Rethinking urban lighting design

Poor urban lighting is felt by everyone – you don’t need to be a lighting professional to notice when a space is overly lit or to experience glare.

In an ideal world, every street, square and park should have softly layered, human-scale lighting that works in harmony with the architecture or landscaping, with just the right amount of light appropriate for the purpose and rhythms of that space.

Yet somewhere along the way, our cities became excessively illuminated, and the public realm increasingly disjointed.

As cities have swelled to accommodate population growth, the scale of the built environment has overshadowed the needs of the individual. This imbalance has weakened our sense of community, wellbeing, and quality of life.

A key contributing factor is that exterior lighting is often introduced as an afterthought – a technical add-on rather than an integral part of urban planning and architectural design.

In recent decades, citywide lighting masterplans have helped us address some of these issues, improving safety and reducing light pollution. But urban lighting still remains a fragmented, unappealing, and in some cases, unhealthy reality.

The irony is that artificial lighting only exists for us humans. The natural world coexists without it – and arguably even thrives. If this is the case, surely every lighting intervention should serve to improve the lives of those who use and inhabit urban environments.

The limits of playing by the rulebook

Too often, places are illuminated simply to meet a code or tick a box in a standard. When we design in this way, the outcome is often a flat or overly bright environment with little sense of scale, character, or visual comfort. Industry standards are of course essential for ensuring safety and guiding best practice, but many are grounded in outdated metrics. The slow pace of change to revise these long-standing metrics leaves designers constrained, working to guidelines that don’t reflect new research. A good example of this is the widely quoted theory that bright public lighting reduces crime. Recent studies contradict this, with some even suggesting that street lighting has minimal impact on crime rates.

Exterior lighting standards are also steadfastly rigid, failing to account for diverse contexts, local cultures and architecture typologies. They state minimum light levels but rarely define upper limits, leaving room for over-illumination. This one-size-fits-all framework prevents us from adopting a site-sensitive approach and is far from conducive to a creative design response.

Does this mean that we should abandon standards? Absolutely not. But we need to be transparent about the need for fit-for-purpose metrics, and until such measures are established, impose our own benchmarks to achieve the best design outcome rather than working blindly within the parameters of the guidelines.

Designing with a more human touch

Urban lighting should be approached with careful planning, creativity and common sense. Rather than flooding a space with light, we should ‘paint with light’, using tone, contrast and shadow to highlight the architecture and bring depth and character to the public realm. We can improve liveability by accentuating viewpoints of interest, defining key routes, celebrating landmarks and improving permeability to create a sense of flow and cohesion between the spaces, places and boroughs that make up a city.

Beautifully illuminated streets and buildings are just one part of the equation. At its best, architectural lighting transforms flat, unremarkable spaces into places where people feel comfortable enough to dwell, connect and thrive. Achieving this requires a subtler approach to lighting, which prioritises experience and recognises the influence that light can have on wellbeing, inclusivity and social cohesion. With urban populations continuing to grow, designers have a responsibility that goes beyond aesthetics and liveability – light should actively support both physical and mental wellbeing.

Toward restorative city

This leads me to the concept of a Restorative City, an idea that I was introduced to courtesy of Restorative Cities: Urban Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing (Jenny Roe and Layla McCay, 2021). The book outlines a framework for urban design centred on the principle of a restorative city that helps regulate emotion and mental wellbeing while managing the demands of everyday life.

Light can play a crucial role here, acting as an intangible thread that connects people, places and experience. We can use it to activate landscapes, greenery and water features to draw people outdoors, establishing these spaces as a vital and therapeutic part of community life. Considered lighting can make parks feel more welcoming and create safe communal gathering points. It can also support mobility by making spaces more usable after dark, with lighting that is appropriate in terms of colour temperature, level and scale for pedestrian-led spaces, cycle zones and transition areas.

Restorative urban lighting can also be more inclusive. For the partially sighted, vertical illumination can improve orientation and usability. For neurodiverse individuals, comfortable, low-level lighting can offer sensory relief and a sense of refuge. And for everyone, light should encourage feelings of familiarity, the desire to explore and reinforce a sense of belonging.

The illuminated thread

Just as the practice of medicine is rooted in the Hippocratic Oath, urban lighting design needs a guiding principle that goes further than ‘do no harm’. We should pledge to create environments that are actively positive, because they help to connect, nurture, and inspire people on a meaningful level.

To realise this ambition, lighting designers cannot work in isolation. Given the amount of time we spend in urban spaces, greater collaboration is needed across disciplines, including urban planners, developers, architects, and landscape designers. While light may not be a primary pillar of urban life, it sits across every strand and has the potential to become the illuminated thread that shapes our cities into more human-centred, integrated, and restorative places.