52(3) 422–438, February 2015

Special issue article: Geographies of the urban night

The gloomy city: Rethinking the

relationship between light and dark
Tim Edensor

[Paper first received, April 2012; in final form, July 2012]

Abstract
Given geography’s neglect of illuminated and dark space, this paper explores the vari-
ous qualities of darkness that have contributed to the experience of the city. In recent
history, darkness has been conceptualised negatively, for instance, with the ‘dark side’
and the ‘forces of darkness’ conceived as the opposite of that which enlightens and
illuminates. Perhaps such metaphors testify to earlier urban conditions in which perils
of all sorts lurked in the nocturnal city and doors were closed when darkness fell. Yet
modern illumination has transformed nocturnal urban experience, producing citys-
capes of regulation, hierarchical selectiveness, consumption, fantasy and imagination.
However, this article suggests that the more positive qualities of darkness have been
overlooked: the potential for conviviality and intimacy to be fostered in the dark, the
aesthetics and atmospherics of darkness and shadow, the possibilities for apprehend-
ing the world through other senses and the dismissal of the star-saturated sky.

Keywords: built environment, dark, light, North America, urban space,

western Europe

Introduction
The recent economic downturn across Britain
has stimulated local councils to decrease
expenditure on street lighting by reducing the
number of lights used and cutting back on
lighting up times. Responses to these disrup-
tions to the customary ubiquity of pervasive
illumination have been angry, exemplified by
one local newspaper alleging that such poli-
cies heralded a ‘return to the dark ages’ in
encouraging criminal and anti-social beha-
viour in the darkened streets (Attlee, 2011).
While contentions that darkness encourages a
rising crime rate are unproved (see Atkins
et al., 1991; Farrington and Welsh, 2002;
Pease, 1999; and the CfDS’s discussion on
this topic), these panicky reactions also reveal
the persistent nyctophobia that characterises
fear of the dark across the urban West.

Tim Edensor is in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Sciences, Manchester

Metropolitan University, Chester Street, Manchester, M1 5GD, UK. Email: t.edensor@mmu.ac.uk.

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online

Ó 2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013504009

In this paper, I explore the complex
apprehensions and meanings that surround
urban darkness in the context of the scarcity
of geographical accounts of illuminated and
dark space. The illumination of modern
cities has transformed nocturnal experience,
producing cityscapes of regulation, hier-
archical selectiveness, consumption, fantasy
and imagination, yet thus far, academic writ-
ing has largely focused upon the cityscape by
day. As McQuire (2008, p. 114) remarks,
‘‘there are relatively few accounts to theorise
the impact of electric lighting on the experi-
ence of urban space’’ or conceptualisations
about the dark spaces and times of the con-
temporary city and the qualities and potenti-
alities they offer, despite the potency of what
Sharpe (2008, p. 14) calls a ‘‘second city—
with its own geography and its own set of
citizens’’ that emerges when daylight fades.
I explore the varied geographies of this
‘second city‘ by looking at historical
accounts that discuss mainstream and non-
mainstream conceptions of the night-time
city, using these sources to critically evalu-
ate contemporary nocturnal practices. First,
I investigate negative medieval and early
modern cultural constructions of darkness as
well as the very real perils which lurked after
sundown. I then consider the widespread
expansion of artificial lighting that has trans-
formed urban experience, focusing upon
how modern strategies to illuminate urban
space were entangled with bourgeois values
and concepts that continue to perpetuate the
negative metaphorical resonances of darkness
and impact upon bodies and order.
However, these dominant negative depic-
tions are supplemented by multivalent
understandings of night across history: ‘‘a
diabolical night, nocturnal devotion, honest
labour at night, and a night of drunken
excess and indiscipline’’ (Koslofsky, 2011,
p. 5) as well as a time for conviviality, inti-
macy, experimentation, excitement and
spectacle. Accordingly, I discuss how more
THE GLOOMY CITY 423
positive qualities of darkness have been
expressed by medieval Christian ascetics,
marginalised classes and minorities, and
those drawn to the demi-monde. Indeed,
the dark has promoted a host of potential
activities and desires that are represented via
a nocturnal sublime aesthetic.
Following this, I investigate events and
practices through which darkness, shadow
and gloom have been celebrated as genera-
tive capacities. Accordingly, in the final sec-
tion, I discuss attempts to develop a subtler
approach to lighting and darkness that
avoids dualistic essentialisms and recog-
nises the ways in which the power of each
condition draws upon the relationalities
and innumerable intersections of dark and
light. I draw on recent lighting practices to
suggest that more sophisticated techniques
and aesthetics are challenging long-held
beliefs that the dark should be banished
from the city, arguing that a pervasively
distorted relationship between dark and
light has meant that illumination has lost
much of its potency to produce affective
atmospheres, deliver aesthetically pleasing
environments and create a sense of place.
In any case, in an era of overillumination
and energy wastage, excess lighting will
invariably be curbed, heralding a return to
darker urban nightscapes, more innovative
lighting strategies and a recalibration of the
relationship between light and dark.
Nyctophobic Geographies of the
Medieval and Early Modern City
Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar
Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined;
Till at his second bidding darkness fled,
Light shone, and order from disorder sprung
(Milton, 1667/2008, p. 83).
As Galinier et al. (2010, p. 820) contend, in
medieval times, ‘‘darkness plays an
424 TIM EDENSOR
important symbolic role as a metaphor of
pagan obscurantism—deviancy, monstros-
ity, diabolism’’. By contrast, Christian asso-
ciations of light with the making of the
world, as God rescued the earth from dark-
ness and chaos, or the metaphorical dark-
ness that preceded the advent of Christ, are
deeply embedded in Western thought and
feeling. Koslofsky (2011) identifies the con-
tinuing associations of darkness throughout
the 17th and 18th centuries with witchcraft
and devilry, heresy, sin and death, the
struggle of the devout through ‘the long
night of the soul’ where faith was threat-
ened by temptation and terror, and heretics
gathered unseen.
These negative associations continuously
re-emerge in medieval and early modern
periods when darkness pervaded nocturnal
experience, as Roger Ekirch (2005)
describes. In times of widespread religious
beliefs and superstitions, night was com-
monly conceived as the domain of Satan in
which his powers magnified and assorted
evil spirits lurked: night demons, imps,
hobgoblins, ghouls, boggarts, elves and
witches. Without illumination, the shadowy
world seemed to contain a host of malign
and insubstantial entities, and imagina-
tions, stimulated by ghost stories, folk
beliefs and religiously inspired terrors were
cultivated. Ghosts and poltergeists, and
interpretations of landscape—such as the
notion that ‘will o’ the wisp’ was conjured
by fairies in order to lead travellers to their
doom in swamps—were accompanied by a
host of more concrete perils, reinforcing
pervasive nyctophobia.
As well as these fearful imaginary geogra-
phies, numerous hazards lay in wait for
those venturing out after nightfall in the
medieval town or city. Piles of rubbish,
ditches and culverts carrying waste, excre-
ment-laden streets and overhanging timbers
meant that finding a path was fraught with
risk, and Ekirch (2005, p. 123) reports that
there were many accidents outside towns as
people stumbled into the dangers posed by
‘‘fallen trees, thick underbrush, steep hill-
sides and open trenches’’. In addition, the
footpads, murderers, burglars and arsonists
for whom night proved cover, and the later
increase in violent gangs and criminals in
the early modern city—provided further
reason to stay indoors. To keep these char-
acters at bay, householders performed the
daily ritual of ‘shutting in’, firmly bolting
doors and windows, and positioning swords
and cudgels next to beds in case of noctur-
nal intrusion. Towns typically organised a
watch who wandered the streets or viewed
from towers, guarding against fire, looking
out for interlopers and surveilling the activ-
ities of urban nocturnal wanderers. In the
dark, friends and foes could be mistaken
and all were apt to be subject to suspicion.
Most towns and cities, with their defensive
external walls, locked the gates each night
once sundown approached, prohibiting
entry to those who arrived too late and were
consequently consigned to spend the night
in the greater darkness outside the city.
To ameliorate the pitch black, candles
and lanterns were carried to light the way,
but they could be blown out by the wind.
Later, the services of linkboys could be pur-
chased to provide a guide through the dark
streets, yet suspicions persisted that they
might lead the unwary traveller into the
clutches of the criminal gangs with whom
they associated. Inside the house, candles
provided ‘‘small patches of light amid the
blackness’’ (Ekirch, 2005, p. 100) providing
at least some illumination before inhabi-
tants went to sleep, yet the sheer effort to
maintain this flickering presence was unre-
lenting, as members endeavoured to keep
the wick of the tallow candle trimmed to
prevent excess smoke and its extinguishing.
In medieval times, then, darkness was
the occasion for all manner of unseen,
spectral, ungodly forces to emerge; it was

‘‘crammed full of all that is devilish, like
some grim cupboard under the stair’’
(Jamie, 2003, p. 29), yet these negative
associations continue to linger. They also
influenced the shaping of enlightenment
narratives as the transcendent transforma-
tion from dark to light signified the passage
from medieval ignorance to rational
thought and science, a process that would
‘‘shed light on all things’’ in the pursuit of
‘‘truth, purity, revelation and knowledge’’
(Bille and Sørensen, 2007, p. 272), embody-
ing the ideals of ‘‘illumination, objectivity
and wisdom’’ (Bille and Sørensen, 2007, p.
273). According to Foucault (1980, p. 153),
enlightenment discourse drew attention to
‘‘the pall of gloom which prevents the full
visibility of things, men and truths’’.
Metaphors have persistently been used to
identify darkness with negative understand-
ings of spaces and times—for instance, in
the assignation of Africa as the ‘Dark
Continent’ in racist colonial discourse and
the reluctance of Victorian bourgeois city-
dwellers to travel through ‘Darkest London’.
Negative allusions to darkness continue to
suffuse Western thought and language. We
speak of the ‘Dark Ages’, ‘dark forces’, ‘dark
deeds’, ‘dark thoughts’ and the ‘dark side’,
and fear the interventions of the ‘Prince of
Darkness’. More recently, the emergence of
‘dark tourism’ connotes the contemporary
tendency to visit places of atrocity and
suffering.
Besides generating enduring historical
and geographical imaginaries of the urban
night, the very real medieval and early
modern perils, efforts and restrictions on life
in towns and cities after dark, underscore
the enormous advantages of widespread
artificial lighting. Yet though pervasive, nyc-
tophobia is neither culturally and histori-
cally universal nor was it shared by all people
during these times of scarce illumination as I
discuss shortly. First though, I consider how
darkness has been banished from the city
THE GLOOMY CITY 425
through what Koslofsky (2011) calls ‘noc-
turnalisation’, the expansion of social and
economic activity into the night and the
colonisation of the dark with illumination, a
process that continues to be informed by
moral and modernist discourses, and lasting
fears about darkness.
Nocturnalisation and the
Colonising of Modern Illumination
In the 17th and 18th centuries, European
monarchs adopted new technologies that
manifested a ‘‘new willingness to deploy
and manipulate darkness and night’’
(Koslofsky, 2011, p. 276). Providing lavish,
baroque displays of fireworks and illumi-
nated theatricalised events, they bedazzled
subjects, displayed magnificence and chal-
lenged religious power. This early modern
‘nocturnalisation of spectacle’ prefigured
the more extensive use of the night for
urban pleasure and business, with the
advent of more quotidian street lighting in
the late 17th century. The simultaneous
evolution of shops, theatres, taverns, plea-
sure gardens and cafes fostered the rise of
social activities, the display of conspicuous
consumption and the commercial reputa-
tion of cities. By the end of the 17th cen-
tury, ‘‘consistent and reliable street lighting
had been established in Amsterdam, Paris,
Turin, London and Hamburg’’ (Koslofsky,
2011, p. 2) as darkness was ‘‘slowly trans-
formed from primordial presence to a
more manageable aspect of life’’ (p. 278).
Subsequently, successive technologies of
artificial illumination have opened up the
night to broader, more diverse space-
making social practices as the frontier of
darkness has been progressively pushed
back (Melbin, 1978). This process is synon-
ymous with the industrial age, producing
‘‘a new landscape of modernity’’ (Nasaw,
1999, p. 8) whereby the city has ostensibly
426 TIM EDENSOR
been transformed from ‘‘a dark and trea-
cherous netherworld into a glittering multi-
coloured wonderland’’ (Nasaw, 1999, p. 6)
and darkness ‘‘expelled into the realm of
prehistory and mythology’’ (Schlör, 1998,
p. 57).
At first, the expansion of lighting was
slow and highly uneven. During most of
the 19th century, the poor still used tallow
candles and rushlights, whereas the rich
inclined towards the use of beeswax can-
dles. Later, more expensive, cleaner and
brighter spermaceti candles, together with
whale oil for lamps, were a consequence of
the growth of the whaling industry, and
other fuel included the introduction of the
‘‘oil of grape pips, flax or olives’’ (Attlee,
2011, p. 38). As the speed of innovation
accelerated, lamps fuelled by paraffin and
kerosene were succeeded by the introduc-
tion of gaslight to illuminate houses and
streets and, subsequently, by the incandes-
cent electric bulb in the 1880s, itself gradu-
ally improved with the replacement of
carbon, tungsten and subsequently ductile
tungsten filament, innovations such as
fluorescent and neon lighting, and the use
of glass in building to reveal interior light.
This progressive illumination, documented
in a range of historical studies (Brox, 2010;
Jakle, 2001; Nye, 1992; Schivelbusch, 1988),
included the creation of large streets lined
with bright streetlamps, illuminated shop
windows and advertising, and the private
house, blazing light from its windows
instead of flickering candlelight.
Rather than remaining within their
homes through fear of the dark, people
flooded into urban streets in search of amu-
sement, spectacle, commerce and new
forms of conviviality, as the early modern
city became harbinger of new forms of
experience and living. The urban nightscape
was progressively and radically transformed,
with its ‘great white ways’, illuminated driv-
ing spaces, night shopping areas and
entertainment districts, all contributing to
the evolution of what has been termed the
‘24-hour city’. To reiterate, the literal and
metaphorical meanings of the term ‘enlight-
enment’ have been consistently aligned with
a belief in the progressive function and
moral desirability of banishing darkness in
line with Edison’s maxim that we ‘‘put an
undeveloped human being into an environ-
ment where there is artificial light, and he
will improve’’ (Ekirch, 2005, p. 207). Such
effusions reached their apotheosis in Italian
Futurist Marinetti’s manifesto of 1909, with
the espousal that we should aim to ‘kill the
moonlight’ in the onward surge towards a
dynamic future of technological advance-
ment and efficiency, for moonlight was
synonymous with superstition and myth of
tradition and must be erased by brilliant,
human-made illumination (Attlee, 2011).
Chris Otter (2002, 2008) discusses how
the emergence of illumination was part of
an array of technological applications,
including transport and sewage, that forged
networks and a series of assemblages to
bring greater efficiency and healthier urban
conditions. Crucially, illumination was part
of a bourgeois reordering of the city in
which dense air pollution, lack of lighting,
few windows, overcrowded buildings and
crowded urban spaces were partly amelio-
rated by illuminated streets, more rationally
planned thoroughfares, the use of lighter
materials such as glass through which sun-
light could penetrate and upon which light
could reflect, more spacious settings, clearer
vistas and cleaner air. Lighting facilitated
movement, directed traffic and signified
meanings. Also important were the promo-
tion of surveillance, along with a vigilance
towards the self and others, points of super-
vision, networks of inspection and the
reproduction of privacy (Otter, 2008). Thus
technical infrastructures installed to facili-
tate vision were inscribed with the power
for some to gaze upon and scrutinise the

presence and practices of others, and the
ideals enshrined in these techniques made
‘‘normal and durable the autonomous,
rational judging, distant practices of the lib-
eral subject’’ (Otter, 2008, p. 259), although
they were never ubiquitously applied or
enforced. Respectable bourgeois citizens
supposedly
mastered their passions in public spaces con-
ducive to the exercise of clear, controlled
perception: wide streets, squares and parks
[wherein] sight can prevail, civil conduct be
exposed to view and those eminently
Victorian qualities of reserve and distance
maintained (Otter, 2002, p. 3).
Moreover, these new regimes of urban
ordering deployed techniques to implement
a ‘calculated invisibility’, illuminating that
which should be seen and erasing—through
the absence of lighting—the less desired
features of the urban landscape.
Otter insists that extensive illumination
was thus part of a moral and political reor-
dering of the city, particularly since pro-
moting the self-government necessary for
liberalism as a technology of rule to operate
was dependent upon the production of
socio-sensual environments. For instance,
the dense and dark atmosphere of slums in
which the sense of touch was often required
for navigation, was conceived as synon-
ymous with an ‘ailing sensoria’, and ‘ethi-
cally dangerous’, and ideally should be
replaced by wide, uncluttered and brightly
illuminated spaces. These ‘rookeries’ were
not only covered in darkness by night but
also by day, a darkness conceived as a sign
and cause of moral, intellectual and physi-
cal depravity, ‘‘physically incompatible with
all forms of dynamism: material and intel-
lectual, individual and social’’ (Otter, 2008,
p. 67), and which magnified ‘‘disconnection
and social dislocation’’ as well as the ‘‘circu-
lation of opinion’’ (p. 84).
THE GLOOMY CITY 427
The elevation of emergent bourgeois
sensibilities informed the reproduction of
an imagined geography in which the poor
were intrinsically reduced through their
inhabitation of gloomier realms in which
the restriction of vision perpetrated a form
of sensory coarsening and deprivation.
Consequently, darkness symbolised the
decadence that had to be overcome in
order to create a city of responsible, auton-
omous, rationally oriented, liberal citizens.
Yet although this sensory and spatial moral
assignation became dominant, it was con-
tested, for as we will see, darkness cannot
be entirely banished and is actively sought
by some city-dwellers.
Moreover, despite notions that the devel-
opment of illumination has been ubiqui-
tous and all-pervasive, Otter reveals that
lighting is an ongoing, largely contingent
and improvisational process. The patchy
and partial replacement of gas lighting by
electric lighting, for instance, exemplifies
how the history of illumination is charac-
terised by ‘‘multiple, overlapping perceptual
patterns and practices rather than singular
paradigms’’ (Otter, 2008, p. 10). Lighting
developments were thus typified by ad hoc
arrangements, local strategies, competing
technological systems, preferred aesthetics,
disparities in wealth and power; in short, ‘‘a
teeming, muddled multiplicity of visual
practices that cannot be reduced to one
hegemonic modality’’ (Otter, 2008, pp.
254–255). Accordingly, in the early 20th
century and beyond, new forms of illumi-
nation co-existed with older forms, tastes
and technologies—with gas lamps, oil
lamps and candles. There was and is no
hegemony of illumination practice and,
although this diversity has diminished with
the expansion of electric lighting, urban
illumination appears to be entering a new
era of innovation with an increase in the
variety of equipment, techniques and aes-
thetics, as I discuss shortly.
428 TIM EDENSOR
Nevertheless, Otter (2008, p. 335) points
out how artificial light rapidly became ‘‘a
symbol and a determinant of urban differ-
entiation’’ and Schlör (1998, p. 65) concurs,
observing how the brighter the light in the
centres, ‘‘the more starkly do the outlines of
the darker regions stand out’’. This is under-
scored by Jane Brox’s contention that the
illuminated shop windows, signs, theatre
entrances, homes and pubs in the commer-
cial, prestigious, central and thus bright
areas of the city contrasted with that space
regarded as ‘another country’, the dark
neighbourhoods of the poor, in which ‘‘old
light retreated into the far streets and lesser
known neighbourhoods, disregarded and
disparaged in relation to the new’’ (Brox,
2010, p. 104). Similarly, the electrification of
suburban and rural places occurred decades
after that of urban centres.
This geographical inequality in the distri-
bution of urban illumination remains with
an unevenness in brightness, quality and
purpose. The luminosity of streets in
American cities perpetrates a spatial hierar-
chy largely determined by the heaviness of
traffic and the perceived relative importance
of main streets, arterial roads, secondary
business streets and varieties of domestic
streets (Jakle, 2001). Furthermore, light
projected onto buildings associated with
local or national state functions, heritage
sites, monuments and memorials reinscribe
the identities and values of the powerful on
space, especially evident with the glaring
illumination of high-rise corporate build-
ings. Accordingly, as McQuire submits, a
‘‘new ‘map’ of the city’’ (McQuire, 2008,
p. 124) was produced which floodlit key
buildings but cast other sites into darkness,
effectively manufacturing a reduction in
urban difference and complexity, flattening
out the city’s rough edges—those unlit mate-
rial absences such as areas assigned the status
of ‘ghettos’ and ‘slums’ (Gilbert, 2000).
Practices of illumination have thus created
‘‘new centres of power and new margins of
exclusion’’ (Koslofsky, 2011, p. 280). For
instance, the early modern coffeehouses,
clubs and theatres constituted new spaces of
gendered and class exclusion. Yet nocturnali-
sation has been continuously contested.
Denizens of the Dark and the
Nocturnal Sublime
As Williams argues, urban darkness is always
socially mediated by human practices and
values
Night spaces are neither uniform nor homo-
geneous. Rather they are constituted by social
struggles about what should and should not
happen in certain places during the dark of
the night (Williams, 2008, p. 514).
Darkness is profoundly ambivalent and
multiply contested, and has not merely been
construed as terrifying, fostering deviance
and disorder, and antithetical to enlighten-
ment and reason, but has also been posi-
tively valued. We can gain a sense of the
generative capacities of darkness in by con-
sidering alternative pre-modern nocturnal
values. Fascinatingly, Koslofsky (2011)
draws attention to the growth of mystical
theology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe,
through which religious devotion was incul-
cated by and in the dark, revalued as a con-
dition conducive to profundity and beauty.
Persecuted Christian ascetics removed to
caves, where other sensory distractions were
few, to seek the acquisition of divine knowl-
edge. Darkness inspired new forms of piety,
metaphorically encapsulating the religious
struggle towards the light and the path from
earthly gloom to illuminated afterlife, and
the invisibility, ineffability and inexpressi-
bility of the divine.
In a secular vein, in medieval Europe
night was not conceived as a single stretch

but was typically marked and experienced
by the regular rhythms of ‘‘sunset, shutting
in, candle-lighting, bed-time, midnight, the
dead of night, cock-crow and dawn’’
(Ekirch, 2005, p. 138). Ekirch also explains
that, before the advent of industrial work
schedules and widespread illumination,
sleep patterns were characterised by a first
sleep followed by a second, lighter slumber.
In between these two spells, numerous noc-
turnal activities took place. Although some
worked, for many this was a welcome inter-
lude from work, with the freedom to
dream, converse, have sex and tell stories.
Understandings and practices that posi-
tively valued darkness also contested the hege-
monic ideals that largely shaped the modern
illumination of the city. Robert Williams
focuses on how darkness provides a cloak for
alternative and oppositional practices that
temporally disorganise space, contributing to
the ongoing contestation between the order-
ing and disordering of the night
Because of its transgressive meanings and
societally harmful uses, darkness threatens to
deterritorialize the rationalizing order of soci-
ety . when it obscures, obstructs, or other-
wise hinders the deployment of the strategies,
techniques, and technologies (Williams, 2008,
p. 518).
Criminal activities, sedition and plotting,
political opposition, illicit love affairs, sub-
cultural practices, urban exploration
(Garrett, 2013), fly-posting and graffiti take
place under cover of darkness and the
homeless may sleep without being disturbed
if they confine themselves to more marginal
urban spaces. Bryan Palmer similarly con-
ceives darkness as a time for transgression,
as well as disconsolation and alienation, the
‘‘time for daylight’s dispossessed—the devi-
ant, the dissident, the different’’ (Palmer,
2000, pp. 16–17), the opportunity for clan-
destine, revolutionary and conspiratorial
THE GLOOMY CITY 429
activities that foster the imaginative, crea-
tive ‘resources of otherness’ that challenge
the daytime norms of commerce, economic
rationality and regulation. In the dark, per-
secuted minorities, marginal groups and the
lower orders may escape domineering mas-
ters, carve out time and space outside work-
ing time, achieve ‘‘freedom from both
labour and social scrutiny’’ (Ekirch, 2005,
p. 227), and organise politically. Night thus
remains that time when witches, prostitutes,
bohemians, beatniks, drug dealers, rioters,
revolutionaries and conspirators, heretics
and blues and jazz musicians come out to
play, plot and do business, nurturing ideas
that darkness is associated with libidinal
desires, transgressive sexualities and mysti-
cal practices, providing a realm in which
‘‘counters to . conventional wisdom find a
space to grow and growl’’ (Palmer, 2000,
p. 454).
Besides these subaltern nocturnal prac-
tices, opposition to early gas illumination
took the form of lantern smashing, erecting
‘‘a wall of darkness, so to speak, protecting an
area from incursion by government forces’’
(Schivelbusch, 1988, p. 106). Strategies to
avoid surveillance must adapt to new tech-
niques to reveal that which lies under cover
of darkness—contemporaneously intensified
illumination, the use of helicopters with their
searchlights and thermal imaging technolo-
gies and night-vision cameras. In addition,
with the emergence of the 24-hour city, for-
merly marginal urban areas are displaced as
legitimate night-revellers and commerce
move in as part of a subtle and shifting spatial
politics whereby certain spaces are contin-
gently claimed and abandoned in favour of
less regulated realms by less respectable night
habitués.
Irrespective of ongoing attempts to regu-
late nocturnal space, the reconfiguring of
illumination and darkness have also con-
tributed to geographical defamiliarisation,
uncertainty and fascination, constitutive
430 TIM EDENSOR
aspects of urban modern experience.
Artificial light has added illusory qualities
and a ‘technological uncanny’ through the
transformation of the city into a phantas-
magorical realm, abounding with ‘‘the
shadowy hauntings of the fleeting and
insubstantial’’ (Collins and Jervis, 2008,
p. 1). Distances are difficult to fathom, illu-
minated buildings appear to float, areas of
darkness are impregnable to sense-making
and scale and proportion may be deceptive
as light enters ‘‘the optical unconscious as
an ephemeral environment consumed in
distraction and producing a range of unex-
pected effects’’ (McQuire, 2008, p. 212).
The modern city has thus become ‘‘a per-
ceptual laboratory’’ (McQuire, 2008, p. 114)
and although an initial sense of wonder
towards electric lighting has been replaced
by routine apprehension, the urban night-
scape still possesses the power to thrill. In
this oneiric city, ‘‘exhilarating and disor-
ienting to its inhabitants’’ (McQuire, 2008,
p. 122) space has been opened up to trans-
gression, fantasy and experimentation.
Besides being available to immediate
nocturnal experience, the phantasmagorical
night-time city has been promoted in
numerous cultural representations. Most
importantly, the rise of a nocturnal sublime,
a ‘‘realm of fascination and fear which inha-
bits the edges of our existence, crowded by
shadows, plagued by uncertainty, and
shrouded in intrigue’’ (Sharpe, 2008, p. 9),
has romanticised the urban night as a time
of libidinal charge and transgression, replete
with ‘‘sensualities and sociabilities, aesthetics
and the art of resistance’’, both alluring and
frightening, simultaneously a ‘‘dark moment
of human estrangement’’ (Palmer, 2000,
p. 394) and potentially replete with thrills
and adventures. For instance, as Sharpe
(2008, p. 7) asserts, representations of New
York City after dark variously suggest ‘‘a
snare, a canvas, a foreign land, a fantasy, a
stage’’. He highlights the contributions of
key artists and photographers, including the
images of lurid accidents and alienation cap-
tured by Weegee and the paintings of
Edward Hopper. The fantastic urban chiar-
oscuro of film noir is specifically organised
around portraying these dream-like, unset-
tling dimensions: flawed characters and
chaotic lives, despair and decadence, danger,
erotic suggestion, by employing techniques
such as weird camera angles, smoke and
rain, harshly lit and twisted profiles, reflec-
tions and mirrors, shafts of disorientating
light and corresponding pools of darkness
and a cast of femmes fatales, corrupt offi-
cials, gangsters and hard-bitten, jaded heroes
marooned in a mire of greed, lust and cor-
ruption. According to Palmer (2000, p. 392),
film noir captures ‘‘the distorted shadows of
night’s always unfulfilled dreams, sliding
inevitably into the sinister hole of nightmar-
ish fears’’ in a nocturnal, gothic Babylon.
Significantly, this sensual and aesthetic
reconfiguring of the night foregrounds
phantasmagorical qualities in which dark-
ness is complementary to light, a sensual
(dis)ordering and revaluing that contrasts
with the rationalising and moral bourgeois
order sought by those who would regulate
the night-time city through illumination.
This exemplifies the ambivalence that con-
tinuously surrounds darkness and the rela-
tional dynamics between light and dark
that offer infinite potentialities in shaping
the experience of urban space.
Reconsidering the Relationality
of Light and Dark
Gallan and Gibson (2011) critique the
rather simplistic dualisms between night
and day, dark and light, binary conceptions
that suggest absolute opposition and dimin-
ish the diversity of each condition and the
ways in which they interpenetrate each
other. Such essentialisms are further

undermined by the actual cultural diversity
in practising and understanding the night,
where different local and national rhythms
and temporalities still vary enormously
(Edensor, 2006, 2010). Moreover, as already
discussed, darkness and illumination are
loaded with contested values: what may be
a quiet and affective site of gloom, for some
may be a realm of terror and suspicion for
others; and what might be experienced as a
brightly illuminated and convivial scene pro-
moting commerce and conviviality for city
planners and shopkeepers, may be conceived
by marginal groups as a harsh realm of sur-
veillance and exclusion; finally, what is for
some a scene of safety and cheeriness, might
for astronomers testify to the dilution, even
disappearance of the nocturnal celestial sky.
Dualistic notions of night and day have
been complicated by the expansion of
urban lighting, which seemingly extends
the day, and assertions of an unbalanced
relationship between the two are evident in
longstanding concerns about the minimis-
ing of the dark through excessive illumina-
tion. Otter reveals that, historically, new
forms of illumination were not seamlessly
accepted. He draws attention to complaints
about the glaring dazzle of early electric
lighting, reactions against the threat to the
aesthetic and sensual qualities of the city,
and the ways in which desires for privacy
and subtlety trumped totalising visions of
illuminated omniscience. Indeed, urban
dwellers rejected glaring electric arc lamps.
Schlör describes the acute loss felt by many
Parisians following the return of illumina-
tion to the city’s streets after the dark years
of the First World War, and Brox shows
how urban dwellers, rebutting modernist
hyperbole about progress, felt nostalgic for
gaslight shortly after its replacement by
electric illumination, opining that
its intimacies seemed all the more desirable,
and people instinctively clung to its lingering
THE GLOOMY CITY 431
form, the ghost in the mist (Brox, 2010,
p. 89).
As I have inferred, in the first half of 20th
century (in the US), the ‘‘night was made
visually complex in its illumination because
of the various overlapping technologies’’
(Jakle, 2001, p. 57), where oil and gas light-
ing persisted along with numerous forms of
electric lighting. However, Jakle contends
that, with the intensified saturation of elec-
tric light
much of the romance and mystery of the
urban night evaporated, street lighting, in its
excess, no longer capturing and holding
attention as spectacle (Jakle, 2001, p. 15).
Thus while in the earlier modern years,
‘‘people moved in and out of illumination’’
(Jakle, 2001, p. 104), according to critics such
as Jakle, the diversity of the early modern
city, with its various shades of darkness,
shadow, glare and sparkle, has been lost.
In other, often non-Western settings,
however, there may be a more subtle mix
between areas of illumination, darkness and
shadow. In market areas of urban India
and North Africa shortly after sundown,
illumination is far less bright than in most
Western cities and yet the streets are full of
people, undeterred by this gloomier envi-
ronment. It seems, as least to this Western
visitor, that there is a more compelling
affective atmosphere, as other sensory
experiences emerge. Sound takes on differ-
ent qualities (of timbre, resonance, sharp-
ness and muffledness) with the clamour of
chatter and recorded music, and awareness
of smells similarly assails the body, with the
acrid scent of rotting vegetables and sewage
accompanied by incense and food stalls.
Moreover, while it may seem that the abil-
ity to walk seamlessly through brightly illu-
minated streets is an indisputable blessing,
the need to pick a path carefully through
432 TIM EDENSOR
the relative gloom enlivens the body, shar-
pens the senses and makes one aware of
others, producing a heightened, tactile
sense of mobility. These sensual and affec-
tive affordances of gloomier spaces remind
us that the normative glare of Western
streets is historically and culturally contex-
tual, and far from universal.
As Davey observes, in a time where illu-
mination is more substantial than ever
before
we generally continue to pursue quantity at
the expense of quality of illumination when
technological development is offering so
many new opportunities (Bille and Sørensen,
2007, p. 271).
Illumination remains sacrosanct for most
local governments in their strategies for
managing the urban night, yet the pleasure
that greets the darkness that emerges when
maintenance fails and systems break down
underlines the relationality between dark
and light. Accounts of blackouts, often sti-
mulating media discussion in terms of
‘calamity’ and ‘crisis’, when televisions and
lights are curtailed and candles are lit to
create a sense of specialness, reveal this
excitement. Many Britons nostalgically
refer to the rekindling of the bonds between
family and friends huddled round the glow
of candlelight during the blackouts of the
1970s and during the more recent New
York blackout of 2003, Yuill (2004) identi-
fies ‘‘a heightened sense of being’’ and the
surfacing of calm, generosity and convivial-
ity as part of a ‘‘collective effervescence’’
that responds to the special conditions of
darkness. In response to a temporary sus-
pension of the normative lighting order,
and foregrounding attributes facilitated by
its absence, blackouts produce a liminal
time and space in which ‘‘one must sud-
denly live in the here and now’’ (Nye, 2010,
p. 35).
After the Second World War in London,
the absence of light during the nightly black-
outs was synonymous with war-time depri-
vation and, during the celebrations marking
the war’s end, the floodlighting of nationally
iconic buildings, such as those in Trafalgar
Square, was euphorically received by the
emotive VE Day crowds as a blaze of flood-
lights illuminating the built environment to
commemorate symbolically and affectively
how the nation had survived in contrast to
the metaphorical and actual darkness of
continuous blackout (Sumartojo, 2011).
Crucially, the effectiveness of this official
spectacle was dependent upon the contrast
with a pre-existing darkness, highlighting
how the experience of darkness and light are
conditioned by their relationality. Similarly,
Schlör (1998, p. 63) remarks on how the
Parisian boulevard was powerfully experi-
enced as inner space because it contrasted
‘‘like an island of light against the surround-
ing darkness’’. Persistent and excessive illu-
mination thus loses its power if there is no
darkness from which it can be distinguished.
Challenging Excessive Illumination
and Revaluing the Dark
Ingold maintains that
light is the experience of inhabiting the
world of the visible, and that its qualities—of
brilliance and shade, tint and colour, and
saturation—are variations, upon this experi-
ence (Ingold, 2000, p. 265).
Yet the homogenising of urban lightscapes
perhaps impairs the depth and diversity of
this experience. In many urban settings,
instead of producing an environment in
which ‘‘different types and modes of light
create different experiences of colour, and
. reflect the experience of things differ-
ently’’ (Bille and Sørensen, 2007, p. 270),

expanses of homogeneous lighting bleach
out contours and colours. A consequence of
the over-riding imperative for the enhance-
ment of mobility, security and commerce,
the prevalence of overillumination and the
subsequent diminution of the potential of
light have culminated in the production of
nocturnal ‘blandscapes’. Increasingly, light
designers express disenchantment towards
the ubiquitous use of sodium vapour light-
ing and ‘‘its nearly monochromatic yellow
light’’ that bestows on ‘‘people and things a
pale, washed out appearance’’ (Jakle, 2001,
p. 84), banishing darkness so that all is sub-
sumed within an ambient glare. Inventive
and sophisticated forms of lighting fail to
stand out and architectural features fade
into obscurity when instead, their careful
illumination might charm the nightscape
and introduce more sustainable forms of
lighting. In addition, electricity for a typical
sodium street light costs between £20–40
per year, no small sum when the tens of
thousands of fixtures are added together.
Five kinds of light pollution are conven-
tionally identified by those campaigning
against excessive illumination: ‘light tres-
pass’ (invasive lighting—say from a neigh-
bour’s porch light); ‘light clutter’ (confusing
and chaotic lighting); ‘overillumination’
(unnecessary lighting such as large office
blocks illuminated all night); ‘glare’
(wherein contrast between dark and light is
too great and can result in temporary blind-
ing for pedestrians of motorists); and ‘sky-
glow’ (where light is uncontained and
leaches into the sky, as with the red glow
that surrounds cities).1 According to the
Campaign for Dark Skies (n.d.), good light-
ing shines on the ground where it is needed.
These notions are foregrounded during the
annual Earth Hour,2 in which swathes of
lighting are turned off, defamiliarising the
nightscapes of major cities. In addition, eco-
logical light pollution may produce disor-
ientation and transform and disrupt the
THE GLOOMY CITY 433
breeding, communication, eating and prey-
ing habits of animals and plants, co-inhabi-
tants and constituents of the city (Rich and
Longcore, 2006).
Perhaps the proliferation of illumination
has also resulted in contemporary practices
involving departure from the city in search
of darkness and affective illuminated land-
scapes, echoing the longstanding attraction
of fireworks displays and son et lumière
shows. The emergence of dark skies loca-
tions, for instance at Flagstaff in Arizona,
the Dark Sky Park in Scotland’s Galloway
Forest (Edensor, 2013), the Channel Island
of Sark, and most recently, Exmoor National
Park, attracts tourists who wish to witness
starry skies without the interference of ambi-
ent glow. Similarly, there has recently been a
growth of tourism to Iceland, Canada and
Norway to experience the aurora borealis in
Arctic venues far from urban lights, where
darkness is a prerequisite for a desirable
experience (Edensor, 2011). Rural attractions
which depend upon the imaginative use of
illumination in dark spaces are similarly
developing, as Morris (2011) demonstrates
in her discussion of the 2005 temporary
night-time installation, The Storr: Unfolding
Landscape, on the Isle of Skye. Similarly, the
Enchanted Forest, an annual display in a
Scottish forest, combines myth, music and
history, with trees and foliage highlighted by
a melange of lighting forms against a dark
background.3 In such examples, the attri-
butes of darkness are not synonymous with
superstition, murky thoughts and illicit
behaviour but replete with generative poten-
tialities and affective possibilities.
As Nina Morris insists, the efficacy of
both light and dark cannot lie in the tri-
umph of light over dark but in the instability
between the two conditions, in the ways in
which they are both present in each other,
and condition the reception of each other.
Because, ‘‘perception shuttles between
extremes of light and dark’’, she argues,
434 TIM EDENSOR
darkness is ‘‘situated, partial and relational’’
(Morris, 2011, p. 316). For instance, the gla-
mour of the bright lights of the big city
depends upon the dark amidst which they
shine and on the darker spaces against
which they are contrasted. Light is most
alluring when it is situated against a dark
backdrop. For instance, new modes of illu-
minating architectural features, which are
far less noticeable during daylight, engage
the eye because they are highlighted against
a dark sky, and hence intensify the experi-
ence of unheralded features.
More subtle accounts of lighting that
admit the power of gloom highlight this
relationality. Offering a counter-aesthetic to
illuminated brightness in his extraordinary
Praise of Shadows, originally published in
1933, Junichiro Tanizaki laments the spread
of Western lighting, and its negative effects
on traditional Japanese aesthetics of place,
person and temporality. Tanizaki provides
an exquisite depiction of the appearance of
Japanese lacquerware in a darkened room
where its ‘‘florid patterns recede into the
darkness, conjuring an inexpressible aura of
depth and mystery, of overtones but partly
suggested’’ as the sheen of the lacquer
‘‘reflects the wavering candlelight, announ-
cing the draughts that found their way into
the quiet room, luring one into a state of
reverie’’; and, in the evening
the thin impalpable, faltering light, picked up
as though little rivers were running through
the room, collecting little pools here and
there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the
night itself (Tanizaki, 1933/2001, p. 24).
He further celebrates the effects of candle-
light in big darkened rooms, the dark depths
of alcoves and recesses, so that the beauty of
a Japanese room, he asserts, ‘‘depends upon
a variation of shadows, heavy shadows
against light shadows’’ (Tanizaki, 1933/
2001, p. 29) in contra-distinction to what
he regards as the overornamentation of
Western rooms.
Tanizaki’s celebration of darkness, and
the heightened experiences it produces, is
echoed in the longstanding expression of
Danish cultural identity in the annual pro-
duction of the condition of hygge through-
out the long winter months. Hygge can be
characterised as the creation of a particular
atmosphere of warmth, conviviality and
intimacy through the use of candles and
firelight, in which comfortable conversa-
tion, drinking and dining take place in a
confined space. Bille and Sørensen contend
that
To achieve hygge the amount of light should
be sufficient for the members of the social
group to see and gain eye contact with each
other, while not illuminating the room com-
pletely (Bille and Sørensen, 2007, p. 275).
As in Tanizaki’s account, the power of
the lighting effect is conditioned by the
co-presence of darkness.
Other contemporary urban endeavours
attempt to recalibrate the relationship
between dark and light. More practically, a
reappraisal of the qualities of gloom and
discontent about the lack of subtle illumina-
tion are promoting the gradual develop-
ment of innovative urban lighting strategies.
Most obvious has been the replacement of
incandescent electric bulbs with lower wat-
tage bulbs, notably the more energy-
efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for
street and festive lighting, initiating a more
extensive future use. Among other new
techniques that direct and shield are lumi-
naires to reduce ambient glare minimise the
loss of light to the sky and contain it within
discrete illuminated realms. Research has
also investigated the implementation of
motion- or heat-sensitive devices that pro-
vide illumination as they sense bodies but
dim once they have passed. While the

adoption of these varied and energy-effi-
cient forms of illumination proceeds slowly,
light designers occasionally form collectives
and through ‘guerilla lighting’ hint at the
future possibilities of inventive illumina-
tion, by using low-cost, low-energy portable
lighting devices as they move through the
city without authorisation, transforming
nightscapes.
The use of lighting to create evocative
and affective atmospheres at specific light
festivals also marks a shift in approaches to
urban illumination (Alves, 2007; Cochrane,
2004; Entwistle and Becker, 2006; Schulte-
Roemer, 2012). For instance, the Fête des
Lumières in Lyon, attracting around four
million visitors each year, serves as a
cutting-edge venue for lighting displays,
spectacles and installations, utterly trans-
forming the city for four nights in
December.5 Crucially, the festival has
served as the catalyst for the wholesale re-
envisioning of everyday lighting across the
city, as ecological and aesthetic considera-
tions are mobilised in the production of
enormously varied site-specific lighting
installations. The urban nightscape is not
one of generic lighting that suffuses space
with a similar appearance and feel, but of
multiple colours, different intensities and
peculiar surprises. New modes of illuminat-
ing unheralded architectural features
engage the eye more intensely because they
are highlighted against a dark sky. And
because most lighting is situated below roof
height, the sky remains dark and star-filled,
enhancing the effects of illumination.
Such approaches are spreading, as exem-
plified in the charter for urban illumination
of the international association of lighting
designers, Lighting Urban Community
International (LUCI), which advocates a
responsible lighting strategy that pays
attention to the social and environmental
impacts of lighting in providing sustainable
illumination and ‘‘reducing social and
THE GLOOMY CITY 435
economic inequalities’’.6 In creating dis-
tinctive nightscapes that foreground crea-
tivity and enhance heritage and identity,
they argue that ‘‘Cities must aim at creating
comfortable light environments and protect
darker areas’’ and ‘‘make starlight visible
again’’.7 Such perspectives have also been
adopted by local authorities, as with
Eindhoven’s Lighting Master Plan, which
specifies that ‘‘a respect for darkness is a
key tenet’’, and to that end has reduced
advertising light in the later evening hours.8
Conclusion
In this paper, I have shown that particular
conceptions of light and dark are persistent,
have a time-honoured genealogy, but have
continuously been contested. Medieval ima-
ginary geographies of darkness have sown
the seeds of enduring nyctophobia, negative
understandings of darkness that have been
entrenched through modern regulatory
schemes and bourgeois values. Yet as I have
also insisted, there have also been those who
contest these depictions and have a happier
relationship with the dark, from Christian
ascetics to subaltern political groups and
the habitués of a nocturnal demi-monde.
Currently, darkness is increasingly being
sought away from the city in dark skies
locations. Moreover, the flip side of moder-
nist ordering of time and space is evident in
the alluring, baroque representations of the
nocturnal sublime.
However, rather than considering the
nocturnal and diurnal, and light and dark-
ness, to be opposing states, I have argued
that it is more productive and realistic to
develop a relational understanding of these
conditions. Neither condition is absolute,
as Tanizaki’s aesthetics and the social pro-
duction of hygge highlight. For instance,
there are varying degrees of gloom, shadow,
glare and brightness. Accordingly, as Alves
436 TIM EDENSOR
speculates, ‘‘night and darkness may be
found anew’’ for darkness ‘‘reaffirms the
symbolic power underlying the use of light’’
and accordingly, ‘‘light only puts on a show
if it breaks out of darkness’’ thus ‘‘the con-
trast between light and shadow needs to be
redressed’’ (Alves, 2007, p. 1254). These
conditioning relationalities draw attention
to the multiplicities of artificial illumina-
tion and the potential for developing more
sophisticated approaches to lighting the
urban night in ways that honour darkness.
Styles and aesthetics of illumination are
increasingly contested and multifarious
(Edensor and Millington, 2013), and light
designers are gradually developing more
sophisticated lighting schemes that move
away from the blanket homogeneity of
sodium lighting, as is evidenced in innova-
tive urban lighting strategies and festivals of
light. These events inculcate an apprecia-
tion of the subtle degrees and shades of
dark and light, of ‘‘heavy shadows against
lighter shadows’’ (Bille and Sørensen, 2007,
p. 266), and of strikingly bright or glowing
lights against the darkness, sustaining a
more subtle investigation into what Bille
and Sørensen call the ‘poetics of light’.
Rather than being lamented, the re-
emergence of urban darkness, although not
akin to the medieval and early-modern
gloom that pervaded city space, might be
conceived as an enriching and a re-enchant-
ment of the temporal and spatial experience
of the city at night. Indeed, the melding of
illumination and darkness has a unique
capacity to transform space and generate
atmospheres (Böhme, 1993; Edensor,
2012). Civic boosterism and marketing
increasingly utilise techniques of illumina-
tion as part of neoliberal commercial inten-
sification across time and space, developing
festive events as part of a growing night-
time economy, but this is accompanied by
increasing concerns to develop sustainable
lighting and more innovative design. These
fertile conditions, along with inevitable
future imperatives to cut back energy con-
sumption, promise to introduce more
subtle forms of illumination that will re-
enchant the night time city and instantiate
more sophisticated relationalities between
light and dark. This accords with Jane
Bennett’s (2001) disavowal of the notion
that modernity is necessarily a disenchanting
process that alienates people from the world
and each other. For artificial illumination,
an integral component of urban modernity,
also contains potential for enchantment, a
condition that fuels the potential to enhance
playfulness, exhilarates through encounter
with the unexpected in the realm of the
mundane, and facilitates affective attach-
ments and communication and thereby
opens up possibilities for ethical generosity.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial or not-
for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. See the Geogise website, on light pollution
(www.geogise.com/environmental-issues/light-
pollution.php; accessed 10 October 2011).
2. Earth Hour (www.earthhour.org/Homepage.
aspx; accessed 10 October 2011).
3. The Enchanted Forest (www.enchantedfores-
t.org.uk/default.aspx; accessed 10 October
2011).
4. Guerilla Lighting (http://guerrillalighting.net/;
accessed 10 October 2011).
5. Fête des Lumières, Lyon 5–8 December 2009
(www.lumieres.lyon.fr/lumieres/sections/en).
6. LUCI Charter on urban lighting (www.
luciassociation.org/images/stories/PDF/luci%20
charter%20on%20urban%20lighting.pdf; accessed
10 October 2011).
7. See note 6.
8. Light London case studies (www.artintheopen.
org.uk/pdf/LightLondon_Case_Studies.pdf;
accessed 14 October 2011).

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