Are citizens interested in their lit cities? A series of urban lighting impressions

Urban lighting is nowadays a widespread issue, above all because of the general period of global economic crisis and subsequent required energetic savings. Many governments are officially and unofficially asking for decreasing the quantity of urban lighting or completely turning it off due to public costs reduction. If only energy and costs issues are taken into account in urban lighting decisions, the lighting experience of the city risks detrimental effects on its conviviality, sociability and relational trust of the citizens. A different approach could be based on the design of the pattern of lighting based on people activities, evaluation and experience of the night-time environment. To achieve these results, lighting design has to reflect on the social landscape of the city in order to understand the experience and affective components of perception by its inhabitants: the evaluative and emotional response of people toward the luminous urban environment. Our hypothesis is that people are able to establish a strong relationship with their nocturnal city and are also interested in urban lighting. How to access the citizens lighting atmospheric perception? Are new technological media based on the web 2.0 useful for this participation and engaging process? This paper aims to investigate and make visible this perceptive layer of the lit city with an experiment based on citizens participation to access the lit Atmosphere of the Urban Nighttime of the city of Milan. The experiment was structured in three main phases: firstly an on-site observation, investigation and collection of urban places was conducted in order to detect where people prefer to go, to stay and to congregate during the Nighttime of Milan. The second phase was an open survey based on the web: people were allowed to navigate virtually the city through its nocturnal images, answering a series of questions about the perception of the atmosphere of the luminous environment. The final phase was the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative information about Lighting Impressions of the city. SEETY was useful to define qualitative insights for the perceived atmosphere of Milan’s spaces where people want to be in, congregate and remember. It could be implemented for a urban lighting masterplan based on a social approach.