Moving Through the Lit World: The Emergent Experience of Urban Paths

Introduction

The presence of many forms of urban lighting are taken for granted, both by researchers and by people who move through the city on an everyday basis. We do not explicitly think about lighting being automatically present when we follow our quotidian routes through cities, unless specifically invited to do so. In this article, we argue for closer attention to what we call the “lit world,” a world where automated lighting of different kinds configure part of everyday experience in ways that are taken for granted, never usually spoken about, and therefore not usually accounted for. We propose and demonstrate an approach to understanding urban mobilities that accounts for the perception and personal meaning ascribed to light as a fundamental constituent of everyday experience.

Indeed, while scholars working in the field of urban lighting design have argued that automated lighting is integral to how urban atmospheres are constituted and experienced (Ebbensgaard, 2015; Shaw, 2014; Slater, Sloane, & Entwistle, 2015), often for practical reasons, light researchers and designers seek to solve or work on locality-based issues, rather than following the routes that diverse people trace through the city. Some recent research has attended to how people experience light and the atmospheres afforded by it as they move through environments, in outdoor arts settings (Edensor & Lorimer, 2015; Morris, 2011) and in homes (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2016). However, given the centrality of light in human perception (e.g., Ingold, 2011; Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002) we argue that the medley of automated forms of lighting that form a ubiquitous element of everyday urban environments needs closer attention. Indeed, sociologists and anthropologists have criticized a lack of attention to human experience in lighting design generally (see Slater et al., 2015). We extend this to suggest that if the lit world forms a backdrop to our mundane everyday environments and the ways that we feel in them, then it needs to be accounted for more closely in studies that focus on movement through and experience of the environment.

In this article, we develop our arguments and frame the empirical material with recent discussions of how light is experienced and understood in a range of settings, bringing this together with a discussion of how people move through the city. We then present the findings of a research project that explored urban light routes with 17 participants through the city of Melbourne, Australia.

Lighting, The City, and Urban Mobilities

A number of historical examples show how urban lighting has long since been associated with particular ways of feeling in cities (Isenstadt, Maile Petty, & Neumann, 2015). For instance, in 19th-century Paris, very bright lights on high towers illuminating large areas of the city were proposed to improve safety and amenity, especially in poorer areas considered both dirty and dangerous. Although never implemented, early designs of the Eiffel Tower, including top-mounted arc lights, and a competing design for a “sun tower” proposed a brilliant light atop a monumental 360-meter-tall column (Schivelbusch, 1995, p. 128). Built around the same time, tall “moon towers,” still standing in Austin, Texas, are now regarded as mysterious, beautiful, and even romantic. Erected in 1894-1895, they were designed to illuminate large areas with a light equivalent to a summer moon, and were bought by the Texan capital from Detroit when it altered its own street lighting system. Now regarded as historical oddities, they are considered valuable heritage material that expresses Austin’s unique identity (Oppenheimer, 2014). In these examples, large-scale urban lighting schemes created ways of seeing, through the casting of light, that were informed by and helped shape particular ways of feeling about the city, its inhabitants and their activities. Light helped shape these two cities through unique schemes of illumination, and through attitudes about light that treated it as safe, clean, and modern in 19th-century Paris or nostalgic, quirky, and romantic in 21st-century Austin.

Existing research has engaged with questions concerning how light shapes our experience of the world, and how people use it to constitute everyday worlds. Indeed, discussions of the fundamental role of light in human perception are deeply rooted in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, Levinas, and others (see Vasseleu, 1998). This material, which we will not reiterate here, forms the basis of understanding light, perception, and movement through the world from an ethnographic perspective. In particular, anthropologist Tim Ingold has built on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas to develop an understanding of light as a central aspect of our visual experience, cultural expression and understanding, and symbolic repertoire. As Ingold (2011) puts it, light is “a phenomenon of experience, of that very involvement in the world that is a necessary precondition for the isolation of the perceiver as a subject with a ‘mind’, and of the environment as a domain of objects to be perceived” (p. 258). Tim Edensor (2017) argues that

the perception of luminous and gloomy space is a key existential dimension of living in the world, of the experience of space and time . . . [and] all sighted people directly perceive, sense and make meaning of the world in accordance with its qualities of luminosity or murkiness. (p. vii)

As such, light is a powerful constituent in the shaping the perception and experience of our surroundings, the people and things in them and our sense of ourselves as spatially and socially located.

Light is thus integral to how we move in and through the everyday worlds of which we are also part. It contributes to how we make the environments we navigate as we go through them, for example as we switch lights on and off, open and close curtains so light may enter or be blocked, or are subject to (or resist) regulatory frameworks for the use of lights on cars and bicycles. Accordingly, the design, manipulation and utility of light as an aspect of how space feels has recently been explored in a wide range of contexts, scales, and temporalities: domestic and intimate (Bille, 2015; Daniels, 2015), public and site-specific (Ebbensgaard, 2015; Sumartojo, 2015), festive and aesthetic (Barns & Sumartojo, 2015; Edensor, 2015b; Papadaki, 2015), metropolitan (Isenstadt et al., 2015), historical (Nye, 2010; Schivelbusch, 1995) and in its relationship with darkness (Edensor, 2015a; Morris, 2011). Nevertheless, such studies tend to be site specific or, in other cases, attention has focused on how people experience light or darkness as it is arranged and designed by themselves or by others, as part of events or activities, or on people as users of lighting.

Our study builds on this body of work by considering the role of different forms of lighting, particularly automated lighting, on their own or in combination with other elements, as part of the general urban environment, and in generating ways of feeling for people who are part of and who move through that environment. Accordingly, in terms of urban mobilities, a vast and growing field that we do not reiterate in detail here, we are specifically interested in arguments relating the experience of moving around in the city from the perspective of a pedestrian or cyclist.

The notion that everyday urban walking is both a way to experience and to research experience of the city is well established (e.g., de Certeau, 1984; Ingold & Lee Vergunst, 2008; Pink, Hubbard, O’Neill, & Radley, 2010). Ingold (2010) brings our attention to the feel of the ground under our feet when walking and also, through his concept of the weather-world, the idea that “Breathing with every step they take, wayfarers walk at once in the air and on the ground. This walking is itself a process of thinking and knowing. Thus knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world” (p. S121). For Ingold, sunlight is an important part of how we experience this weather-world because: “We see in sunlight whose shades and colours reveal more about the composition and textures of the ground surface than about the shapes of objects” (2010, p. S131). Departing from his specific focus on weather, Ingold’s ideas are also useful for conceptualizing the city as a lit world, folded into an experience of moving through environments rich with different sources and rhythms of natural and artificial light. In the lit world, the affordances of urban lighting are part of an environment where automated technologies form part of an ongoingly emergent everyday world which is made meaningful, in part, by how people move through them.

Furthermore, in literature on urban cycling, in fields such as health and urban planning studies (e.g., Pucher & Buelher, 2012), and human geography (e.g., Spinney & Brown, 2009, Spinney 2010), commuter cycling has been understood as a form of “sensory immersion” (Jones, 2012). Connecting these literatures to Ingold’s framework for understanding walking through the weather-world, we might likewise see urban walking and cycling as a way of moving through a lit world that articulates particular configurations of relationships between people and technologies. Middleton (2011) explores similar themes in the context of walking and the habits and routines in everyday life that are part of moving through city environments. However, unlike studies specific to walking and cycling, we have not limited our research to one particular mode of movement or transport. Rather, we have made automated lighting our core research focus, how light is experienced as dynamic, in motion and generative of particular atmospheres in urban settings.

Researching Through the Senses and Movement

The difficulties associated with researching things that are often unnamed, not usually spoken about and experienced sensorially and emotionally rather than in terms of cognitive interpretation or reflection, have long been acknowledged in anthropological approaches to ethnography. Here, there is an emphasis on the processual nature of life and of research, with a focus on ethnographic knowing as emergent from the research encounter rather than becoming packaged as objective knowledge as an after-event (Pink, 2015). Indeed, a sensory ethnography approach (Pink, 2015) will often focus the research question not on the object of interest itself, but on those very elements that are interesting because they are likely to constitute or need it. For example, when trying to understand energy use in the home—another intangible research topic—Pink and Leder Mackley (2016) focused on how people used energy, by investigating how they enacted the tasks as they moved through their homes and that made their homes feel right.

We adopted this open and emergent approach to help us understand the role and impact of automated lighting in our participants’ mobile experiences of the city. To undertake this research we asked fifteen people, plus ourselves, to record and reflect on their journeys through Melbourne on foot and by bicycle, train, tram, and car in the evenings of late winter in September 2015. We were interested in finding out how they encountered and experienced the lit world, so we asked them to audio/visually document the forms of automated lighting they encountered on their ways home, and to talk with us about how they felt during these encounters. As such, we developed an “emplaced ethnography that attend[ed] to the question of experience by accounting for the relationships between bodies, minds, and the materiality and sensorality of the environment” (Pink 2015, p. 28). This meant asking participants to dwell on the embodied, affective, emotional and place-specific aspects of their journeys through the city, as they moved along well-known and routine commutes, which we called “light routes.” In recording what they could see on these routes, they also developed a series of prompts to consider how they felt, specifically focused on their interaction with and experience of automated light.

The project had two stages. In the first, we asked participants to document the sources of automated light they encountered in one typical journey from work or university to their homes, photographing or video-recording examples as they went. By not specifying a particular recording technique we left it open for participants define the most effective way of recording their experiences. Given that they all had smart phones and could therefore photograph or video, they all had similar choices, except in the cases of two participants who had their own bike helmet-mounted cameras. All the techniques that participants adopted have been used in previous research to audio or visually document routes through the city in walking or cycling studies, including Irving’s (2010) walking and photographic ethnographies, Spinney and Brown’s (2009) head-cam video recordings of cycling routes and Pink’s (2007, 2013) video walks. We left the instructions purposefully general, so the act of selection and photographing meant judging whether the examples were the “right” sort of light. This meant that participants had to consider and develop their own frameworks for what constituted automation.

In the second stage, for those participants who were design students (about half of the sample), we watched, video-recorded and discussed class presentations on their images and films. They discussed what they perceived and how they felt about the lights, presenting their own photographs and videos. These presentations helped us think further about the experiential aspects of automated light and the different ways that photographs record the lit world. Based on this, we developed semi-structured interview questions which we asked the other participants in one-to-one interviews, while we videoed them discussing their images or videos with us, showing what they photographed, telling us how they decided what to photograph, and describing their experiences and how they encountered and felt about different aspects of the lit world. We asked how they felt about the different lights, where they were on their journey with each photograph, whether they usually noticed the lights in their photographs, and how the lights worked together visually or as signals and how this affected their movements.

It is well established that the experience of the city is profoundly shaped by, for example, gender, age, race, class and bodily ability. However, because individual subjectivity was embedded in their approach to the task, and because this was a pilot study to investigate the image-making and interviewing methodology, we did not include or exclude participants on the basis of these social categories. Instead, we used the interviews to investigate volunteers’ subjective experiences of the exercise, experiences in which social categories of difference were implicit.

Participants’ responses revealed a range of attitudes toward the role, effect, and sensory perceptions of lights and their impact on the participants’ feelings, thoughts and bodies, although there were some consistencies in the experiences they related. It became apparent that in addition to our interests in the affective properties of light in relationship with automation, the movement of the lights relative to the participants was also an important element, and that photographing and videoing on the move had thus allowed particular perspectives to emerge. Indeed, some participants decided that it was more appropriate to video rather than photograph automated light because the change in light (e.g., from a red to a green traffic light) was an important part of how they were sensed and how they contributed to a distinctive lit world.

Seeing, Sensing, and Feeling City Lights

While light has been associated with vision and visual perception in philosophy (Ingold, 2011; Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002), the same scholars have also insisted on the mulitsensoriality of human perception. Light also carries an emotional, cultural, and even haptic charge, as its brightness, shimmer, glow, contrast with shadow, and color invoke memory, feeling, and sensations of warmth or coolness (Bille, 2015; Edensor, 2012a; Kumar, 2015). The sensory experience of light cannot in fact be separated out as belonging to the one or other sensory modality but should, like other sensory experience, instead be seen as a multisensory embodied feeling (see Pink, 2015). Understanding light as such, detached from the constraints of having to associate it with limited sensory categories, enables us to open up the question of how participants define the feeling or experience of light. Just as Ingold (2000) has proposed a focus on the “creative interweaving of experience in discourse and to the ways in which resulting discursive construction in turn affect people’s perceptions of the world around them” (p. 285) in the context of his critical approach to the anthropology of the senses, in the case of light, we similarly sought to understand the categories participants used for their experience of light.

Particularly in cities, lights are invested with multiple intentionalities and have various unintended affordances. These may be expressed in combination with, for example, movement to grab attention, text in advertising, color for traffic or signal lights, illumination for safe activity and to prevent accidents in crowded streets. Automated light thus does a range of complicated and overlapping work that is not necessarily coordinated, synchronized or ordered, inflecting urban environments and shaping our use of them in particular ways. Their affordances are sensed and perceived by people moving through their surroundings, co-constituting the lit world as a highly subjective aspect of experience that participants described their conversations with us.

This subjective understanding of light and its affects, rather than the intentions of light designers, engineers, or urban planners, is the focus of this article. To develop this, we concentrate on three themes to explore for when people sense and perceive light when they are on the move, or when the lights are: how this is perceived as pleasurable, beautiful or ugly; experiences of safety and order versus chaos or vulnerability; and how light contributes to how we wayfind through our worlds in movement. We conclude by discussing how these accounts contribute to the notion of the urban lit world and how its mix of automated lighting, people, and urban built environments is understood and experienced as affective and atmospheric.

Pleasure, Beauty, and Ugliness

In the participants’ narratives, comments, and stories, they told us how in the lit world, reflection, glow, sparkle, shimmer, and brightness both caught their eyes and dissolved into background obscurity. Lights signaled, illuminated, and advertised, drawing attention with motion and color, making them squint or blink in glare or gloom, halting them suddenly at traffic intersections, or hurrying them along at crosswalks. On the train or tram, lights whisked past, blurring together signal and illumination, and when it rained, the shimmer of car lights reflected in water on the road and against the raindrops could both delight passengers and make drivers grip the handlebars or steering wheel more tightly. Here, different forms of light mixed and mingled with visual and other sensory impressions with affective impact, making lights feel particular ways, as we noted above.

Urban light’s aesthetic qualities can thus engender a form of enchantment, a state that “is to be transfixed, spellbound . . . You notice new colours, discern details previously ignored” (Bennett, 2001, p. 5). It also shapes movement and mobility: The photographs and videos represented moments when, for instance, participants were jolted into action by a crosswalk light, stepped into a brightly lit train station, gazed at advertising lights reflected in a rain-swept street, or quickly braked in response to the movements of the cars around them. As our participants’ accounts showed, the multisensorality of the lit world is ubiquitous, intense, varied, and personal, and how lights feel is an important part of how we make sense of and perceive them.

Amy’s trip home, for example, was punctuated by a row of three shops with flashing lights at the tram stop where she alighted (Figure 1). Her pleasure was apparent when she described how she felt about them: “I quite like those neon lights . . . they were all in this little cluster glittering along the side of the road. I found that quite enjoyable and . . . pleasurable part of my commute.”

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Figure 1.

Amy’s photo of “glitzy flashing lights,” described in the main text, in a row of shopfronts, 2015, photo.

However, part of the pleasure she expressed was not just what they looked like, but the discovery of these lights that the research task engendered. She had never noticed them before, despite being very familiar with the area:

I walk down this section of Sydney Road all the time . . . I think there’s four of them? They’re all within, maybe three metres of each other at maximum, these glitzy flashing lights in little Internet cafes and restaurants . . . I’m sure that they’ve been there forever, but this is the first time I’ve noticed.

For many of our research participants, the research task made them aware of light that previously had formed an unnoticed background, part of what Vannini (2015) has referred to as “the sites that fall outside of common awareness, the atmospheres we take for granted, the places in which habitual dispositions regularly unfold” (p. 9). The research task foregrounded the lit world, pulling it out of familiar backgrounds and revealing its configuring of particular sensory experiences. Kylie, for example, described a lighting display above a row of shops (Figure 2) in terms of how the colors made her feel an affective pull:

the brilliant bright colours and the rainbow effect just always catch my eye . . . it kind of drags you to the shops underneath as well . . . there’s a lot happening there and I guess the colour kind of evokes a bit of excitement, yeah . . . and I like the design and aesthetic . . . it is really effective and catches your eye straight away, yeah, with all the colours.

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Figure 2.

Kylie’s photo of the light display that “drags you to the shops”, 2015, photo.

Kylie purposefully altered her route on her 7-kilometer walk home depending on her energy levels, weather, and feelings of boredom, choosing to walk further for a familiar and pleasant vista or catching a tram in a tedious stretch. The pleasure of the movement of walking was augmented or ameliorated by the “brilliant bright colours” and the feeling of excitement that seem to coalesce around them. For Fiona, the beauty she enjoyed in the lights she encountered was diminished by their purpose: “I love the blue glow of the Safeway [supermarket] lights, they’re so beautiful! But then when you know it’s Safeway it disheartens you somewhat.”

Here light was a means by which material elements of the built environment were mixed with individual, subjective sensory perception to create feelings of pleasure, joy, ambivalence, and repulsion. Although light did not feel the same way for all participants, its affordances commonly contributed to the making of affective experience, in these examples described as pleasurable. Light here was not causal to pleasure, but was constituent of a certain passing way of feeling in the city, at moments when the material and affective worlds met.

Thus, our participants’ accounts revealed how pleasure, enchantment, and delight were bound up in and partially engendered by the lit world. Here, rather than noticing the specific engineering of lighting design, or even the representational and narrative aspects of signage and signaling, participants discussed how the lit world’s complex colors, movement, and placement helped them make sense of their surroundings as they moved through them on habitual routes. Furthermore, this process of perception and understanding was affective and emergent, contingent on states of attention and noticing, subjective aesthetic judgment and existing attitudes toward particular sites, such as a supermarket.

Chaos and Vulnerability, Safety and Order

Since our participants all followed habitual routes, the automated light they encountered was, although often not noticed, familiar and predictable in its regular patterns. In some cases, this created a sense of comfort and safety. For example, Ben described this in his photograph of a train signal light at a busy suburban station (Figure 3) where he began his journey home:

This is signalling, railway signalling . . . it’s all regulated by lights, because a train comes probably every three, four minutes? And there’s a lot going on there . . . this was about lighting for system or function . . . I just thought “wow, that’s really complicated” and its not there for my benefit, well it is, its there for the driver’s benefit, which then benefits me because he or she doesn’t run into the back of the previous train.

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Figure 3.

Lights signal trains at a busy station in Ben’s photo, 2015, photo.

Here, light was an agent of an invisible but potent system in which each individual is regulated and their movements controlled and standardized to allow everyone to move predictably through urban space; light was part of the city’s “legal architecture” that ensures “regularity and order” (Young, 2014, p. 146). A sense of order was one result, comprised of the lights, the rhythms of waiting and moving, the motion of other people, and the transfer between different modes of transport, as Ben observed,

[Automated light] is sort of designed to prevent chaos, I mean traffic chaos. We’ve got pedestrians, we’ve got cars . . . and then the railway signals . . . there’s only one line it can go up, so it has to be regulated and ordered . . . Its about preventing chaos, really . . . stopping the system breaking down.

For Chris, dark rather than light signaled safety, as he shared the road with cars on his cycling route home; less light was “more restful” because “with these smaller streets that are quieter and less brightly lit, you can be . . . in the middle of the road because you can hear and see what’s going on around.” The brightness of his bike lights relative to the other light sources around him was an important aspect of this; darker conditions made him more visible. The darker stretches of his ride were more relaxing and an important part of transitioning to home after a busy day.

Ben’s journey from work to home comprised several different forms of transport: “walking to the train station, then getting a train, then walking through the city, then getting a tram,” only driving occasionally. Automated light both conditioned and was a condition of his sense of vulnerability as a pedestrian or driver:

I do have that sense of exposure as a pedestrian, I always sort of check that a car has kind of just jumped the lights or gone through the red lights for whatever reason . . . [when I’m in a car] in a way the traffic light is regulating the fairness that everyone, you know, the only we’ll get through this is to take our turn and wait patiently and eventually we’ll get there.

Here, traffic lights co-constituted feelings of fairness, even if they required patience. For Jordan, traffic lights symbolized our relationship with the city environment, typified by control and regulation: “I just think they’re there to serve a function and that’s to control the flow of traffic and pedestrian movement . . . they’re symbolic of the controls that we live with every day in our cities.” His image of complex traffic lights in a city center intersection (Figure 4) showed how light controls the flow of bicycles, trams, cars, and pedestrians in ways that none of those entities have any direct control over.

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Figure 4.

Jordan’s photo of complex lights controlling city life, 2015, photo.

However, in all the light routes, safety, control, and predictability were imperfect and complicated. Vulnerability and danger were recurrent eruptions brought on by movement, often expressed through or symbolized by light and the feelings it conjured. Jolynna expressed this as a feeling of safety when she turned into a quiet side-street after the bustle of the main road where she disembarked the tram:

The light makes you feel safe when you walk around the corner because it is a significantly quieter road. It is safe . . . the brightness and size of that light I think makes it feel safe . . . [If the light weren’t there] I don’t think I would consciously feel unsafe, but I probably would walk a bit quicker when turning that corner.

Our participants’ sedimented knowledge of place, built up through habitual and repeated activity, was complicated and at times disrupted by light. Indeed, as Harrison (2000, p. 499) reminds us, “the everyday experience of the lived disturbs categories of thought by way of contingencies, excess and indefinite answers.” While accounts showed how light afforded rhythm in daily journeys, including through familiar feelings of safety or vulnerability, it also surprised by catching the eye, allowing the swift emergence of delight, frustration, relief, or annoyance that caught participants off-guard or made them reconsider their surroundings. Furthermore, the systems of lighting were not entirely reliable, giving the appearance of responsiveness while actually running to their own logics. When this was unmasked, frustration and annoyance resulted, as Amy described,

I recently found out that all of these [street crossing lights] are completely automated and touching the button doesn’t make any difference, but that they’ve left the buttons there so you feel less frustrated . . . so I find these ones very frustrating because I know that but I still press the button, but I know it doesn’t make a difference.

Here, the disconnect between what the lights appear to do and what they actually do, although probably imperceptible to most users of the crossing, carried a discordant charge. The fact that the button remained in place felt like a form of deception on the part of the device, rather than, for example, the designer who made them like that, and by extension the light signal to walk was met with displeasure at being somehow tricked. This ascription of intent or agency to material things, a reoriented of the world to foreground nonhuman perspectives, generated affective engagement in the things and what they did. Deceptive crosswalks were not the only frustrating automated light on Amy’s journey home. The reliability or predictability of automation that we often take for granted was disrupted by the lift in her block of flats (Figure 5) that seemed to have a mind of its own, or to answer unknown calls from other levels:

These lights [in the lift] actually annoy me slightly as well because they’re not 100% truthful and sometimes even if you enter on level 1 which is ground and . . . you want to go up to level 2, sometimes the lift will take you to the basement just for fun. So they’re slightly deceptive . . .

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Figure 5.

Amy’s photo of lights in the “untruthful” lift, 2015, photo.

How does this sense of vulnerability or unpredictability speak to the lit world? Light was the means by which these encounters emerged as untruthful, deceptive, and annoying, the medium that conducted the affective charge of encounters with technology. Light wove together the perceiver and their environment through an integrating field made through interaction. That automated lights were experienced as untruthful or deceptive calls us to attend to the nonhuman aspects of our cities that are powerful agents in their own right. Our sense of safety or vulnerability in cities demands that we attend to the non- and more-than-human, and their powerful affordances that we experience everyday, often unpredictably.

Movement, Wayfinding, and Rhythm

Vannini (2015, p. 3) reminds us that “movements of all kinds are profoundly social activities that are both perceptive of the world and generative and transformative of it” (see also Ingold, 2011). Thus, the device of tracing light routes, although only a research exercise, demonstrated the mix of elements that contribute to the lit world that we sense as we move through our surroundings. This recalls Ingold’s (2008, p. 1808) refiguration of place through movement:

the path, not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming . . . There could be no places were it not for the comings and goings of human beings.

Such paths, evident in our treatment of light routes, must also include the previous experience and anticipation of future movement—thus, the path is a state of mind of moving as much as it is of physical movement, of purposeful journeying that exists in our imaginations and is manifest in the habitual actions of our bodies. This pulls us forward, perhaps to the promise of a known viewpoint that is a milestone or moment of reward for physical exertion, and pushes us along, away perhaps from an unpleasant setting or a boring stretch of footpath.

This is especially evident through walking or cycling. For most of our participants, walking formed at least part of their route home, or cycling that is similar in its close engagement with the material aspects of the city: uneven pavements, bumps and holes in the road surface or the danger posed by vehicular traffic. Here, walking and cycling were not just

simply something we do to get from one place to another, but [were] . . . a form of engagement integral to our perception of an environment. We cannot but learn and come to know in new ways as we walk. (Pink et al., 2010, p. 3)

These forms of movement are a vital element in urban wayfinding, “a skilled performance in which the traveller, whose powers of perception have been fine tuned through previous experience, ‘feels his way’ towards his goal, continually adjusting his movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of his surroundings” (Ingold, 2011, p. 220). As above, the memory of journeys in the past informs and motivates new ones, but do not fully determine them. Thus, rather than the specifics of the route recalled in stasis, “what the traveller remembers are vistas and transitions rather than location-specific images” (Ingold, 2011, p. 239) because they are encountered in movement. The lit world is a crucial part of this, as was strongly evident at a point in Kylie’s route when she emerged from a pedestrian tunnel to a walkway along the city’s river (Figure 6).

You come out the other side of the train station, it’s really nice coming up, there are all these beautiful lights, lots of lights on the walkways and the lights are designed quite differently, they’re quite pretty . . . there’s all the office lights, all the lights lining the river, it’s quite pretty and reflections.

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Figure 6.

Reflected office lights shimmer in the Yarra River in Kylie’s photo, 2015, photo.

These transitions into different configurations of automated light signaled a gradual transition to home for many of our participants. For Amy, the lights in the hallway of her block of flats were important:

I’m really glad that these are softer lights in the hallway . . . it’s a lot more muted experience than it used to be in that corridor and I appreciate that when I’m coming home and also when I’m leaving in the morning, it’s not a . . . stark break into the world, it’s a more gentle passage out to the world or a gentle passage home.

Acting as a part of transitions or milestones in routes home, aspects of the lit world signaled certain points in the journey, weaving together with location, thoughts, emotion and affect, and a sense of the immediate future, such as how much longer to go before reaching home. As Jolynna explained, particular qualities of lights at important junctions in her journey became associated with pleasant and positive atmospheres of home: “I really liked the glow of the sign . . . that’s the corner where I get off the tram, and this intersection definitely makes me go ‘oh, I’m nearly home’. I’ve always liked that corner.” Fiona reported a very similar feeling about the blue glow of lights at her local supermarket (Figure 7), a familiar stop on the way home:

Some days the light at Safeway draws you in because maybe it’s the last task at the end of your day, so I’m heading home and I’ll do my nightly shopping…it marks the end of day, so I’m nearly done …

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Figure 7.

Fiona’s photo of the beautiful blue glow of Safeway supermarket lights, 2015, photo.

Understanding the Lit World

The concept of the lit world allows us to take analytical steps forward in understanding people’s changing sensory and affective experiences of light as they move through the city. Accordingly, in this article we have sought to explain the different experiences of light that people had as they moved through the city, as well as some of the common cultural concepts they have used to label them, starting with a research question about the experience of automated lighting. This has a led to a better understanding of how the complex and variable lit world is integral to the ways in which people feel and intervene in the world. Thus, we were able to go beyond simply asking about the experience of lighting, toward understanding lighting as part of a configuration of things and processes that make up a perceptual environment—in this case, a lit one.

Our movements through the lit world are a vital part of how the city is experienced and understood, which both condition movement and condition our experience of it. Our participants’ light routes, records of their usual journeys from work or university to home, were comprised of familiar sensory and material traces through known landscapes. Light contributed to knowledge of distance or time from home, linked to narrative understandings of place built over many repetitions of the same paths that lend the journeys “an ontological predictability and security” (Edensor, 2012b, p. 8).

However, everyday patterns of movement and activity are “characterized by immanent and emergent possibilities as well as repetitive rhythms” (Edensor, 2012b, p. 14). Hence, constant change and the potential for change is thus crucial to urban mobility, and even on familiar and quotidian routes, a constant checking and switching from attention and inattention, noticing and not-noticing occurs that combines sensory perception with affect and feeling. Such experiences are necessarily ephemeral, as Harrison (2000) puts it:

Feeling and sensibility are the rendering of the emergent surface, the sense we have of a “good” ordering, or the disturbance we feel when something is “out of place” . . . sensibility and feeling are in touch with an outside because they are constantly attaching, weaving, and disconnecting; constantly mutating and creating. (p. 502)

The implication is that automated light is a fundamental part of how we move around the city, our rhythms of movement, the ways we feel in the city. Our participants experienced this as enveloped in affects such as frustration, pleasure, safety, or resignation that drew them in through a combination of physical affordances, memories of previous journeys and changing states of mind on each encounter. These experiences enabled our participants to notice and label the lit world, to make it momentarily tangible, and to explore the elements that constituted it. Through this naming, an improved understand of the urban lit world emerged.

Thus, our work has revealed a complex ecology of urban lighting, often experienced as alternately chaotic or regulated, that we have labeled the lit world. This is a world that people know and feel as they move through it, but that they also perceive without noticing, until asked to name and account for their experiences. As Kylie explained, she was surprised by the “sheer amount of light that’s everywhere” and how “it’s used everywhere as wayfinding and an indicator of where things are.” As we have shown, the lit world is an important underlying condition of how we move through and understand the urban environment.