Lighting and nightscapes - an interdisciplinary approach

By Karl Jones

Karl Jones is a chartered landscape architect and chartered environmentalist, and has over 25 years’ experience in environmental design, assessment, management and planning. Karl is Managing Director of Crestwood Environmental, and has served on the Technical Committee of the Landscape Institute and at the Registration Authority for the Society for the Environment.

Making the case for fully-informed lighting and landscape design.

The pleasure of seeing a starlit sky has been likened to that gained from seeing the scenic beauty of landscapes; from those that we actively travel to for enjoyment and to those environments that we seek to protect for this very reason.

As landscape and environmental professionals, we take pride in our work to protect and enhance these. We understand the value and contribution the environment makes to the quality of everyone’s lives, through good landscape planning, assessment, design, implementation and management.

The UK has some of the largest areas of dark sky in Europe. The International Dark Sky Association (darksky.org) currently lists eighteen Dark Sky Reserves in the world, and seven (or over 38%) of those are in the UK. In the same way that people seek naturally scenic places for recreational purposes, astrotourism (travelling to destinations that have dark skies and associated natural scenery, visiting observatories, etc.) has taken off, so to speak, around the world. Yet this valuable environmental asset has not, to date, received adequate recognition in our planning policies and associated work, although this may be about to change.

At the end of 2020, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Dark Skies published its Ten Dark Sky Policies for the Government to reference when it updates the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2021, potentially giving nightscapes greater prominence in strategic planning and planning decision-making than ever before.

In the UK, as much as 16 hours of the day can be “night-time”, yet, even in an increasingly 24-hour economy, landscape professionals usually only focus on the daytime – the night-time is considered to be the preserve of lighting professionals alone. Whether it be at a strategic planning level, through contribution to an evidence base in relation to (daytime and night-time) landscape character assessments, or through Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (LVIA) and design input into development proposals containing lighting, landscape professionals should recognise the important role they have in relation to nightscapes.

London City Lights

© Shutterstock

Guidance on undertaking environmental assessments generally requires specialist professionals to assess effects in relation to their environmental aspect. A lighting professional would not be expected to undertake a LVIA on night-time landscape character any more than a landscape professional would be expected to produce a lighting impact assessment. So interdisciplinary working is essential when considering the environmental effects of Artificial Lighting at Night (ALAN). Only through effective communication, at all stages in a project’s life, can the various professionals then understand the considerations to be taken into account, their relative importance and the design solutions available. This then allows multi-purpose, fully informed design and land-use planning options to be devised.

Of course, lighting can spectacularly transform a place, literally overnight, becoming a defining key characteristic of a locality, as found in vibrant cityscapes, or it can highlight key townscape features. This must be done in a co-ordinated and hierarchical way to legibly tell the story of the site. Conversely, a dark landscape undisturbed by artificial light, with starlit skies in a tranquil setting, may have inspired poets, songwriters and artists in relation to a place providing a valued cultural aspect to a locality’s landscape character, and may also contribute to perceptions of tranquillity and ‘wildness’. The majority of populated areas have a night-time character that lies somewhere between the darkest of skies and inner-city locations – a wide gamut, as demonstrated by the nine-level numeric Bortle Scale which grades the ‘darkness’ of locations’ night skies based on the observability of different celestial objects.

As demand for new housing and development increases, there will inevitably be increased numbers of artificial sources of light (internal and external, including vehicles) in the changing landscape, and the pressures on our night-time environments, on areas of dark green infrastructure and on dark skies will increase in parallel. Dark skies and landscapes can be adversely affected by sources of light tens of kilometres away (whether through visibility of light sources or ‘sky glow’ light pollution effects), bringing cross-boundary effects and decisionmaking into consideration also.

There is a fundamental connection between the stars and ourselves: when we look up at the night sky, we look deep back in time to where our existence began. This connectivity also provides a link to our previous family generations who all experienced this same view, when light pollution was largely absent, in the context of an otherwise very different world. Starlit skies are natural and cultural assets worthy of preservation where they are, and restoration where they are not (as with other forms of pollution) and, through interdisciplinary working, we can achieve this.

The joint overall aim should be to ensure that the quantity, quality, location, visibility and timing of light, has been sufficiently considered and optimised to minimise adverse effects on nightscapes and receptors at, and distant to, that location, and to maximise the positive ‘place-making’ opportunities presented through fullyinformed lighting and landscape design.