Right to light

摘要

Light is a relational material. What defines it for human experience is not that it is somehow immaterial - though many cultures, including Western ones, have a wide vocabulary for framing light metaphorically and abstractly, splitting it off from its very physical presence in everyday life. Light is an unusual material in that human vision does not perceive it directly but only in how it shines on surfaces made up of other materials. To talk about 'lighting public spaces' is immediately to enter into analyses of complex urban assemblages and social practices-to ask how lighting arrangements participate in structuring space and time. It is instantly a conversation about social and political values too: what are lights shining on? What is deemed so important that it should be illuminated, and what is not? Who decided, and how, on the basis of what power or political process? Lighting is always a matter of material culture, of how societies materialise and perform their values and relationships, their dynamics and conflicts. Lighting can also reveal deep conflicts around who can participate, and under what conditions, in civic spaces.