Atlas of Urban Lighting Experience 2.0- Concorso internazionale "VOX JUVENTA 2012 - Light Symposium in Wismar, Germany" - progetto vincitore

Life and identity of the cities all over the world are shaped by light in different ways. As a consequence cities are lived and experienced by people in different ways because the nocturnal lit cityscape affect people’s behaviours, feelings, thoughts, attitudes. Today, the night in the public realm of the city, has been deeply contaminated by functional and uniform lighting systems transforming the cities in highly bright environment for safety reasons but disabling the darkness perception. The superimposed light poles, while striving to obtain energy-efficient lighting, afflict people, animals and plants with light pollution. The general increase of light, actually, has not provided better places to live in. Conversely, light has a cognitive, aesthetic and symbolic role and citizens ask for more various lighting systems in order to increase the experience of the public urban space. If we just observe the urban lit environment, we understand that this lighting richness is already present in several micro examples that are more appreciated by people (examples: coloured reflections of lights, flicking billboards and old neon signs, illumination of trees). RESEARCH QUESTION The background statement is that urban lighting is a positive tool for people engagement, relational trust and people-city relationship restoration but there are few applied studies to support this understanding. This research claims at investigating what kind of lighting performances do meet people's preference and interest and what kind of feelings these elicit. What is the relationship between the perceived attributes of lighting and emotional appraisals, which variables of lighting are salient to people for liking or disliking a lit urban scene. METHOD The research is based on a multiple-method survey mediated with the web: it is an ongoing virtual, indirect survey based on the observation of lighting stimuli in order to grasp the diverse experience of urban lighting environments from around the world. It is mainly a netnography followed by a survey using lighting pictures (stimuli) in order to understand meaningful perceptions and imagery of the users about the lit cities. Lighting stimuli were derived from the most used web photo sharing databases (such as Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa) and were chosen into in thematic groups (such as Night Images Group, Urban Night Shots, etc) and selected by setting several features. The most clicked, viewed cited and commented were chosen in order to understand the preference. Added comments provided information about the individual experience and perception of lit cities. The general aim was to review the present state of urban environmental lighting, exploring what lit scenes people are selecting to record and, once published, what king of lighting features are the most viewed and commented. RESULTS Urban lighting analysis should be focused more on qualitative aspects in order to satisfy the perception of the city at night: this research explore what lighting features in actual use are preferred by people instead of relying on theories and normative. The results are represented with visual tools in a world map that show trends of similar attitude, perceptions and preference about lighting features. The achievements can be transferred into lighting design guidelines in order to support the design process for the creation of better lit cities. The research show that, urban lighting has a growing potential of changing the human experience of the urban nightscape by reflecting more on the relationship between people-light-city.