Urban Lightscapes / Social Nightscapes was a lighting design workshop held on a London housing estate. It brought lighting design professionals together with architects, planners and social scientists, and set them a single task: to develop lighting interventions that would improve the outdoor spaces of the estate.
What made it unusual was the method. Rather than treating lighting as a purely technical specification, the workshop built social research into the design process — researchers supported the design teams in understanding the estate and the people living on it, and the teams spent the week in dialogue with residents, listening to how the place is used after dark and trying out different fittings on site.
The pages here describe the workshop and the research programme behind it, and record the kind of observations residents contributed about their own streets at night.
