Rethinking urban lighting: geographies of artificial lighting in everyday life

PhDIn this thesis I study the role of artificial lighting in the everyday urban life of older residents living in the London Borough of Newham. Newham’s light infrastructure is currently undergoing change as the borough’s entire 19,000 street lamps are being re-placed with Light Emitting Diodes and as a range of regeneration projects provide public spaces designed with new lighting. By increasing visibility and encouraging everyday activity into the evening, the Council claims that the changes in public light-ing will provide ‘eyes on the streets’ and encourage ‘eyes from the windows’ of build-ings, contributing to increasing ‘natural surveillance’. The Council’s avowal of every-day practices in streets and in homes, has made me question how lighting affects the way older residents move through streets and carry out domestic practices as dark-ness falls. The study explores how light planning, lighting design and everyday, rou-tine practices in the public realm and inside homes co-produce the urban, lit environ-ment. Two major contributions of the thesis lie in the (post)phenomenological ap-proach I develop to study everyday experiences of urban lighting, and the methodo-logical framework I employ to research such practices, which combines mobile and visual methods. I have conducted 11 in-depth interviews with nine different planners and designers, 12 walk-along interviews with 22 residents between 58 and 79 years old, and a collaborative photography project with 14 residents between 68 and 96 years old. As I show how older residents experiences different lighting technologies, layers of light, and different lit spaces in their neighbourhoods, I discuss how urban lighting makes them see, feel and carry out routine practices in particular ways. Based on my findings, I argue that urban lighting shapes what, and how, people see, but how people see depends on how they negotiate changes in lighting. In a range of examples where residents mould the urban, lit environment or respond to lighting in different ways, I show how they play and active part in co-producing ways of seeing. I argue it is crucial that light planners and lighting designers recognise such co-constitutive role of everyday practices in order to ensure better lighting for our future cities

Light violence at the threshold of acceptability

This paper shows how residential high-rise developments in London deteriorate the living conditions for existing residents and set a legal precedent for distributing harm unevenly across the population. The paper unpacks the contentious decision-making process in one of several local planning applications in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that ended in a spur of high-profile public planning inquiries between 2017 and 2019. The Enterprise House inquiry shows how, among other things, a loss of daylight, sunlight and outlook, and an increased sense of enclosure, affect already marginalised residents in neighbouring buildings disproportionately, elevating light to a legal category for assessing harm and addressing social injustice in the vertical city. The paper adopts a forensic approach to interrogate four instances during the public inquiry, in which numerical evidence of material harm resulting from a loss in daylight, sunlight and outlook was made to appear and disappear. The translation of scientific evidence into legal evidence is performed through the act of claiming ‘truthful’ representations of ‘real life experiences’ of light in digital visualisations. By revealing how material harm resulting from vertical development is normalised and thus naturalised in the planning inquiry, the paper demonstrates how ‘light’ violence is exercised in vertical development

Introduction: Verticality, radicalism, resistance

In recent decades urban scholarship has witnessed a ‘vertical’ or ‘volumetric’ turn that has advanced understandings of the multi-modal power asymmetries cutting through and organising urban space. Yet, this volumetric scholarship often remains locked into binary critiques – of success/failure, inclusion/exclusion, luxury/abjection, dispossession/accumulation, arborescent/rhizomatic, horizontal/vertical. This special issue tinkers with the limitations of these (unwittingly) binary urban geometries and volumetrologies – material as well as metaphorical ones. By building the etymological opposition of ‘the vertical’ with ‘the radical’ into the title of the volume (via the Latin root radix, meaning ‘root’), we seek to make the radical itself work with geometric and morphological associations. The papers in this special issue proffer diverse ethnographic, geographic and conceptual material for considering and theorising urban verticality in concert with rather than in opposition to its incumbent horizontalisms, diagonals, curls, zigzags and scattered planes. As we completed work on the special issue, the horrors of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory played out before our eyes. Accordingly, we make use of the introduction to reflect upon the insight that the war in Ukraine brings to bear on the intersection between domains of the urban, the vertical and the radical in the fraught, tense, vicious, fragile – but resistant – urban worlds of today. In doing so, we seek not only to render more clearly visible the violent effects of power verticals on lives, worlds and cities, but also to find seeds of hope in emergent, insurgent forms of (vertical as well as horizontal, and neither vertical nor horizontal) resistance

The 'living of time': entangled temporalities of home and the city

This paper explores the entanglements between urban and domestic temporalities in order to understand what it means to live in the city. Inspired by the film Estate: a reverie (Zimmerman, 2015a), and drawing on a series of home-city biographies, this paper explores the ‘living of time’ through the memories, experiences, and narratives of residents living on different housing estates near Kingsland Road in Hackney, East London. We address two key questions: how are residents' experiences of urban living shaped by multi-layered and entangled temporalities of home and the city? What can an understanding of the urban and domestic 'living of time’ reveal about temporality, home and the city? We explore the ways in which entangled and multi-scalar ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ (Clifford, 1997) chart migration, housing and family histories for urban residents which, in turn, shape and help to articulate narratives of domestic and urban change in terms of stability and instability. We then turn to the overlapping and/or contested temporalities of urban and domestic lives, whereby residents’ home lives – and their wider ideas about the estate, street, neighbourhood or city as home – are affected by processes of urban change in complex and often contradictory ways. Finally, we investigate the ways in which home-city temporalities have shaped, and are shaped by, people’s hopes and fears for their future homes. Urban dwelling is shaped by multiple and multi-layered temporalities, intertwining the past, present and future, generations and life courses, and housing, family and migration histories. The urban and domestic ‘living of time’ reveals how residents adapt to, negotiate and at times resist processes of change and continuity at home and in the city

Standardised difference: Challenging uniform lighting through standards and regulation

Artificial lighting has received increased attention from urban scholars and geographers in recent years. It is celebrated for its experimental aesthetics and experiential qualities and critiqued for its adverse effects on biological life and the environment. Yet scholars and practitioners unite in their disapproval of uniform and homogenous lighting that follows from standardised lighting technologies and design principles. Absent from debates in urban scholarship and geography, however, is any serious consideration of how lighting designers respond to such standardised measures and regulations. In this article, I address this lack of academic attention by exploring how designers overturn the restrictive challenges posed by the standards and regulations of the design and planning process. Drawing on interviews with designers involved in the lighting design of a mixed-use redevelopment project in Canning Town, East London, I demonstrate how the interpretation and translation of lighting standards and regulations resist the tendency to predetermine design aesthetics and functions. By drawing attention away from the technical specifications and numerical values that are prescribed in standards and regulations, and towards lighting’s experiential and performative effects, the article argues that lighting designers can play an important role in challenging how standards and regulations are measured, defined and maintained. Calling on urban scholars to play a more prominent role in foregrounding this process of translation, I suggest that standards and regulations can provide frameworks within which luminous differentiation and preservation of darkness can be achieved, playing a potentially crucial role in ensuring a socially and environmentally sustainable transition to energy efficient lighting

Planetary Portals:“Dreaming in Continents” from East London to the Cape in the Colonial Praxis of Emergence and Extraction

The European imagination shaped a vision of other continents as resource, ripe for ongoing extraction – creating processes that continue today. Based on original research in the Rhodes archive, this collaborative work examines the emergence of “planetary portals”, and considers how they might be decolonised