Re-thinking public spaces at night through the plurality of nocturnal experience: a case study of Liberdade Square, Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses public spaces at night, analysing how urban lighting and its gradations of light and darkness affect experience. Urban lighting has been questioned in relation to sustainable and perceptual aspects of the night. Drawing on a methodology that explores the singularities of the nocturnal experience, this paper traces relationships between the practices of subjects and aspects of lighting identified in the Liberdade Square in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The findings suggest perspectives for designing public spaces at night, regarding the plurality of the experience, revealing deviations from the usual practices in Brazil regarding the lights of the city.

KEYWORDS:

• nocturnal experience
• public space
• rhythms
• night-time
• urban lighting
• urban design

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Graduate Program in Urbanism and our fellow researchers at the Laboratory of Urban Analysis and Digital Representation (LAURD/ PROURB) for hosting the research and providing such a rich environment for the exchange of ideas. Moreover, we would like to thank CAPES, CNPq and FAPERJ for supporting the Program and the Lab’s researchers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Major relates the urban lighting design possibilities with Kevin Lynch’s categories regarding legibility of urban settings presented in ‘The image of the city’ (1960), such as edges, paths, landmarks, nodes, and districts.

2. According to Lefebvre, ‘the analysis of rhythms provides a privileged insight into the question of everyday life’ (Lefebvre [1992] 2004, viii).

3. Based on the methodology of the Lighting Department/ Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). The V/P Lighting Theory adopts a vocabulary for description of light through the visual experience (Pettersson 2015, 50).

4. ‘Colour rendering index’ relates to the ability of a light source to reveal the colours of the object in comparison with a natural light source.

5. The answers were in Portuguese and translated by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES), [Programa de Excelência Acadêmica – PROEX], from 2016 to 2018.