Standardised difference: Challenging uniform lighting through standards and regulation

Abstract

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.

The LED Paradox: How Light Pollution Challenges Experts to Reconsider Sustainable Lighting

“…Unquestioned industry standards that are designed to make products and lighting systems compatible with global production and usage [45] might not lead to the most sustainable project-and situation-specific LED applications. Instead, light specifiers, planners and users require professional skills and knowledge of both LED technology and application contexts, before they are capable of interpreting technical standards in a way that meets and mediates their specific needs [21,46].…”

“…Such sustainable design choices become more likely when builders and investors are willing to commission and pay lighting professionals in the first place. They should know how to avoid bad product choices, bad designs, glare and overlighting and be able to interpret standards [46]. As our interview partners pointed out, binding regulations can offer hard incentives to solicit such professional expertise in lighting projects [18] (pp.…”

City Light or Star Bright: A Review of Urban Light Pollution, Impacts, and Planning Implications

“…Thus, designer adherence is a far-from-straightforward matter given already contested definitions and meanings. For example, in a discussion of a mixed-use project in East London, Ebbensgaard (2019) argues that design professionals can play a more prominent role to deliver socially and environmentally just forms of urban illumination and inform related decision-making processes. In the prevailing context of "color blight," LP, and partial enforcement, who will educate the planners?-this is a question some lighting professionals thus pose in turn (Gardner 2006).…”

Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change

“…In marking wealth and power, such topographies have inscribed massive distinctions between different realms of class and race, as in 19th-century American cities (Baldwin, 2004). In contemporary times, while a selective aesthetic ordering persists in the glaring illumination of high-rise corporate buildings and iconic structures, the nocturnal design of upmarket residential buildings is increasingly embracing darkness and softer, integrated, and indirect illumination (Ebbensgaard, 2019b). Such crepuscular designs contrast with the city's "rougher" quarters, with the harsh floodlighting and poorer quality lighting of lowlier housing estates (Sloane, 2016).…”

“…At night, a plethora of competing light sources reveal how successive waves of urban change and infrastructural upgrades have been introduced (Cubitt, 2013;Jakle, 2001;Otter, 2008). Recently, geographers have warned of the potentially homogenising and sensorially sterilising effects of contemporary lighting practices (Edensor & Millington, 2018) and shown how such effects can be ameliorated throughout the design process (Ebbensgaard, 2019b). Scholars have also discussed moral and aesthetic landscapes of darkness and illumination (Dunnett, 2015;Edensor, 2012;Edensor & Millington, 2009) and explored how residents make sense of changes in lighting, as with the widespread introduction of LEDs (Ebbensgaard, 2019a;Pink & Sumartojo, 2017).…”