5 days ago
Brighter isn't always better: How lighting plays a crucial role in making cities feel safe
In New Zealand and Australia, public spaces at night are often lit by lots of bright overhead lights illuminating the ground. Lighting designer Tim Hunt tells Shanti Mathias why this isn't always ideal.
As a lighting designer, Tim Hunt has gone on dozens of night walks with clients across New Zealand, Australia and Indonesia. Every time, he says, he learns something new. 'I was walking with 30 women through an alleyway – it looked dingy and a bit suspect,' he says. He asked them what could improve the space, and they suggested lighting the doorways, so it was easier to tell what kind of space was around them. 'As a lighting designer, I couldn't have thought of that,' he says now. What's more, lighting doorways isn't called for in the guidelines consulted by city councils and corporate developers.
Hunt, a New Zealander based in Australia, works for the design agency Arup. The group has just undertaken a research project looking at how lighting creates the perception of safety – or not – for women and girls at night. What they've learned, Hunt says, is that the accepted wisdom isn't always true.
'City centres use pole lights and flood lights – the logic is that brighter is always better,' he says. But that doesn't always hold true. Using data from Free to Be, an app where women can record their experiences in cities, the Arup designers and a team from Monash University found that lighting was a frequent feature in incidences of women feeling unsafe. But not just any lighting: light that was too bright or too harsh felt unsafe, creating stark shadows and areas that need to be avoided.
Think of it like this: would you rather walk through a courtyard that has some patches of bright light, and some of strong shadows? Or a space where multiple, dimmer lights overlap? 'Going from bright to dark, bright to dark – that's a poor experience,' says Hunt. Strong overhead lighting means that your eyes can't adjust to seeing what is in the shadows.
Lighting plans measure lux levels, which quantify brightness. But those measurements are of what hits the ground, not what is around a place. 'Tarmac is dark, and it's hard to make it feel bright,' Hunt says. 'It's light in the distance that can reveal spaces so that people feel safe, but that's not what we're asked to do as an industry.' When walking at night, most people prefer to be aware of their surroundings, not just seeing the path ahead of them. The official New Zealand and Australian lighting standards for public spaces have minimum lux levels that cities have to adhere to, but not maximums.
The generally accepted wisdom is that more lighting can prevent crime – but that's really hard to quantify, especially because lighting isn't separate from other environmental factors. That's why they choose to focus on perception of safety, Hunt says, because it's easier to examine how different lighting set-ups in the same place make people feel more at ease. Many times when someone feels unsafe at night – having someone behind them who may or may not be following them, not being able to see the faces of people at a train station entrance – no particular crime has occurred, and there's unlikely to be an official record.
Fear of harm at night, even if it's relatively unlikely, affects many more people than harm actually does. 'Where lighting is can affect your decision to use public transport or not, where you go at night, and how you get there,' Hunt says. Recent research from the Helen Clark Foundation shows that only 45% of women feel safe walking alone at night in New Zealand, compared to 71% of men. And while the stereotype of activity at night is people going out to events or restaurants, in winter it can get dark by 5pm; people have to navigate dark streets on the way home from work, or the way to work if they do shifts.
When done well, lighting can make a difference. Work under way in the Auckland suburb of Avondale to improve lighting, install CCTV and revitalise the main street with a community centre and library has been celebrated as making it a more pleasant place to be. Upgrades to Wellington's waterfront lighting last year used lights on buildings as well as poles to make it easier for walkers, cyclists and scooter-users to traverse the area at night.
Lighting has to work with human biology – our crucial sense of sight and ability to open pupils wider to see in the dark – and psychology. Hunt has had people tell him, for instance, that they feel safe when they're in a place that seems 'loved'. 'I've gone on night walks and asked people to shine their torches on the wall, then at the ground,' he says. Almost everyone prefers the ambient lighting bouncing off a lighter wall to light directed at the dark floor. 'Then I say, 'that won't meet the lighting standards'.'
There are other reasons to rethink lighting standards. Artificial light can have an effect on plants and animals. Seabirds, bats and wētā can get confused, like the tītī in Kaikōura who crash into the road, mistaking it for the sea. As well as the way that ecosystems are affected, using too much light in the wrong places also represents wasted energy. The blurry light pollution you experience in cities, a haze that conceals the stars, is all made of light bouncing into the sky, energy going where it doesn't need to at all.
Changing lighting is expensive. Hunt points out that the design of street lamps – light on a stick – was developed when streets were lit by costly gas lamps, which had to be individually ignited each night. Modern lighting doesn't have to mean big bulbs: it can be smaller, fitted into other infrastructure like a park bench or a bus stop. Over the past decade, many councils in New Zealand have changed sodium light bulbs for more efficient, and sometimes shielded, LEDs, which can be dimmed or change colour temperature. The results can be striking, even if the design continues to use overhead streetlights.
People feeling safe at night is ultimately good for the economy, meaning more people might engage with local businesses at night, attend events or use public transport – services cities are also investing in. To Hunt, that's all the more reason for cities and developers to think about how to make everyone feel safe at night. 'Darkness [averages] 12 hours of the day, half the year – yet lighting is still treated like an afterthought.'
