Moving Through the Lit World: The Emergent Experience of Urban Paths

Abstract

There is growing scholarship both on how light (and darkness) shapes our perception and experience of our surroundings and coalesces particular affective experiences. In this article, we build on this emerging field to address a fundamental but unexplored question for understanding urban experience: how is the experience of everyday movement through the city constituted in relation to automated urban lighting. We argue that the affective and sensory aspects of the “lit world” need to be accounted for, an aspect of quotidian urban experience that remains underexplored. In doing so, we discuss a mobile sensory ethnography of public urban “light routes” by drawing on the words and photographs of people moving through the city of Melbourne, Australia on their journeys home at the end of the day. Their stories about automated lighting reveal how particular affective intensities, responses to urban complexity and aesthetic experiences emerged on the move, and begin to account for the role of the “lit world” in everyday experience.

Atmospheres in Urban Light

“…In a study of the 'lit world' and automation, Sumartojo and Pink (2017) identify how illumination of various forms mixed and mingled with many other elements of their research participants' surroundings, creating feelings and impressions that were well beyond what the designer of any one of the light sources may have intended. For example, car lights through a curtained bedroom window moved along a bedroom wall, resulting in a compelling aesthetic effect that was intensified in combination with other light sources and the materialities of room walls and curtains, and creating a moody, mysterious feel (Pink & Sumartojo, 2018, p. 845).…”

“…One of the researchers wore a body-mounted GoPro camera, thus recording some of what the team saw and heard in their surroundings, as well as our conversation, gestures, movements and pace as we moved together. We walked, talked and videoed an hour-and-a-half journey into the heart of Melbourne, building on previous work on 'commented walks' (Thibaud, 2013), and on the investigation of automation on 'light routes' experienced by city commuters Sumartojo & Pink, 2017). We extended this, however, through the use of video and the specific attention to the lit world.…”

Making sense of diodes and sodium: Vision, visuality and the everyday experience of infrastructural change

“…This leads to the second point, that stresses the importance of movement to how people experience light and darkness: moving through darkened spaces is less dependent on the actual light levels and more on the relative distribution of light across different spaces (Cook & Edensor, 2014;Edensor & Lorimer, 2015). Michel de Certeau has argued that "to travel is to see, but seeing is already travelling" (de Certeau quoted in Thrift, 1996, p. 296), suggesting the need to recognize that the visual experience of the lit city always unfolds in relation to the movement through it, and therefore the movement through light (see also, Sumartojo and Pink, 2017).…”

Moving through a dappled world: the aesthetics of shade and shadow in place

“…In recent years, in addressing a rather startling lacuna, geographers have begun to consider how conditions of light and dark pervade spatial experience. A surge of explorations focus on how artificial illumination is conducive to the production of potent atmospheres and the sensory apprehension of everyday worlds (Edensor, 2012;Bille, 2019;Pink and Sumartojo, 2017). Others investigate the historical emergence of electric lighting and the contestations that continue to create 'new centres of power and new margins of exclusion' (Koslofsky, 2011, 280; also see Nye, 2015;Isenstadt, 2018;Jakle, 2001;Cubitt, 2013;Entwistle and Slater, 2019).…”