Lighting design or visual planning - call it what you will - but there’s no doubt that urban planning involving lighting in public spaces is going through a remarkable transformation.
From a time when street lighting most often meant flooding inner cities with light from luminaires on tall poles, which threw deep shadows and also blotted out the night sky, we are now in a far more agreeable place.
One man closely associated with the change process is Mike Grunsell, director of LDP, also known as the Lighting Design Partnership, which is a network of lighting consultants working from Sydney, Auckland, Singapore, Shanghai and New Delhi.
LDP has recently been working with a range of councils, including Papakura, Auckland, North Shore and Waitakere City, and the Queenstown Lakes District Council.
The Auckland project involves the council’s project to turn parts of the inner city into ‘shared space’ streets, such as Fort Street, Elliott Street and Darby Street.
The council says a shared space design removes the traditional segregation of motor vehicles, pedestrians and other road users.
Conventional road priority management systems and devices such as kerbs, lines, signs and signals are replaced with an integrated, people-oriented understanding of public space, so that walking, cycling, shopping and driving cars become integrated activities.
At night, the interaction between all these different users must involve an excellent lighting system that ensures everyone can see properly, but which doesn’t spoil the ambience of a night-time street scene.
Mike Grunsell says whether his company is working in Auckland, Queenstown or any other part of the country…his team operates on the “less is more” policy that provides lighting for safety but is also mindful of the dark sky and good visual appeal of the surroundings.
“We have been advocating the quality of exterior lighting for a long time. We have written infrastructure design manuals for a number of councils and last year we worked with Auckland City to help draw up their lighting guidelines which have now been adopted and published.
“The emphasis is not so much on the functionality ― because most lighting needs to be functional ― but as well it’s got to provide pleasant spaces for people to live and work and for recreation and socialising ― and it’s changing the philosophy from being vehicle-oriented to being pedestrian-oriented in the CBD.
An indication of LDP’s philosophy on lighting is expressed on their company’s website: “"Our moods and behaviour are affected by light. Improving our environment through the use of good lighting solutions therefore improves our health and wellbeing.”
Applying that philosophy to town centres and inner cities is becoming an increasingly common task for LDP, and lighting is being required to provide many different outcomes these days, including security.
However, increasing emphasis on the value of heritage buildings by councils and ratepayers alike has also seen LDP being asked to develop feature lighting plans for various heritage buildings in cities like Auckland.
“It’s all about making the city look like an international city,” says Mike Grunsell, adding that Queenstown is also a strong advocate of this sort of improvement and has produced a comprehensive lighting policy which Mike Grunsell assisted on.
“We did a presentation to the council, the retailers association, the police and the community and from there we helped move on improving lighting throughout Queenstown. They have moved very quickly on this. They’ve moved away from the yellow lights to white lights with full cut-off - which are more efficient and provide a better atmosphere.
An interesting part of the Queenstown work was a desire amongst locals that lighting in the town centre didn’t blot out the spectacular surroundings.
“The lighting plan for Jack’s Point, an emerging resort area on the shore of Lake Wakatipu, is an example. With spectacular scenery all around it by day, at night the plan was to ensure lighting did not flood the surroundings.
“We deployed low-level lighting and used poles only at junctions where there could be potential conflict between cars. The lighting is designed so that it allows residents to walk around and enjoy the beautiful night sky, but also be able to see where they are going.
“You don’t need lots of bright light to see…to be orientated. Your eyes adapt to lower light and so why escalate the amount of light pollution by throwing too much of it about?” asks Mike Grunsell.
“In suburbs where we have done the designs, the lighting provides visual guidance for pedestrians and the residents, but allows them to look out to the mountains, to see the moon and a starry sky as well.”
(Note: LDP has recently been named among the top 50 independent lighting design companies in the world, as judged by the Mondo Arc magazine. The company was asked for information about a year ago before a global survey was conducted by the magazine, and has now been named in the top 50 group.
Judging was based on a number of parameters including business structure, client satisfaction and others, delivering a rating based on quality, not just on the size of the company or its location in the world).