Urban outdoor lighting trends (architectural outdoor)
Mar 24 2022
Urban planning and outdoor architectural spaces, as dynamic elements that address the needs of society, are currently undergoing an increasingly rapid process of transformation in order to respond to new challenges, such as:
- Reclaiming urban spaces for pedestrian use, creating areas for urban coexistence;
- The domestication of urban spaces, adapting them for pedestrian use and recovering the human element (leaving the predominant road traffic bias of 20th-century urban planning well and truly in the past);
- Adapting to new forms of mobility;
- The prioritisation of measures that will improve sustainability;
- Recovering city and neighbourhood identity
- The incorporation of technology in "Smart Cities" that help to improve the quality of life of those living there and the fulfillment of the above objectives;
During the first edition of the 2020 "By Your Side" debates organised by Lamp, in which they consulted different experts about the "Evolution and Transformation of Architecture", some of the key issues that the group of participants addressed were:
- Understanding sustainability as a driving force, with a focus on people's well-being;
- Recapturing the importance of "common areas" as a strategy for making architecture more versatile;
- Rethinking the limits of current spatial typologies and reflecting on how to synchronise the use of these areas, in order to transform them and maximise their use, while minimising their environmental footprint.
The well-known concept of the "15-Minute City" has been presented as a potential solution to these and other challenges, by means of a model that promotes the transformation of existing spaces into an urban ecosystem that provides seven basic functions: living, working, shopping, access to health, education, and culture, and leisure time in tune with nature, all within 15 to 20 minutes on foot, or by sustainable urban transport methods such as bicycles. This model gained momentum in social debates during the early days of the health crisis and is in alignment with the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG) for 2030 which aims to ensure inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities.
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF LIGHTING IN THIS URBAN RENEWAL?
The design of outdoor architectural lighting, in turn, has ceased to have a merely functional character oriented fundamentally towards road traffic. Neither does it favour a purely aesthetic approach.
Beyond a purely compliance-oriented approach, outdoor lighting is becoming a dynamic element in our urban landscapes, and is being used to reshape them, in an integrated manner, both in new buildings and in the restoration of the existing architectural stock, with three lighting approaches:
- Functional: Focused on the optimisation of certain areas such as roadways, paths, or entrances. To cover this first functional level, we need to comply with lighting requirements at ground level and uniformities, according to guidelines to ensure safe and optimal operation.
- Ambient: This refers to general ambient lighting and takes into account visual comfort and the creation of ambiance, as well as vertical lighting that allows for correct facial recognition.
- Emotional: This is used to highlight certain elements, areas, or structures. It provides an environmental visual identity, which facilitates the development of the city's identity, allowing for environments that stimulate the use of urban spaces, beyond their functional needs.
Human scale lighting
Towards the end of the 1980s, people began to talk about "human scale development", which advocated a new way of understanding the concept of development, based on improving people's quality of life. In this context, outdoor lighting is also understood as creating lighting for our well-being; this light isn’t only designed for visual comfort, but also to create other stimuli apart from the simply visual ones.
The concept of "domestication of spaces", which applies the concepts of comfort, well-being and safety to public spaces, encompasses lighting solutions that facilitate:
- Proximity-based lighting, which brings the light source or the element to be illuminated closer to the action, creating much more pleasant lighting ambiences, and at the same time reducing the building’s energy consumption. This is possible thanks to solutions such as DUIT, minimally intrusive luminaires, with controlled luminous fluxes and a wide range of optics available, in order to direct the lighting to the element to be illuminated.
- The application of warmer, less intrusive and less polluting colour temperatures by reducing harmful blue light emissions.
Responsible lighting
Sustainability is at the heart of human-scale development as well as in the way new urban spaces are designed. Outdoor lighting plays a key role in ensuring that the outdoor architectural space of buildings and cities is sustainable in terms of energy efficiency and in reducing the impact of its carbon footprint. We do so by opting for LED technology which has a longer life and lower consumption than other technologies, and, together with renewable energies, contributes greatly to the reduction of CO₂ emissions.
But what else can we do to provide responsible lighting solutions? Well, one way is by providing solutions that minimise light pollution. Outdoor architectural lighting should eliminate light emissions in the upper hemisphere by using efficient, easily integrated and environmentally friendly solutions. Duit, developed and designed under the "Living Centric Life" concept, aims to meet the strictest standards to encourage the following applications:
- Products developed usingr Ecodesign principles
- Planning of proximity lighting
- The use of light sources with environmentally friendly amber temperatures and light spectra
Cities and communities are starting to adopt technologies that help them to improve their operations through intelligence and control.
The implementation of smart lighting, whose fundamental principles are innovation, connectivity, and automation, aims to increase people's quality of life and optimise resources, in line with the idea of sustainable and human urban development.
