Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the affective power of light, darkness, and illumination and their role in exposing and obscuring processes of rapid urban change. Little academic attention has focused on how lighting informs multiple, overlapping, and intersecting urban temporalities and mediates our experience of an ever-changing city. This paper foregrounds a walk through the illuminated city at night as an epistemic opportunity to develop an embodied account of material and temporal change in ways that disrupt the aesthetic organisation of the sensible world at night. By detailing the discontinuous experience of walking through differently lit spaces, the paper develops novel ways of conceptualising the experience of urban change that unsettle common understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and the city. The paper draws on a single night's walk from Canning Town to Canary Wharf in east Londonan area that has recently undergone rapid change, including the erection of enclaves of high-rise development. By accentuating the shared experiences of walking with light, we reveal the affective capacities of light and dark to conceal and expose wider material, embodied, and temporal urban changes but also how we might challenge the organisation of the nocturnal field of the sensible.

Geographies of night work

“…As night studies has grown, the value of this approach is being shown over an increasing number of areas. For example, there is a growing literature on nocturnal mobilities which ties together work on darkness, fear and nightlife, and which shows some of the insights that can be created by bringing these themes together (Cook and Edensor, 2017; Ebbensgaard and Edensor, 2021; Farina et al, 2021; Duff and Moore, 2015; Smeds et al, 2020; Wilkinson and Wilkinson, 2018). Across this research, by turning attention to the nocturnality of nocturnal mobility researchers have found new insights and new phenomena that might otherwise have been overlooked.…”

Tracing the Evolution of Lighting in Architecture

“…The art of storytelling or narration starts with light at its center, where communal activities surround it, suggesting that our life, values, and needs intersect heavily with light and its capacity for us to create narration (Hough, 1932). One extreme example of this was the notorious Nazi regime at Nuremberg to use light as a propaganda tool for self-grandeur perception while twisting its meaning as "cathedrals of light" with 130 giant searchlights (Ebbensgaard & Edensor, 2021). The evolution of this storytelling with light can be found in West Sumba, Indonesia, in the form of fired-up football (Figure 1).…”

Creels and catenary wires: Creating community through winter lights displays

“…Urban community spaces are significantly different spaces at night and during the day; they assemble in different ways depending on, for example, light/dark, open/ closure of businesses, busy/quiet roads and pedestrian spaces. A key element of the night time assemblage is the visual aspectthe lighting (Laing Ebensgaard and Edensor, 2021;Shaw, 2014) because a sense of community implies to many a sense of safety created through lighting (Shaw, 2014). It is the material infrastructure that makes these lights possible (Klinenberg, 2018).…”