Climate change, especially hotter cities by day and night, will mean we need to revisit and reimagine how urban lighting at night works and what it is for, delegates to the LUCI Cities & Lighting Summit London 2025 heard.
Our accelerating climate crisis is going to mean lighting professionals, municipalities and urban planners are all going to have to work together to rethink, and reimagine, how cities work at night, including urban lighting at night.
That was one of the key takeaways from the LUCI Association’s three-day Cities & Lighting Summit in London in April, for which the ILP was a partner.
The event brought together lighting professionals and city leaders from around the world to consider the changing shape of cities, and urban lighting, at night, and how municipalities will need to respond.
For example, Andreina Seijas, founder and principal of consultancy and think-tank Night Tank, highlighted how we need to grasp the realities of our changing climate in the context of cities at night, including thinking about how the night – and the city at night – can work to become a climate adaptation tool.
‘As temperatures go higher, we will see that in many parts of the world – and it is already happening – people will spend more time out at night. So, it is really important to start unpacking those behaviours. What kinds of activities are changing, what kinds of habits are changing, and how should we reflect those changes in policies?’ she pointed out.
‘If you are going through a heatwave in the city and you, for example, live in a tiny apartment in Paris, your only alternative is to go out and spend some time in the park. So how can we open parks to enable people – with families – to socialise and spend time with each other, in a way that is free, accessible and safe?
‘It is important to start monitoring these changing needs, to make public spaces safe, and to restructure perhaps for these new climate patterns,’ Andreina told delegates, emphasising that this is already happening in Spain, where she already works closely with the new night commissioner of Barcelona, Carmen Zapata.
‘In Spain there are some activities that are outdoor jobs, such as street sweeping, that are banned during heatwaves for health and safety reasons. There are conversations happening right now about if we should change the time that schools start in the morning, because during heatwaves kids go to bed too late,’ Andreina said.
‘There are many actors, many people involved. The way to bring this all together is to have a long-term strategy. Which is to systematically develop a proactive and collaborative vision of night life, or life at night,’ she added.
This needed to include young people and gig economy workers, such as night-time delivery drivers, she highlighted. ‘For these people, a park bench can be their office,’ she pointed out.
‘They are sitting there waiting for the next order. They are hanging out in the street, and they need spaces – dignified spaces – where they can gather, which have good lighting, which have good services, so they can operate and have a dignified life at night.
‘I believe one of the stakeholders that we always leave out of our strategies is young people. We need to find proactive ways in which we incorporate young people’s perceptions and needs, and that we do so in creative ways because we can’t speak to them in the same way that we speak to other stakeholders,’ Andreina added.
CLOSING PLENARY SESSION
The three-day summit closed with a high-level panel discussion led by city leaders from across the globe.
The session, on ‘lighting the future, cities at the crossroads of inclusion, sustainability and resilience’, brought together Alison Gowman, alderman in the City of London Corporation, Ari Alatossava, mayor of Oulu in Finland, LUCI president Fatiha El Moudni, mayor of Rabat in Morocco, Bruno Paternot, vice president of the Montpellier Mediterranean Metropolis in France, and LUCI Vice President, and Leonardo Williams, mayor of Durham in North Carolina. It was moderated by Patricia Brown, director at Central.
‘I am here in London because light matters,’ said Fatiha El Moudni. ‘Not only as a tool or infrastructure or technology, but in terms of unity, identity, safety and transformation.
It is not only about aesthetics, it is much more than that; it is about social cohesion, it is about safety after dark, and it is about sustainability and of course resilience.’
Ari Alatossava emphasised how, in the winter, his city, which is near the Arctic circle, gets only about three-and-a-half hours of daylight. ‘So there are a lot of opportunities for lighting. But when you say you are interested in lighting, you have to recognise that darkness also matters.
‘You also have to worry about what will happen to the night if everything is lit 24-hours a day. Do we risk losing the night-time?’ he cautioned.
Leonardo Williams, while emphasising first that he was the mayor of Durham in North Carolina not the Durham ‘up the road’, also highlighted how municipalities are increasingly recognising that lighting at night needs to be about more than just utility, but amenity too.
‘There is the emotion of lighting. Lighting has a way of driving how we feel or where we’re interested in going. We’re looking at that as part of an overall living experience,’ he said.
In the context of discussion about dark skies, it was also important to recognise that, within city centres especially, you will always likely need a certain level of artificial light at night. ‘We don’t pretend that [dark skies] is going to be the case in the heart of the city; I think you have to be intentional about that,’ he said.
Alison Gowman emphasised the importance of balancing light at night with preserving ecology, biodiversity, flora and fauna, and green urban spaces, highlighting the City of London’s lighting masterplan, which had been discussed the day before.
‘I am keen to explore how we can have a strategic attitude towards lighting, make it entirely holistic in terms of how it impacts on all of our way of working, living, and how we can make therefore the City survive,’ she said.
Bruno Paternot, in turn, emphasised the need for urban spaces at night be warm and welcoming, to embrace the ethos of the Danish word ‘hygge’, or a physical environment, mindset and philosophy focused on creating a relaxing and enjoyable atmosphere.
‘To reconnect people to the earth and to make warm places for humans, birds, bugs and bats; to connect or reconnect people,’ he said.
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the June edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, simply click on the page-turner to your right.
Image: the closing plenary session, LUCI Cities & Lighting Summit London 2025, BAR Productions
