Into the light

Antony Funnell: Hello, Antony Funnell here and welcome to another edition of Future Tense. Hang on, it's dark in here. Somebody's forgotten to turn on all the studio lights. One sec...

[Click of light switch]

There. Much better. Now I can at least see my script and tell you that today's program is all about...um, it's all about…yes, here it is, illumination. Ah well, there we are, how appropriate.

A little later in the show we'll here from author Paul Bogard who worries that we're losing our sense of darkness. In Europe and North America the amount of light in the night sky continues to increase by around six per cent a year.

But new forms of lighting technology, LEDs in particular, promise a more sophisticated and controlled approach to urban illumination, lighting that becomes a distinctive architectural feature, not just an urban utility. And that's our starting point.

Now, come with me for a walk back in time, along the south bank of the Brisbane River, it's a few months ago, it's night time, and I'm on my way to meet lighting designer Jono Perry.

Jono is waiting for me in a marquee on the edge of the river. He's promised to show me how to light up a city. He's the creative director for a project called Colour Me Brisbane. And as I get closer, I can see whole skyscrapers suddenly washed in brilliant coloured light, the shades and patterns changing constantly.

Jono Perry, thank you very much for joining me here, and I have to say, looking across the river at the city all illuminated like that, it looks absolutely terrific.

Jono Perry: Thank you very much Antony, it does look spectacular. I am a big fan of Brisbane, I'm a Brisbane boy I've and always wanted to make our city look even more beautiful, and lighting is a great way to do that. We are very lucky in this day and age with new LED technology that we can do it quite efficiently and we can do it quite effectively and engage the public. That's one of the big things that I wanted to do with Paint Your City.

Antony Funnell: And that engagement happens just here in front of us, doesn't it. This panel that's here, explain how that works.

Jono Perry: This is known as the Paint Your City Kiosk. So it's a big touchscreen, we are looking at a big 50-inch touchscreen, and we've got a map, a layout of the 15 buildings along George Street, that you can control…

Antony Funnell: Which are…the real buildings are just across the river there.

Jono Perry: Indeed, the closest one being the…the casino is 300 metres away. And we've got a network that talks from this touchscreen to a media server on the roof of one of the buildings and that's distributed out to the rest of the buildings. The public can come here to the Paint Your City Kiosk, they can choose different colours, there's a couple of effects that they can choose. Then they basically create their palette of Brisbane and then press the big 'go' button at the top here on the screen and send that to the city.

Antony Funnell: So if I choose…if I touch this building here…

Jono Perry: Yes, if you touch 111 George, you can touch that, and then we can create a colour, and then basically we can put the stripes here, and then we can press 'go' and it sends your colour up to the city.

Antony Funnell: Cities were once largely daylight spaces, but computer systems and LED lights now allow people like Jono Perry to transform the outside of a skyscraper into an artistic canvas of light and motion. This isn't just illumination, it's transformation. Light festivals are now popular around the world and the way a city is lit at night is quickly becoming as important as how it looks aesthetically during the day.

Jono Perry: Australia, we are very fortunate that we have caught up to that very quickly. Europe probably led the way. Cities Lyon, that's got an amazing lighting festival called Fête des Lumières, and Montréal in Canada, probably the cultural capital of the world, has got an amazing light festival called En Lumières, which happens on an annual basis. So we are very lucky that lighting has changed our cities.

In places like Lyon, in the late '80s they actually developed a citywide lighting plan which allowed for the permanent lighting of 250 civic landmarks within Lyon. Lyon now attracts over 3 million people for a four-day lighting festival every December. It's amazing, I'd love to think that we can do something like that in Brisbane, and hopefully Colour Me Brisbane is the start of it.

Antony Funnell: So for civic authorities it's a different way of thinking of the city, isn't it, it's not just thinking of the city as a place that people inhabit during the day, but it's also thinking of the city as a place that people will inhabit and enjoy during the night.

Jono Perry: Yes, definitely, and obviously the way of the world in terms of everyone operates on different hours as well is people want to be engaged and want to have something different to do and different experiences. And also CBDs traditionally were not places where people actually resided, whereas now we've got a huge amount of residents in the city. So to give them something to be entertained with and give a city some life and it's not just a culture inside a theatre or inside an art gallery, inside a museum, you actually want to give it its life outside as well.

Antony Funnell: So in lighting up a city like this, it is theatrical, isn't it, and it is artistic.

Jono Perry: Very much so, and you're right in what you are talking about before in terms of cities originally and architecture was originally conceived for what it looked like during the day, whereas we can now think about cities and how they look at night. And cities all over Asia, cities in Europe have done that a lot. I went to Guangzhou earlier this year, and Guangzhou is an incredible city and probably half the CBD is completely lit with LED. The exterior facades of buildings, all in different ways, and they've got the amazing Canton Tower which is extraordinary, it's covered in rainbow effects of LED.

Sandy Isenstadt: My name is Sandy Isenstadt. I'm a professor of modern architecture at the University of Delaware.

Antony Funnell: And professor Isenstadt is also the co-editor of a new book called Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination.

Sandy Isenstadt: When you think of many cities, say Sydney or Paris, you think immediately of iconic buildings. The same is increasingly true with lighting in that some cities have begun to understand their own identity in terms of a particular lighting scheme that takes advantage of some unique characteristic of the city, either its tree canopy or the particular kind of architecture that's there, and these cities have had competitions inviting lighting designers to create lighting master plans that accentuate these unique characteristics.

And I think more and more cities are recognising that they can at least partly brand themselves by a certain kind of night-time look or revise the image of key iconic landmarks through the treatment of lighting. In fact Paris has recognised this with the Eiffel Tower, which has long had in fact various sorts of lighting schemes for different kinds of fairs, and it's had advertising on it, it's had fireworks. So there's a history to this, but more and more cities are thinking about that.

I should also say there are many places in cities that end up being neglected spaces, such as highway underpasses or places that have fallen out of favour. And a number of cities are thinking of ways that for relatively low cost they can introduce lighting that adds literally sparkle and a kind of movement to these sorts of spaces, thereby bringing people there at night, thereby making them much safer and more interesting places. So I think there's a recognition that lighting has an effect on the overall image of the city and also a recognition that underutilised spaces can be transformed through lighting, either through permanent installations or sometimes light events, art events that make use of new ways to think about light.

Antony Funnell: According to Professor Isenstadt we're currently living in a new golden age of lighting innovation, the first being the early years of electric lighting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yes, he concedes, the world got brighter during the mid to second half of the 20th century, but not in a particularly creative or intelligent way. What became important to most city planners and lighting companies at that time, he says, was simply brightness, making sure streets were flooded with light in order to serve the needs of drivers, or to make an urban environment seemingly safer. And over time people lost interest in the potential of lighting.

Sandy Isenstadt: I think it's the case with many technologies that once they become ubiquitous…however marvellous they were at their inception, once they are ubiquitous we simply get used to them. So I think lighting is part of that. It really was a novelty, people would travel to see lighting. The world's fairs, international exhibitions from 1889 to 1937, all of them, all of the big world's fairs had a lighting theme or an electricity palace, and that was always a special feature. So I think it's a real credit to the lighting design profession that they've been able to innovate so much and present so much in the way of new possibilities, that cities around the world are recognising the great enrichment of urban life through new lighting designs and new lighting practices.

Antony Funnell: When I think of urban illumination, of cities defined by light, I confess I first think of Hong Kong. It's long had a history of not just playing with light, but of attempting to banish the darkness. The distinction between day and night seems so much more arbitrary when you're walking along the always crowded streets of Kowloon.

As Sandy Isenstadt and Jono Perry have told us, new lighting technologies make it easier to light a city in creative ways, but it's hard to imagine that many cities will go to the extremes that Hong Kong has gone or, say, Shanghai for that matter.

Warren Julian is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, and he says there will always be differences, he says, regardless of the potential offered by new technologies.

Warren Julian: When a town first gets electricity in the developing world, often one of the first things that is done is to spend a lot of money lighting the main street. It's not really being done for the purpose of lighting for pedestrian safety and road safety, it's done more as a celebration of what electricity means in terms of freeing people from darkness, whereas in more developed countries the differences are often to do with the way urban spaces are used. So in congested countries or cities such as Hong Kong or Shanghai, the use of light in the city is partly to do with the fact that many people use the public spaces and the cafes and so on more or less as their living rooms. And so it's a place where you entertain and celebrate rather than, say, in Sydney or Australian cities where the trip into the city or in the city tends to be a much more subdued experience because of the entertaining at home and entertaining outside the home is much more formal than in countries where it's quite common to eat in the street or in small cafes.

Antony Funnell: So there are going to be quite significant cultural differences in the way in which illumination in cities is carried out.

Warren Julian: That's right. And so someone might look at, say, Hong Kong, and say it's terribly gaudy, with huge neon signs, and now screens located almost in every conceivable location, compared with the much more controlled and subdued appearance of most western cities.

Antony Funnell: So it's a mistake to think that because new technologies can allow us to do a lot more in terms of the illumination of the city, to be a lot more sophisticated, that we are all going to follow the same path.

Warren Julian: Yes. I think the path, say…well, take Sydney for example, it's very difficult to do much with outdoor lighting on or off buildings without the approval of local government, and there are controls on the percentage of a facade that can be used, say, for advertising signage and so on. Whereas in other countries you can basically make the whole of the building, if not a total advertising sign, the building itself can be lit very brightly and dynamically in order to make it more attractive in the sense of attracting attention, not necessarily in the aesthetic sense.

Antony Funnell: So urban illumination is about architecture and about art. It can be about making a statement, or about simply allowing people to find increased living space in an outdoor, urban environment. Its usage is culturally-specific, as Warren Julian told us, but increasingly, thanks to censor-driven LEDS, it can also be community-specific, according to Sandy Isenstadt.

Sandy Isenstadt: The ability to have ubiquitous sensors that can be operated remotely means that in many ways…on the one hand the city itself has greater control over the lighting, but on the other hand it also means it opens up the potential for ordinary citizens to have some control over their lighting. So, for example, there have been studies of lighting and the sense of safety. And we used to think that higher and higher levels of lighting were what made people feel safe. In fact it's a range of more complex factors such as the surrounding brightness, contrast, even colour. Certain light colours can improve facial recognition, and people feel a lot safer if they can make out fine details at a greater distance. And again, just having the brightest lights possible doesn't always make that effective. It's often these more subtle factors.

And I would even say that vision is an enormously complex sense, and it varies in individuals, it varies on lighting conditions, it varies on age, all kinds of physiological factors. And again, these new sensors can take much of that into account. So there have been a number of studies for ways that lighting can help make the elderly feel more comfortable coming out at night and bring them out into the city, which again increases people on the street, increases activity and also is certainly better for the individuals involved.

Antony Funnell: What you're talking about there fits in very much with the ideas of the social light movement, doesn't it, that intelligent and creative lighting can be seen as a fundamental right for people, not just a privilege of wealth or status anymore.

Sandy Isenstadt: Exactly, I think one of the great advantages of the social light movement is to recognise and even to demand that lighting. It's a right, it's not something that can be distributed inequitably, as it has been in the past, and certainly much of human history. And it's as fundamental a right as the right to clean water or clean air. And I think this is the strength of their argument. What the social light movement does is it has really I think taken some very innovative steps to show ways that residents of an area can rethink their entire environment through their lighting by participating in light events, by participating in lighting designs and having a say in how light gets installed, how it gets operated, who uses it, who is responsible for maintenance. So as opposed to giant citywide infrastructures like a sewer system or a clean water system, lighting can be fine-tuned to local conditions. And once cities recognise that there could be a great variety of options rather than a single uniform standard, then I think you have neighbourhoods within cities that can start to identify themselves and have a night-time identity and come together through their lighting.

Tvilight promo: Every day street lights are powered from sunset to sunrise at full strength throughout the night, even when there's no one around. This costs Europe over €27 million each day. This is a big waste of energy and money. The solution is both simple and effective, Tvilight intelligent street lighting.

Chintan Shah: Basically it's quite simple. What we have designed is a wireless sensor that fits into existing lights and does two main things. One, it dims the lights during off-peak hours when there is no one around, and as soon as any presence is detected, not only one light but all the surrounding lights grow to the full mode.

Antony Funnell: Chintan Shah is the CEO of an Amsterdam-based company called Tvilight. And his system is a good example of the way in which smart lighting technology is now being employed at a street level, not just to provide light but, just as importantly, to limit it when necessary.

Chintan Shah: So what we have designed is a network of sensors, which means when a car is approaching the sensors much in front tell in advance that 'please light up, a car is approaching'. And this could be 400 metres or even one kilometre in advance. The beauty of this solution is that either a pedestrian, a bicyclist or a car is always surrounded by a safe circle of light. So for him or her it is just a normal light. Only from the helicopter view you see that, wow, this is something cool happening. But for a person, a user on the street, it's all normal and beautiful.

Antony Funnell: You estimate, don't you, that there could be quite significant savings in terms of energy consumption from this type of intelligent lighting system.

Chintan Shah: Correct. We have installed this solution at many places around the world. In the Netherlands we have projects in residential areas, at train stations, at airports, in industrial areas, where we are saving up to 80% energy. So it is quite significant. And this is simple to measure. So what we do is dim the lights for up to 20%. It's a comfortable level of light. It's like in a restaurant. However, as soon as any person is detected we go up to 80% or 100% of the lamp intensity, meaning full light when people are around. And just by dimming the lights we can achieve significant savings.

Antony Funnell: I would imagine there would also be a reduction in what you might call light pollution in residential areas.

Chintan Shah: This is an emerging topic because light pollution not only damages the human rhythm but also wildlife quite significantly, and we have many projects, for example in Kerry County in Ireland, the light pollution is one of the major things because they have a night sky view, and there we are rolling out a solution, but also by example in Seoul city in Korea, and also certain villages in the Netherlands where people don't like so much light. Of course we need light for safety and security, but only when there are people, and this solution beautifully combines public safety with savings, and reducing light pollution significantly.

Antony Funnell: Chintan Shah there from the smart lighting company Tvilight.

If you don't recognise the sound in the background, this sound:

[Crickets chirping]

Let me help you out. It's the sound of no human activity.

As the world continues to urbanise, it's getting harder and harder for most of us to find a quiet space of our own. And for all that's good about urban illumination, it's also getting harder and harder for most of us to get away from light.

Paul Bogard is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University in the US and he's the author of a book called The End of Night. True darkness, he says, is something we're losing touch with. So how does he rate the environmental benefits of our new lighting technologies?

Paul Bogard: I am optimistic about it. The new technologies, primarily the LED technology, offers great promise for controlling light pollution, and of course cutting energy costs. But there's also a sense of potential peril as well that we can get into a little bit. Unfortunately a lot of the LEDs that cities are using right now tends to be heavy in what we call a blue-rich white light, so it's heavy on the blue end of the spectrum, and unfortunately that's the kind of light that we don't want to be seen at night.

But I think on the optimistic side we have great potential to control this never-ending spread of electric light and electronic light or light pollution. The new technologies by and large are focused downward, they shine their light downward where we need it rather than up into the sky where nobody needs it. So that's a good thing. But I'd like to see…even as we are using the new technologies begin to think about why we are using and how we are using lighting at nights as well because if we simply adopt the new technology but we don't change any of our attitudes about lighting and darkness at night, I know there sure what will happen in the States and probably in Australia as well is that instead of really realising the energy savings from the efficiency of the new lights we will just light everything more brightly and use up all that efficiency.

Antony Funnell: And it's important to remember, isn't it, or to recognise that the amount of light in our skies has actually been increasing year on year, hasn't it. By what percentage?

Paul Bogard: Well, worldwide it's been increasing by about 6% every year, and I think the significance of that number I guess is that it's actually a huge number when you add it up over the last few decades. But it's just slow enough…the growth is just slow enough that it's hard for folks to appreciate, certainly from night to night or even from year to year. One of the estimates I like to talk about is that our gas stations and parking lots here in the States, for example, they are lit about 10 times as brightly as they were just 20 years ago, and 20 years is not that long ago, and 10 times as bright is an enormous growth in light.

Antony Funnell: What can you tell us about the environmental and the human costs of that continuing increase in illumination?

Paul Bogard: Some of what the scientists are finding out about in terms of human health issues are that artificial light at night is disrupting our sleep and contributing to sleep disorders, which are tied to every major disease we are dealing with in the Western world these days, like diabetes, obesity, cancer, depression. It is confusing our circadian rhythms, those 24-hour rhythms that orchestrate our body cells and that rely on the natural cycles of light and dark.

And then maybe most worrying I would say is that research is pointing to the fact that exposure to light at night impedes the production of the hormone melatonin, which is only produced in our bodies in the dark. And a lack of melatonin in our bloodstream is being linked to an increased risk for breast and prostate cancer.

So when you begin to add up the many costs of light pollution, the monetary costs, the waste of energy, the human health cost, the environmental cost…again, we are not the only animals obviously who have evolved with darkness, and we have so many species, we have upwards of 60% of invertebrate species, for example insects are purely nocturnal and 30% of invertebrate species are nocturnal. So much of the wild world has evolved to depend on darkness. And when we flood their world at night with artificial light we essentially destroy their habitat.

Antony Funnell: You talk and write about natural darkness being an endangered resource, as you call it. Explain that idea to us, and also the way in which you differentiate between darkness and night.

Paul Bogard: Sure. We've taken what was once one of the most common human experiences, which is walking out the door and coming face to face with the universe, and we have made that one of the most rare of human experiences simply by overusing and misusing artificial light at night and creating this light pollution. We've cut ourselves off from this resource of darkness or this source of inspiration, meditation, reflection. Being able to see the night sky, having it be dark enough to see a brilliant night sky has inspired science and religion and philosophy…

Antony Funnell: And you argue, don't you, that for many of us we have lost our sense of what darkness really is, we've lost a perspective on what is true darkness.

Paul Bogard: That's absolutely true. I mean, I write in the book about a scale that goes from 9 to 1, with 1 being the darkest places, and I make the point is that most people in the Western world now spend most of their lives on levels 5 and above. And we rarely or never experience anything darker. So when you ask somebody does it gets dark at night, they might look at you like, 'Of course it gets dark at night!' But it really doesn't get dark, certainly in our cities, the way that it used to.

Antony Funnell: We've talked about the power of new technologies to cut wastage of artificial light. What sort of community or government initiatives are there in the world at the moment to try and ensure a more natural state of darkness in our urban and rural areas?

Paul Bogard: Well, there are efforts at all different levels. There are efforts at the town and city level to institute lighting ordinances that would control the use of light at night. There are certainly here in the States a number of states that have state-wide legislation to control the use of light at night. The country of France two summers ago instituted some of the most innovative I would say rules on light at night, that was primarily to cut carbon emissions and control waste, but it was also, as their Environment Minister mentioned when announcing the legislation, to preserve the nocturnal environment. So I think we can be optimistic about the fact that this is an issue we certainly…it's readily within our ability to control.

Antony Funnell: Just finally, the long-term costs of over-illumination, of the use of artificial illumination in our cities and towns and in our natural environment, we've only really had electric lighting since the end of the 19th century. So it has only been with us really for a blip in the history of humankind. Is it still too soon, do you think, to get a gauge on what the long-term effects might be for us?

Paul Bogard: I think we are already seeing the impacts of light at night on our physical health and on the health certainly of the creatures that we share the world with. I think we don't know what we are going to know about in 50 or 100 years, it's much easier to look backward and think what we were thinking about, say, as recently as 1980 when our researchers were saying artificial light has no impact on us. Now we know that's not true. I look forward with optimism. I think that as more and more people realise the many costs of light pollution and the value of darkness we'll begin to see there's really no reason not to control our use of light at night and to realise how important night and darkness is for the experience of being alive.

Antony Funnell: Paul Bogard, thank you very much for joining us on Future Tense.

Paul Bogard: My pleasure.

Antony Funnell: Paul Bogard from James Madison University. Before him Sandy Isenstadt, Chinatan Shah, Warren Julian and Jono Perry.

Thanks to sound engineer Jim Ussher, producers Wendy Zukerman and Karin Zsivanovits.

I'm Antony Funnell, until next time on Future Tense, cheers!