ensure that both the overall Lighting Vision and the detail of the various lighting schemes are correctly implemented. The urban lighting masterplan is about coming up with design principles, and that is when one will really end up with a lot of different lighting designers being involved in this complex lighting scheme. In the case of King’s Cross, the lighting design company established lighting strategies for individual project areas they were involved in, each with

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Figure 2.5 Location of squares forming focal points and gathering places on site for residents and visitors, based on King’s Cross Central public realm strategy, 2004

its own character and sense of place that would be animated by day and into the evening. As is the case with most urban lighting masterplans, this development is ongoing.

Granary Square – towards more humanistic urban lighting design The urban lighting masterplan for the King’s Cross development follows the idea of squares forming focal points and gathering places throughout the site (see Figure 2.5).29 They act as small local neighbourhoods with a concentration of people and diverse activities within them. Appropriately designed, welcoming lighting for residents and visitors makes a direct contribution to the character of these key urban spaces.

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Granary Square (see also chapter 6) is the most important of the public spaces on the site of the King’s Cross development. It is adjacent to the Granary Building designed by Lewis Cubitt in 1852. Formerly it was a canal basin used by barges to moor and to unload their goods. After refurbishment, the Granary Building now hosts the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. By looking at the transformation of Granary Square, one can see how a gloomy, abandoned, lifeless place can be brought back to life at night-time (see Figure 2.6). Today, this urban square at the heart of King’s Cross Central is one of London’s most significant and celebrated new public spaces (see Figure 2.7). It is a vibrant

destination that plays host to a wide range of cultural events. Lighting design for the square provides the high level of flexibility required for these events, together with an elegant architectural and landscape scheme for the intervening periods (see Figure 2.8). By introducing elements into the space such as lighting integrated into trees, water features, cafes and restaurants with alfresco dining, and artwork – it was possible to encourage people to stay in the square and its surroundings. To define the space and provide a backdrop for activities, the square was framed with light. The ‘frame’ consists of the soft illumination of the imposing Granary Building facade along one side, the illumination of a grid of pleached trees

at one end, and the light emanating from the lantern-like Pavilion Building at the other end. The general illumination of the square is provided by an indirect lighting technique so that the lighting is diffuse and its source does not cause uncomfortable and distracting glare. Lighting columns in the square itself are avoided so as not to detract from the landscaping, the Granary Building’s facade and any event-related features installed in the square. The fixtures and reflectors are clustered onto two 15-metre masts, which are carefully positioned to ensure an unobstructed view of the Granary Building. During events, the light levels can be raised when required to support the safe movement of thousands of people. Feeder pillars have also been erected

Figure 2.6 Granary Square, with the grade II listed Granary Building, showing its distinct identity at night

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Figure 2.7 Granary Square by day – one of London’s most vibrant new public spaces

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to provide power and data to cater for temporary event lighting on an impressive scale; these retract into the ground when not in use. When not occupied by an event, the square is filled by four rectangular water features. These can be left static and dark, reflecting the Granary Building and creating a quiet, contemplative space. When activated, hundreds of individually controlled and illuminated

fountain jets provide an ever-changing spectacle and a focal point for the area. The grade II listed Granary Building forms a backdrop for the square. The lighting concentrates on the loading door bays, where narrow-beam uplighters throw light up the full height of the building. The light diminishes on the vertical surfaces towards the top of the building, but picks up strongly on ground-facing horizontal surfaces

1

2

3

4

The lighting for The Grade II listed Granary Building concentrates on the loading door bays, where narrow beam uplights throw light up the full height of the building. The remaining illumination is confined to the base of the building, helping to visually ground it When not occupied by an event, the square is filled by static, dark water pools, reflecting the building and creating contemplative space. During events hundreds of individually controlled and illuminated fountain jets provide a focal point for the area Inground uplights provide soft illumination of a grid of pleached trees and encourage people to stay in the square in the evening The general lighting to the square is provided by secondary reflector systems mounted onto the column

1

2

3

4

Figure 2.8 The lighting layout overview, highlighting the different lit elements in Granary Square

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Figure 2.9 Gasholder No. 8 contains a new pocket park and event space used by local families, visitors, students and office workers during the day

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Figure 2.10 Gasholder No. 8 has been redesigned as a public space, utilising the existing structure

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such as the loading door lintels and the cornices. The window bays are also uplit. The remaining illumination is confined to the base of the building, helping to visually ground it. Warm white colour temperature has been used to emphasise the higher red content in the brick. Since the square opened in June 2012, it has become a popular new destination for London, winning a Camden Design Award in 2013 for best new public space, due to its safe, comfortable, barrier-free spaces designed for use by all age groups day and night.

Gasholder Park To highlight the identity of the development, the Lighting Vision proposed the illumination of selected important heritage buildings and structures (including the iconic gasholders) throughout the site. Gasholder No. 8 once dominated the horizon at King’s Cross. This magnificent historic structure (classical cast-iron columns connected by iron lattice girders) has undergone a major offsite restoration and been repurposed as the frame to contain a new public pocket park and event space. During the day the park is used for relaxation and watching the narrow boats at St Pancras Lock (see Figures 2.9 and 2.10). The circular lawn is also a popular recreational space for local families, visitors, students and office workers during their lunchtime. Mark Major explained the concept of the project: “The lighting design focused on making the most of the juxtaposition of the gasholder and the concentric mirrorpolished canopy set within it (see Figure 2.11). Inspired by the idea of a solar eclipse, the park is turned into a beautiful night-time landmark, as well as an enlivening immersive experience”.30 In an eclipse, the form of the moon is revealed by a soft corona of light, which shifts in intensity and position as the sun and moon move relative to each other. To create a glowing ‘corona effect’, each of the new canopy uprights are uplit, the cool white light enforcing the architectural rhythm and reflecting from the canopy roof back onto the path. The gasholder frame itself is also uplit with cool white light from the inside, creating a highly legible silhouette and reinforcing the special sense of enclosure with the illusion that all light is emanating from the canopy ‘corona’. Twenty-minute ‘eclipse’ cycles begin with all of the lights on, followed by cross-fading from east to west over three minutes, a pause of two minutes in darkness (full eclipse) and then a slow east-to-west cross

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fade back up to full brightness. This apparent movement of the light creates fabulous shifts in the shadows and interreflections from the polished surfaces, gently animating the environment.

A visionary result King’s Cross is a successful benchmark for future urban redevelopment schemes. Its safe, unique, environmentally friendly after-dark places are full of character and identity and are easy to understand and navigate. It demonstrates the importance of vision and consistency in decision-making at various levels throughout the whole development in bringing cities to life, with urban lighting playing a vital part in the project’s overall success.

Figure 2.11 Gasholder No. 8 was once part of the largest gasworks in London; today it has been adapted into a new park and event space, with illumination subtly highlighting its features of historical importance

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CONCLUSION Demand for suitable, high-quality illumination in urban night-time environments will unquestionably continue to rise in the future as people realise the way in which it enriches the appearance of the public realm. The shift from the industry-driven car city to the human-centric pedestrian city directly impacts both urban lighting designers (with regard to their night-time concepts and implementation) and the end user (residents, visitors, tourists) and is one of the main driving forces behind the creation of an attractive social life after dark. This chapter has illustrated how the lighting design for a whole city or part of it, such as an urban district, can be approached in a coordinated manner based on an urban lighting masterplan created by an independent urban lighting designer. The design task involved in creating such a masterplan involves complex activity on various levels and therefore needs to be undertaken by consultants who are experienced in all the matters and requirements discussed in this chapter. The creative part of the masterplan is quite

STATUS

CATEGORY

Existing

LIGHTING GUIDELINES

flexible in its approach. There are certain physical, spatial, built-environment elements, such as routes, buildings, squares, landscape, which should be addressed, but the high-level symbolic and poetic ideas and the methodology used vary depending on the experience of the urban lighting design team, the context of the place, its geographical location and climate and cultural aspects. The technical part is more structured and should address all the necessary themes presented earlier in the chapter. Only a combination of the two parts – creative and technical – can ensure uniqueness for a specific city, neighbourhood or town by creating its own individual night-time identity. Residents and tourists do not want all cities to be illuminated in the same manner, as this would take away the whole point of night-time tourism and new city experience. In the whole concept, pockets of light but also pockets of darkness must be allowed. Uniformly illuminated cities or districts, for example not only add to over lighting, increased energy use and light pollution but also lose the visual hierarchy and clues that are so important for orientation in cities when darkness falls.

General rules, principles or advice regarding lighting matters, which are part of the ULM

Recommended

LIGHTING PROCEDURES (How do I do this?) An established or official method for preparing the ULM

Existing

LIGHTING STANDARDS (What is required?) A required or agreed level of lighting quality to be adhered to in the ULM

Recommended

LIGHTING POLICY (Why do I need to do it?) A course or principle of action adopted or proposed by an organisation (government, local council, etc) related to the ULM

Table 2.2 Existing and recommended regulatory frameworks for an urban lighting masterplan [ULM]

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People want beautifully designed places in which they can gather in the public realm after dark. It is clear that the objective of creating such spaces cannot always be met through the planning of an urban lighting masterplan alone; this is especially true for public clients with a lot of contradictory interests. Recommendations based on current guidelines and codes of practice are a well-intentioned quality benchmark but they are, in most cases, neither required nor evaluated in practice by towns or local authorities. Also, of crucial importance is the fact that today the lighting manufacturing industry is strongly promoting smart city technology. Consequently, a new legislative framework is recommended to add to the existing framework (see Table 2.2) which would allow lighting issues to be dealt with on a comprehensive basis and could be incorporated into the city and town planning system. In the future, any urban lighting proposal related to an urban lighting masterplan should require planning permission from the local authority and be classed as development.

Such an approach would enhance the night-time urban environment and allow better control over both existing and new illumination of our towns and cities.

KEY LEARNING POINTS

1

Urban lighting designers (ULDs) should start project collaboration early, preferably at the feasibility and concept design stages of the project.

2

Visit the site by day and night to understand the character of the space.

3

Find a theme, tell a story with light and make it interesting.

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Always keep in mind that good design is human and environmentally friendly and

respect the environment by minimising the negative impact of light on flora, fauna and humans.

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Talk to residents and future project users about their expectations and what they think needs to be improved.

Be a member of an interdisciplinary team, as this has the best chance of creating unique spaces, and listen to other people: clients, planners, architects, engineers and other consultants.

Read and research – do not follow a routine path in design. Work on the scheme from start to completion to ensure ideas are fully realised.

Speak the language of your collaborators – understand the norms and regulations.

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Create robust solutions for outdoor applications – recommend appropriate equipment and foresee the maintenance cost and time.

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CHAPTER 3

STREET LIGHTING AND OLDER PEOPLE DR NAVAZ DAVOUDIAN

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INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the requirements of elderly pedestrians regarding street lighting, and covers physiological as well as social needs. It is intended to increase designers’ understanding of age-related vision loss and highlight the importance of design decisions that could impact the safety and independence of this growing sector of the population.

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Figure 3.1 By 2039, 30% of people in the UK are projected to be above 65 years of age

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WHY ARE OLDER PEDESTRIANS SO IMPORTANT IN URBAN LIGHTING DECISION-MAKING? The elderly population is set to increase over the coming decades, with 30% of people in the UK projected to be above 65 years of age by 2039. With an ageing population, mobility problems can affect the accessibility of outdoor environments and public spaces and this can have consequences for mental health. Driving may not be an option for some older adults, particularly at night, due to issues such as slower responses and increased disability and discomfort glare. Consequently, access to outdoor spaces is likely to involve walking and greater use of public transport. To encourage the use of outdoor spaces/ streets at any time of the day and to change/prevent sedentary behaviour, several factors must be considered. Restructuring the physical environment is important. Street lighting is one environmental factor that can either encourage or discourage the use of outdoor spaces after dark. Improving the design of street lighting and implementation of evidence-based lighting design could encourage more active lifestyles later in our lives. The provision of street lighting in the UK is currently undergoing a rapid transformation as conventional light sources are replaced by LEDs and complex control systems (often referred to as smart lighting) become more common. While there is considerable research into what pedestrians need from street lighting, the change to smart lighting seems to be focused on replicating old lighting practice while reducing the energy used. This is a missed opportunity as the inherent flexibility within smart lighting, coupled with minor changes within the night-time environment, has the potential to make our roads much more accessible at night-time.

HOW AGEING AFFECTS VISUAL PERFORMANCE One of the main problems that older individuals encounter in terms of accessing the outdoor environment is agerelated vision impairments. Older people face two essentially universal oculomotor changes that vary only in the age of onset and rate of progression in older adults.

With senile miosis, maximum pupillary dilation gradually decreases in moderate and low illumination, resulting in reduced light. With presbyopia, the lens loses its ability to focus on nearby objects, requiring the use of bifocals or reading glasses. Furthermore, the evidence shows that many older people experience general losses of contrast sensitivity. This results in degradation of object recognition and is especially problematic in low light; also it slows oculomotor responses, which reduces the ability to sample visual information from the surroundings; and it reduces ‘useful visual field’, which limits the span of visual attention across the visual field. These visual difficulties are often intensified by age-related visual pathologies such as cataracts, which absorb and scatter light, causing extra discomfort and disability and glare, further impairment of visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, particularly at nighttime. Moreover, macular degeneration results in progressive loss and eventually blindness of the central visual field. Untreated glaucoma can result in a complete loss of peripheral vision. Research on young adults indicates that under difficult visual conditions focal and peripheral vision are affected by degradation of the retinal image in different ways. Focal visual functions like contrast sensitivity and acuity are rapidly degraded by blur and by reductions of luminance below photopic (daylight) levels. Peripheral visual functions such as vection (visually induced sensations of self-motion) and guidance of locomotion, however, showing little effect of severe blur. Researchers Leibowitz and Owen have suggested that selective degradation of focal vision, while ambient vision performs effectively, explains the overconfidence of young drivers at night. This finding is in line with a study of steering accuracy in a driving simulator. Leibowitz and Owen found that young drivers steered as accurately in low light levels as in high light levels.1 However, a different pattern of results was found by the research of Owen and Tyrell into older drivers, which found that they displayed progressive losses of steering accuracy in low lighting levels. These findings suggest that peripheral visual functions may be less robust with advancing age.2 Considering the above, one can conclude that these changes result in reduced function of locomotion guidance under low light levels (mesopic) and in darkness.3

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LIGHT AND AGEING EYES Retinal illuminance decreases with age Much of the light incident on the cornea is lost en route to the retina due to absorption, scatter and reflection of quanta in the ocular media. Because most of these light losses vary with wavelength, there is both a reduction in overall light intensity and a change in the spectral distribution of the light that arrives at the retina. Spectral power distribution (SPD) describes the power per unit area per unit wavelength of an illumination (radiant exitance). It more generally refers to the concentration, as a function of wavelength, of any radiometric or photometric quantity (for example, luminance, luminous flux, luminous intensity, illuminance, luminous emittance). Hence, to the extent that ocular media absorption changes with age, there will be age-correlated changes in the intensity and spectral distribution of the retinal stimulus. Let us consider in more detail the main structures in the eyes that cause a reduction in retinal illuminance.

humour to meet its metabolic requirements and to carry off its wastes. It lies posterior to the iris and anterior to the vitreous body. It is now known that there are substantial individual differences in ocular media absorption for observers of the same age. Most of the age-related loss in light transmission is due to changes in the crystalline lens. There is a linear increase in the density of the ocular media with age, up to approximately 65 years. This increase is due primarily to absorption by the crystalline lens and results in an age-related decrease in retinal illuminance.

Crystalline lens absorption The crystalline lens is a transparent, biconvex structure whose functions are to maintain its own clarity, to refract light and to provide accommodation (see Figure 3.2). The lens has no blood supply or innervation after foetal development, and it depends entirely on the aqueous

The pupil The ageing of the human iris is apparent on casual observation in the form of a smaller pupil. The smaller pupil will, of course, admit less light to the retina by a factor that is proportional to the area. The average pupillary diameter of the dark-adapted eye decreases by about 2 to 2.5 mm between the ages of 10 and 80 years. These changes in pupil diameter will alter the intensity of the retinal stimulus. In addition, by restricting the passage of light to the thickest portion of the lens, a smaller pupil will lead to greater absorption of short-wavelength light. Thus, an age-correlated decrease in pupil diameter will mimic the effect of lens ageing with respect to colour vision – that is, it will decrease the overall intensity and alter the spectral distribution of the retinal stimulus.

Figure 3.2 Anatomy of the human eye

Figure 3.3 Sensitivity of photoreceptors to different light wavelengths

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Consequences of age-related changes in retinal illuminance Colour vision It is clear from the evidence presented above that the intensity of the retinal stimulus for a particular set of conditions is strongly dependent on the observer’s age. Because the changes in the stimulus are wavelengthdependent (see Figure 3.3), the largest effects on vision will be observable in terms of sensitivity reduction at short wavelengths. Age-related changes in thresholds for shortwavelength stimuli detected by rods and changes in the shape of the photopic spectral sensitivity function at short wavelengths are well predicted by the increased density of the ocular media and reductions in the area of the pupillary aperture. Changes in colour-matching functions and colour discrimination with age are also related to increases in ocular media absorption. Since a colour match depends on quantal absorption in the photoreceptors and because good estimates of the receptor action spectra are available, it is possible to calculate shifts in colour matches if the density of the ocular media and macular pigment are known. Colour discrimination is also affected by a reduction in light intensity and a shift in the spectral distribution of the illuminant. In general, these losses in discrimination are similar to deficits associated with congenital deficiencies of shortwave cones. Spatial vision One widely used assessment of spatial vision is the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). The CSF is determined by measuring the reciprocal of the minimum contrast required to detect sinusoidal gratings of various spatial frequencies. Sensitivity to high spatial frequencies is strongly dependent on the overall light level, whereas sensitivity to low spatial frequencies is less dependent on the adapting light level. (A scene with small details and sharp edges contains more high-spatial-frequency information than one composed of large coarse stimuli.) In general, high-spatial-frequency sensitivity increases in proportion with the square root of increases in luminance. This implies that a change in the shape of the CSF is to be expected in elderly people due to a reduction in transmission of their ocular media. That is, even without retinal and neural changes in older people, a loss in

sensitivity at high spatial frequencies is expected. Agecorrelated reductions in retinal illuminance are not the only changes in the eye that affect spatial sensitivity.

Neural efficiency decreases with age The consequences for colour and spatial vision as a result of age-correlated changes in the retinal stimulus are straightforward. When changes in the vision of elderly people exceed or qualitatively differ from these predictions, age-correlated neural losses are implicated. Colour vision There are age-related changes in the sensitivity of the different classes of cone receptors and/or cone pathways. Several studies have tried to measure the age-related decline in sensitivity and they all agree that each of the three cone classes has a significant decline of sensitivity: blue cones (short wavelength), green cones (medium wavelength) and red cones (long wavelength). These results refer to sensitivity specified at the cornea and so some of the loss must be related to a reduction in the retinal illuminance. Around 40% of the age-correlated loss in sensitivity of the short-wave-sensitive cones (defined in terms of light delivered to the cornea) is attributable to light losses in the ocular media, with the remaining loss ascribable to receptoral and/or postreceptoral changes. Losses in sensitivity of medium-wave-sensitive and longwave-sensitive cones are nearly the same as for shortwave-sensitive cones. However, because the age-related changes in ocular media (crystalline lens) reduce sensitivity to short wavelengths more than to long wavelengths, the loss in sensitivity of short-wave-sensitive cones specified at the retina is less. This would suggest that while older eyes will need a higher intensity of light to achieve the same visual performance as younger eyes, the light wavelength plays a role in this equation too (see Figure 3.4). Blue wavelength of the light will be missed in the cloudy lenses of ageing eyes more than medium and long wavelength light. Therefore, you may see many older adults who prefer more blue/ whitish light colour to warmer light colour. However, this is not the whole story and it is too early to simply say we need more blue light for older adults.

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Figure 3.4 Log relative sensitivity of short-wave sensitive, middle-wave sensitive and long-wave sensitive cones are plotted as a function of age. Redrawn from (Werner, J. S. and Steele, V. G. (1988) Sensitivity of human foveal color mechanisms throughout the life span. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A: Opt. Image Sci. 5: 2122-2130.)

Spatial vision Age-related declines in contrast sensitivity, like declines related to decreased retinal illuminance, are most pronounced at high spatial frequencies. (As mentioned earlier, a scene with small details and sharp edges contains more high-spatial-frequency information than one composed of large coarse stimuli.) Although increased lenticular density with advancing age, which results in reduced lens transmission, may contribute to decreased sensitivity to high spatial frequencies, it is not primarily responsible for agerelated changes in the contrast sensitivity function. Older people’s loss of contrast sensitivity is more than would be predicted if age-related loss in retinal illuminance was the only cause of decreased sensitivity. This implies that neural changes must contribute to the loss of contrast sensitivity in elderly people, although these neural changes are similar to the effects of decreased retinal illuminance. That is, the underlying neural changes result in reduced efficiency with advancing age. In other words, where contrast sensitivity matters, the excess light required to compensate for decreased retinal illuminance may not be enough to achieve the optimum contrast sensitivity.

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GLARE AND AGEING EYES Light that has been scattered in the eye is termed ‘stray’ light and is the cause of disability and discomfort glare. Disability glare impairs the vision of objects without necessarily causing discomfort; discomfort glare causes discomfort without necessarily impairing the vision of objects. Light scattering in the eye’s optical media causes a veil of stray light over the retina. This leads to visual effects such as glare while driving at night, hindrance from a low sun during daytime, facial recognition problems, haziness of vision, colour and contrast loss. Older individuals are more sensitive to glare. It takes them longer to adapt from one light level to another. Stray light increases with age in the perfectly healthy eye, but much more so with disturbances to the optical media, such as cataracts. The typical symptoms of stray light are thought to occur quite independently from symptoms associated with visual acuity.4 A study by Davoudian et al, however, showed that increasing low-level glare (veiling luminance between 0 and 4 lux) in the eyes of older people had no significant effect on their threshold luminance contrast, while it significantly increased in younger people.5 The reason behind this might be an offsetting benefit due to the increase in retinal illuminance produced by the glare in older participants.

Figure 3.5 Sample colour temperatures of different light sources, expressed in Kelvin

2200°K

2700°K

3000°K

3200°K

4000°K

4200°K

5500°K

Standard Incandescent

Halogen

Warm Metal Halide

Standard Clear Metal Halide

Cool White Fluorescent

Daylight Metal Halide

1500°K

High Pressure Sodium

Kelvin Temperature Chart

Discomfort glare Age is quite a controversial factor in the assessment of discomfort glare. Although older individuals report higher sensitivity to brightness, the measured sensitivity to brightness, which was assessed by asking the subject to rate discomfort glare from artificial glare sources and daylight, did not reveal a significant difference between age groups. There is a deviation in glare sensitivity among older people and this large deviation depends on the visual characteristics of the individuals, which can cause the person to be more sensitive to glare.6 From these studies, it can be concluded that if age affects discomfort glare perception, this effect is weak; discomfort glare perception depends more on the visual characteristics of the individual than on his or her age.7

How about correlated colour temperature and/or spectral power distribution (SPD) and glare? The directionality and spectrum of scattered light depends on the density and size of the particles that scatter the light. Small-particle or Rayleigh scattering has no preferential direction, but small particles scatter shorter wavelengths more efficiently than longer wavelengths. Daylight sky is blue because light reaching an observer from any direction other than directly out of the sun is scattered by

8000°K

atmospheric particles that are small in comparison to visible light wavelengths. Conversely, light coming directly from the setting sun appears red because shorter wavelength light is scattered out of the sun’s image during atmospheric transit. Stray light from the cornea and lens decreases with increasing wavelength, showing the influence of smallparticle scattering. Stray light from fundus reflectance or trans illumination increases with increasing wavelength, showing the influence of the decreased optical absorption of melanin and haemoglobin in the red end of the visible spectrum. The net effect is that stray light reaching the fovea has little wavelength dependence.8 However there are studies showing the impact of blue cone signals and discomfort glare ratings.9 This apparent increase in short-wavelength spectral sensitivity has also been reported in extrafoveal discomfort glare and is consistent with the increase in peripheral brightness appearance.10 It has also been demonstrated several times that the colour temperature of the light could have an impact on discomfort glare perception.11 Colour temperature represents the warmth or coolness of the light source’s appearance. Colour temperatures are normally expressed in units called kelvins (K) (see Figure 3.5). In several experiments on LED lights, the glare source or the

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Figure 3.6 Light exposure may lead to loss of visual sensitivity

background colour was shown to have a significant influence on discomfort glare perception, because bluish light was always perceived as more discomforting. Some studies have reinforced this observation by showing that glare sources with a large number of short wavelengths resulted in higher perceived discomfort. However, it has recently been demonstrated that metameric light sources, namely sources having different spectral power distributions but the same correlated colour temperature, did not lead to different discomfort glare perceptions.12 This last observation implies that the spectral power distribution does not directly influence discomfort glare perception, but the correlated colour temperature does.13

LIGHT EXPOSURE MAY LEAD TO LOSS OF VISUAL SENSITIVITY The changes in ocular media transmission with advancing age are at least partly due to exposure to light itself. Evidence for this view comes from both epidemiological and experimental studies. The former show that as exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UVR) increases, there is a correlated increase in the incidence of senile cataract. One possible

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benefit of increased lenticular density with advancing age may be to protect the retina from potentially harmful radiation. Exposure to UVR at high levels may damage the retina directly and at low levels may have cumulative photochemical effects, leading to disease and/or ageing. Different studies found that in sufficient intensity any wavelength of light may be damaging to the retina. However, the threshold for damage by UVR was significantly lower than for visible or infrared wavelengths. Within the visible spectrum, short wavelengths have lower thresholds for damage than medium or long wavelengths. Studies have also shown that the short-wavelength-sensitivity (SWS) cones in the retina are less likely to recover from light damage associated with extensive exposure to visible light compared to medium-wavelength-sensitivity (MWS) and low-wavelengthsensitivity (LWS) cones. Therefore, it can be said that UVR would be particularly hazardous, and the short-wave cones would be most susceptible to any harmful effects on ageing eyes. The sensitivity of all three types of cones progressively declines with age. Other studies also have emphasised that the changes may be greatest for the SWS cones. Both groups of studies found that about 30 to 40% of the normal agecorrelated change in short-wave cone sensitivity is due to the age-related increase in lens absorption, but the remainder is

due to changes in the receptors and/or postreceptoral neural processes. (It is not clear whether any of the neural loss in this sample is due to UVR exposure.) Generally, people who regularly wear sunglasses typically have SWS cones with high sensitivity for their age and individuals who work in outdoor occupations and who do not wear sunglasses are often found to have lower short-wave cone sensitivity than others of the same age.

These studies have focused on the effects of different environmental factors, such as access and walking facilities, traffic and crime, familiarity and social contacts, weather and so on. The studies have focused mainly on the daytime environment and the lighting level has been mentioned only as a factor in hazard detection and fear of crime. More recent evidence suggests that the after-dark effect involves more than just changes in illumination level.

Falls or fear of falling?

OUTDOOR LIGHTING AND THE WALKING HABITS OF OLDER PEDESTRIANS Lighting is an environmental factor that encourages pedestrians to travel at night, due to its impact on their perception of safety, security and reassurance. The presence of lighting in streets has been highly ranked and weighted in the environmental determinants for walking. Barriers to access and walking in an outdoor environment for older people have been studied.

According to a World Health Organisation global report, falls are a major threat to the health and wellbeing of older people. Approximately half of falls among adults aged 65 and over occur in outdoor environments. Frail physical health and environmental shortcoming, as well as vision problems, are associated with falls by older adults. Only 20% of falls by older adults take place at night. Older people’s anxiety of falling in outdoor spaces is much higher at night and can prevent them from getting outdoors, and this largely explains the lower number of

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