People’s Perception of Urban Lighting in Public Space (original) (raw)

The majority of the world’s population lives in and around urban centers. In order to enhance the quality of life in the city, architects, urban planners and designers include a variety of aesthetic and functional aspects. Appropriate lighting is one of those aspects that can provide significant benefits by enhancing the aesthetic value and perception of the urban environment. This research is an effort to establish new perspectives in urban lighting design by identifying people’s preferences in urban lighting through an exploratory research. It defines the urban lighting design as a discipline that aims at improving the quality of urban space for the users which is missing because of the lack of exploration of and in accordance with the preferences of people. It aims to focus on the preferences of people in urban lighting for a critical analysis of the existing urban lighting design discourse. It is to find out the people’s evaluation of urban lighting and what are the perceived attributes that elicit certain emotional reactions: preference, interest, comfort and safety. Based on questionnaire survey in the city of Pune as case study it will examine the relationship between the perceived attributes of lighting and emotional appraisals, and find out the variables of lighting which are salient to the users for preferring and disliking a lit urban scene. This is aimed to help architects, urban designers in identification of new variables and understanding their importance of them for people, and in turn, present urban lighting designs which have good public appeal.