Advocacy to make cities more vibrant after dark

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Leni Schwendinger wants to see cities become as vibrant at night as they are during the day. The opportunity for improvement is vast, according to the artist and lighting specialist.

“When it’s dark for a designer or artist, there is quite a canvas,” she said.

That canvas is largely ignored, according to Schwendinger. But she’s hoping to change that by traveling around the world emphasizing the importance of the nighttime experience.

Here, Schwendinger is spending a week speaking to a studio of Portland State University architecture students, stressing the importance of incorporating nighttime elements into their designs. She also led a tour of downtown Portland to demonstrate how urban environments can be improved.

“Urban lighting leads to nighttime design,” she said. “We bring in an interdisciplinary group to approach a given district that wants to manage the nighttime in a positive way.”

When planners focus on nighttime environments, they often don’t give much thought about livability, said Jeff Schnabel, a PSU associate architecture professor who is leading the studio.

“Our planning documents and our design guidelines, regarding nighttime design, are frankly pretty narrowly focused on navigation and the perception of safety,” he said. “They aren’t on things like the character and quality of spaces, making really good people places at night.”

Typically, urban planning goals are to flood areas with as many foot-candles of light as possible. In that quest for security, light frequently shines upon undesirable objects and places. Finding the proper balance of security and an inviting environment is a major aspect of Schnabel’s class.

“In the community of Portland there are so many dumpsters that have really large, bright security lights over (them),” Schnabel said. “That means, at night, those are centerpieces of the show. I think we can probably all agree that we could probably lose our dumpster lights.”

The prioritization of what is lit up at night isn’t just a question of safety; it’s a question of economics.

“My students a couple years ago did a quick survey of the central city and there were 30 times more billboards illuminated than there were works of art,” Schnabel said. “The light at the bridgeheads coming into town on the billboards, those dominate the skyline.”

At the same time, the art pieces that are illuminated are lit at such low levels they are often drowned out.

“What is the nighttime identity that we want to have for our community?” Schnabel asked. “(We need) to start to have these kinds of conversations where we prioritize what we want to have seen at night and what we are OK with kind of disappearing back into the shadows.”

Urban planners aren’t the only ones neglecting to consider the effects of design on urban nightlife. Architecture schools often fail to encourage students to think past daylight hours, according to graduate student Kagan Reardon.

“In my undergraduate studies, it was more about creating design principles, and I didn’t address nighttime ecology or economy enough in that,” she said. “My drawings or models represented daytime.”

Schwendinger is trying to bring an artist’s sensibility to how a cityscape is treated after dark. Improving residents’ nighttime experience is about more than lighting, she said.

“It’s really about city life around the clock,” she said. “The overarching goal is to create nighttime design as a profession.”