BED-TIME READING

The ILP has linked up with the International Nighttime Design Initiative to launch a new resource for ILP members, the ‘Write, Light, Night’ booklist designed to raise awareness of books to help lighting professionals think about and reflect on night-time design. A launch event also delved into our changing perceptions of night, shade and dark

By Nic Paton

Urban nightscapes

Regular readers of Lighting Journal will be well aware that the pandemic and lockdowns of the past year have prompted an intense discussion among lighting designers about our urban nightscape and the role of light and lighting within any future postCovid night economy.

It is a conversation that led last summer to the ILP linking up with the International Nighttime Design Initiative (NTD) to run a high-level panel discussion around how lighting might be able to help the night economy recover post pandemic (‘Remaking the night?’, July/August 2020, vol 85, no 7). It fed into a panel debate led by Mark Major of Speirs Major around how the experience of the pandemic might even create an opportunity to return darkness to at least some of our urban fabric (‘Dark designs’, September 2020, vol 85, no 6).

These questions, of course, don’t have any easy or even short-term answers. But our perceptions of the night, how they can be coloured, affected and even directed by light, and the role that light and lighting can play in shaping the modern urban nightscape were at the heart of a discussion in February to launch a further joint venture between the ILP and the NTD, the first formal collaboration between the two organisations.

LIBRARY OF NIGHT

Entitled ‘Writing, Lighting and Night – an ever-expanding booklist’, the event marked the launch of a public, co-hosted and curated virtual resource, ‘The Write, Light, Night’ booklist. The project has been founded to raise awareness of high-quality books that cover night-time design (including but not limited to lighting) and how these disciplines can have a positive effect on the planet and society.

The initiative is aiming to encourage lighting professionals to recommend books that have resonated with them, write reviews and browse the booklist to enhance their own learning. The project is

Urban nightscapes

being run through an online platform called The Library Thing, and more details of how to register and get involved are in the panel at the end of this article.

The event was opened by Leni Schwendinger, creative director and leader at the NTD, and Graham Festenstein, the ILP’s Vice President – Architectural and owner of Graham Festenstein Lighting Design.

‘We’ve been dreaming about this booklist, or a library, or a bibliography – we didn’t really know what it was – for a good number of years,’ said Leni.

‘This booklist is particularly interesting because it expands beyond lighting and looks at the context of the environment, urban design and, importantly, the inspirations that designers draw upon when they are working in these environments. So, this is particularly relevant to the Institution and for our members,’ added Graham.

At the launch event a virtual audience of ILP and NTD members as well as other lighting professionals listened to a discussion chaired by ‘librarian’ Nick Dunn, architect and designer, professor of urban design and executive director of ‘ImaginationLancaster’ at Lancaster University.

FOUR ‘BOOK WORMS’

Nick invited four ‘book worms’ – Cristina Gil Venegas, Mark Ridler, Alex DeWitt and Beata Denton – to talk about a book that had inspired them and their practice, and why.

First up was Colombian lighting designer Cristina Gil Venegas, founder of ‘The Nighttime Traveller’, a research project examining ways in which women interact with the urban environment after dark. For her book she chose, In Praise of Shadows, by Japanese author and novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

‘Tanizaki introduces us to a journey through Japanese culture; talking about housing, culture, people, the appearance of places and things, and adding to it a lot of layers and shadows. He talks about how to discover things and places,’ she explained.

‘A sentence I really love about this book says, “if light is the scariest then light is the scarcest”. We immerse ourselves in the darkness and discover its own particular beauty,’ she said, adding that, in her view, the key to discovering the essence of our cities at night was to realise that we don’t need to overlight them.

Mark Ridler, head of lighting at BDP, chose Stage Lighting, by Richard Pilbrow. While this was at one level a ‘how to’ guide to theatre and stage lighting, it was much more than that, he explained.

‘It helped me enormously to get up the learning curve and discover some of the things that lighting was all about. It was revelatory for me because it set out the physical nature of how lighting interacts with the human form in its physical context. But it also caught its emotional power and the way in which changing time impacts perception and feeling. Whilst it’s a how to, it starts with a very non-scientific – no calculations – exploration of light,’ Mark said, adding: ‘It was, “wow, maybe I could do this as a career?”.’

The book helped him to recognise and understand that, while lighting is of course a physical thing, the way we perceive it is fundamentally physiological and psychological. ‘I still refer to this [the book] now; I come back to it periodically,’ Mark said. ‘I think one of the things that I love about it is that it is still relevant to the current generation. One of my daughter’s friends has just left the same university I went to and is discovering theatre lighting and I know he has a copy, the third edition, and it has still got relevance. I thoroughly recommend it.’

The next ‘book worm’ was Alex DeWitt, a New York-based urban place maker, planner and photographer. He chose two texts: Planning the Night-time City by

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The virtual launch event for the Write, Light, Night booklist initiative

Marion Roberts and Adam Eldridge and Cities Alive: Rethinking the Shades of Night, by Arup and Leni Schwendinger.

‘Both of these books, together, bring I think an important perspective in lighting and planning, which is how lighting can influence the public realm and have a positive impact on how we view, appreciate and participate in the night,’ Alex explained, emphasising the need for a more inclusive urban realm at night.

‘The books are important to me because they changed my career path. I chose to focus on night-time planning after reading Marion Roberts’ book because it is important, and it is something planners don’t think about. Most of the time we stop work at 5pm and we have our own lives and nobody is really thinking about the public realm after-hours,’ he added.

The final ‘book worm’ was Beata Denton, architect and lighting designer at Reflex Arkitekter in Stockholm, Sweden. She, intriguingly, chose a fiction book, Marguerite Duras’ 1953 novel The Little Horses of Tarquinia, which, as she put it, was ‘a little book packed with light’.

It is about a group of friends who are holidaying on the western coast of Italy during one intensely hot summer. ‘The main impression that stays with me is the light. It is just like a weight on you; it is almost claustrophobic; the light that they’re in all the time, they just can’t escape it,’ said Beata.

‘It is omnipresent and they are so enclosed in this light. It affects how they interact; the way they use the space; where they go, how they talk to each other. They try to seek out shade or places where they can hide away. It might be a shadow along the wall of a house. There is a tiny hotel with a terrace that has a leafy canopy. They sit down there and drink their Campari bitters. They go out on the lake or on the sea and “the clefted light was so strong that you couldn’t look at the marble rocks without it hurting”,’ she quoted from the novel.

‘I work with interiors, mainly office space, and this book makes me reflect on this massive bombardment of light. It is the default, at least here in Sweden, that you do office spaces with LED panels, 60 x 60, just a flat light that kills all life, basically,’ Beata pointed out.

This, too often, led to a similar focus on trying to escape this constant, monotonous, flat light all the time. ‘It affects how you talk to your colleagues, it affects how you do your

Urban nightscapes

work, and you try and seek out places where you can sit and have a different feeling or look inside yourself to find some inspiration. So it is very important to have a variation in light, I think.

‘It is so interesting to me how a lot of light, a little light, affects our mood and the way we feel and experience everything around us,’ she added.

FLUID, NON-UNIFORM SPACES

The event now moved to more of a discussion, with Nick Dunn taking questions from the audience as well as throwing some in himself.

Nightscapes, he highlighted, are not a uniform space; they are often gendered, racialised and come with all kinds of complications. ‘They are not a homogenous experience or a place of equality. So, how can we encourage people to think differently about the amount of light that they have and the ways in which we interact with light and dark in our lives?’ he asked.

‘I think it is through experience,’ said Mark Ridler. ‘When you are only presenting numbers, presenting on paper or in theory; when a client is very risk averse and they just want to know that they’re not going to get sued, then it falls back to numbers.

‘But light is a very visceral thing. There is always this tension between safety and risk aversion, and having somebody creative showing the dream, showing what is possible. But it is a process of showing and experience that, I think, tells that story,’ he added.

‘One of the challenges with space and lighting is that no one really understands that it is the lighting, or the lack of light, that makes them feel the way they do,’ pointed out Beata Denton. ‘We have to try and encourage people to learn, because a lot of people, they just feel good in a space but don’t know why. When you point out to them that it is the lighting or the lack of light, it is like a revelation to them. So, we need to talk about light.’

‘I think it is helpful if we can consider light as a language in itself,’ suggested Alex DeWitt. ‘The built environment – the buildings, the sidewalks, the foliage, the trees – all of it is the canvas that we write this “novel” or whatever it is on. We use this light language in the urban realm. If we can start to think of it that way, it kind of gives it more importance, and we can really see what it actually is for us, because of a lot of people take it for granted because it is very ethereal and not tangible. But it should be thought of with importance.’

Tanizaki talked about the essence of a space, that we are not just using light to make a space bright but to create an atmosphere, emphasised Cristina Gil Venegas. ‘If we recreate the emotions that we are going to feel in that place, it is easier to find an accurate light, an accurate amount for the place, rather than just to talk about the light by itself. It is about translating emotions within a physical space,’ she said.

ENGAGING WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES

Given that post pandemic there is likely to be much more of an emphasis on people using, interacting with and engaging with outdoor spaces, both during the daytime and at night, what role could lighting and lighting professionals play in articulating that balance that needs to be reached between light, night and health, questioned Nick Dunn.

‘I think it is achievable when you solve a lot of the conflicts that there are currently at night,’ said Alex DeWitt. ‘A lot of that is to do with perceptions of safety, but it also has to do with the type and breadth of activities available for people to do at night. A lot of people think night is specifically for younger people or single people or whatever it is. But the original idea of the 24-hour city was for an inclusive night that was beneficial for everyone living in urban centres.

‘Until we can solve those conflicts, the night-time economy can’t really expand much farther than it has. We have to pivot away from just strictly entertainment as well. There is an over-saturation of entertainment-only: bars and restaurants and nightclubs and so on. That colours our perception of the night a lot,’ he added.

Nick Dunn highlighted the importance of lighting, as ‘a rather closed and specialised sector’, working harder to involve, and communicate with, other sectors, especially healthcare. ‘We need to involve other sectors, particularly healthcare, if we are going to get the message across about how important the night environment is to us as the human animal. So how do we change the narrative, how do we begin to tell a different story about our relationship with light?’ he questioned.

Lighting consultant Terry John, who had made the point about the need for more collaboration to Nick in the first instance, came in at this point. ‘I think we have an amazing opportunity,’ he pointed out. ‘Strangely enough, Covid I think has given us an opportunity that we need to grasp – because people have suddenly realised just how important our emotional connection is with the world and with each other; that our lit environment is one of our basic human needs.

‘We have completely forgotten that, or we have devalued it because we flick a switch on and change the light. As lighting people, we are actually far more important than we believe we are. If we can talk to some of these other sectors it would be brilliant, because we would raise the value of lighting, or the lit environment, in people’s minds generally,’ he added.

Mark Ridler then closed the discussion with a final observation. ‘There has been a lot of conversation about night-time and public realm, but I work in the internal realm as well,’ he highlighted.

‘I think we need to be aware of disconnection from the day, too, disconnection from daylight. We turn on the fluorescent light and that provides us with enough light to see what we have to do. But it doesn’t feed us with the emotional and physiological light that we are only beginning to discover we need, but have known intuitively that we have needed for a long time. So, when you come to this library, don’t only look for books on the night, also look for the day,’ he advised.

HOW TO JOIN THE BOOKLIST

The ‘Write, Light, Night’ booklist can be accessed through The Library Thing (www.librarything.com/) which is a free cataloguing and social networking site for people who love books.

To access the booklist itself go to www.librarything.com/catalog/WriteLightNight.

All you need to do then is choose a book and click on it. You can use the list to find out about the book and the author, collections and tags, reviews, recommendations. The booklist has been grouped into three collections: ‘light’, ‘night’ and ‘context’.’

The ILP’s pre-existing booklist project ‘Light List’ has also been wrapped into the current platform, and can be found at www.

librarything.com/catalog/ The_ILP

A recording of the full launch event can be found at https://

theilp.org.uk/project/writinglighting-and-night-an-ever-ex-

panding-booklist/ along with a six-minute guide to The Library Thing.

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CITY SMART

Started in 2018, a smart city project for the City of London is now finished and aims to provide a flexible, interoperable communications infrastructure that will help to reduce pollution and energy consumption and manage traffic and transport systems more effectively

By Giles Radford

APRIL 2021 LIGHTING JOURNAL 23

Public realm lighting

Occupying just over a square mile, the City of London is the historic heart of the capital, defined by its unique architecture – a mix of old and new – and the area’s medieval street pattern, complete with narrow streets and alleyways.

The City is, as we all know, the UK’s centre of commerce and one of the largest financial hubs in the world, home to the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England. Because of this, a large proportion of the daytime population does not live within the City itself, residing outside of the ‘Square Mile’ at night. Its tourism attractions and famous landmarks compound this problem. The City has only 9,400 permanent residents, but around 450,000 people at the busiest times.

This makes accommodating and moving this number of people within the medieval footprint and urban canyons challenging. The City of London uses the term ‘conflict area’ to describe the areas that are most difficult, and uses street lighting as a solution to this problem, and to create a safe and vibrant environment.

However, with much of this ageing stock more than 30 years old, the City’s lighting was nearing the end of its useful life. Using an old Cyclo system, which basically sends a pulse down the electrical cable allowing the lights to be turned on and off, the lighting had become redundant over the years and was no longer fit for purpose. It was also no longer supported by UK Power Networks.

The City’s inventory included 9,500 streetlights, 1,300 road lights, and 1,600 ‘specials’ – more than 12,000 lights in total. There were about 45 different types of lights that needed standardising, and all were on unmetered power supplies, which required effort to rationalise when it came to billing.

During the three-year overhaul project, the old units were replaced, helping to reduce the City’s carbon footprint and, importantly, lower its maintenance costs.

Like many cities, London has to cope with rising energy costs, with the added challenge of a carbon tax introduced by the UK government. According to the City of London Corporation, it has already saved 60% on its energy costs between 2018 and 2020 since installing the new street lighting.

As well as the functional element of lighting up streets, road signs, bridges and tunnels and floodlighting, there was an aesthetic element to the project in that it needed to be sympathetic to the environment and light up the City’s iconic

Public realm lighting

landmarks, such St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as fountains, and tree and festive lighting.

LEDs and a CMS would allow the City to set the scene of its historic assets, using the tuneable settings of digital lighting that are not so easily achievable using analogue lights. Adaptive visual design was a key requirement, but having control over the lighting stock was critical.

TACKLING UNIQUE CHALLENGES

What makes London so special is what also makes it so challenging for technology projects. It became clear during the procurement process and trials that there would be some issues to overcome.

The City’s environment, for example, with its narrow lanes and tall buildings made of glass and steel, can create connectivity problems for many communications technologies, such as cellular, which struggle to reach into the narrow streets and urban canyons between skyscrapers. The street lighting therefore required a communications technology that could carry a signal where and when it is needed.

The answer was a high-performance City-wide wireless mesh network supported by Wi-SUN Field Area Networks (FAN) technology.

An open and flexible city management based on Wi-SUN technology would meet all of the requirements, while helping to future-proof the City for other smart functionality and devices.

The project was ambitious, in that we were coping with the architectural and structural challenges that the City presents. But, at the same time, it was exciting to, finally, be putting in place a network that would meet our needs for lighting management and control, for example changing lighting levels when we needed and providing fault reporting.

The great thing about the Wi-SUN FAN system is that it can support this level of control and management through a CMS. But, in truth, what really sold it to us was the fact it is an open standards-based platform. This has allowed us to introduce other smart devices and sensors, such as for traffic and environmental monitoring, asset management and waste management, across the network, all of which can provide key data to manage our assets more effectively.

Naturally, the City of London, as a local authority, tested the full capabilities of the network during the pilot phase, to ensure it provided full coverage and resilience even in the densest, narrowest parts of the City.

This very much had to be an inclusive, collaborative process, involving all the internal stakeholders, including public realm, transportation, open spaces and environmental health. Externally, too, there was extensive consultation with residents, workers and visitors, the City of London Police and Transport for London to create what we call ‘a whole sense of place to the City’.

Alongside this activity, there were also parallel programmes to consider. These included real-time reporting in line with a service-based and strategic energy review, reduction in energy consumption to deliver financial savings, and alignment to the wider Internet of Things (IoT) initiative.

Over a three-year period, the City of London partnered with Urban Control, a smart city solutions company and Wi-SUN Alliance member, Itron.

Exterior lighting specialists DW Windsor provided the new lighting stock, which included 12,000 LED luminaires supported by 10 gateways using Wi-SUN FAN’s self-forming, self-healing mesh technology. Urban Control’s software-based security offerings were used to comply with the City’s stringent requirements.

THE ‘GLUE’ OF WIRELESS MESH NETWORKING

It’s worth taking a moment to look at wireless mesh in more detail because, for me, wireless mesh is fast becoming the ‘glue’ that holds smart cities together, thanks to its excellent network coverage, scalability, enterprise-grade security and reliable communications.

Public realm lighting

The nature of the mesh network topology provides an advantage when deploying LED streetlights using wireless connectivity. It delivers more control and management through to the local authority office via a border router, which takes the wireless mesh and runs it across either cellular or fibre, or most convenient backhaul connection.

Once up and running, local authorities can therefore deploy other sensors on to the network, such as traffic and parking signals, which connect into the communications fabric.

They can continue to add sensors for applications, such as environmental and air-quality monitoring and waste management, which join as leaf nodes (so low-powered battery devices). The self-forming, self-healing nature of the network means that, if there is interference or a device fails causing a communication problem on one route, traffic is automatically re-routed through the mesh.

CONCLUSIONS – JUST THE BEGINNING

While the City of London street lighting initiative is now finished, it is important to emphasise that this project is only part of the City’s journey to become a truly smart city; we have plans to deliver additional applications and services in the future.

We are seeing more smart city initiatives being rolled out around the world to help meet environmental targets, reduce energy costs and improve health and wellbeing, as well as cope with increased urbanisation.

The idea, therefore, of a smart city is evolving. But, in simple terms, ‘smart’ increasingly means creating a communications network where connected devices and applications can provide not just enhanced functionality but, actually, tangibly help to improve the lives of citizens, whether that’s through less pollution, greater safety or better transport systems.

Converting legacy streetlights, many of which have been in place for decades, into a smart lighting network has become an important part of this digital transformation process, and in many cases, the ‘entry point’ for city developers and local authorities when designing and planning a smart city.

In fact, analyst firm IoT Analytics estimates that the connected streetlights market will surpass US$3.6bn by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 21% from 2018, driven by more deployments, more interconnectivity and more collaboration between utilities and other service providers, city developers, local authorities and governments [1].

The message then for lighting professionals, clearly, is not just ‘watch this space’ but ‘watch this space grow’.

FIND OUT MORE

For ILP members interested in finding out more about this project, Giles Radford has presented a video on it, which can be found on YouTube, at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3nQDSqx3S3w

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: City of London Corporation Technology providers: Wi-SUN Alliance, Itron, and Urban Control Lighting: DW Windsor

Giles Radford is highways manager for the City of London