Anticipating Place in the Emergent Darkness of the Urban Night

Abstract

This paper explores the unfulfilled spatial potential of the darkening urban nightscape. And more specifically, how critical concepts of possibility might provide urban theorists access to a night that has yet to take form. In doing so, I build on the presumption that global movements to decrease energy consumption and light pollution will lead to a reduction in nighttime uses of artificial illumination. And that as cities transition to sober lighting technologies, nocturnal darkness can take a more active role in shaping urban space. To what extent this transition will be deployed, in what forms and with what outcomes, are open questions. The urban night remains a space and time of possibility. Its situation is fluid, and its parameters not yet fully drawn. In this state, I suggest that the darkening night lends itself to ontological considerations of what Ernst Bloch termed the anticipatory, or an analysis of what is both in process and on the way. It is an analysis that is firmly situated in the realities of the present urban night, while encouraging the projection of alternate imaginaries for a more sustainable future. Through the analysis of possibility, we can anticipate new ways of composing, and being in, nocturnal urban space.