Co-creating Public Lighting Technology and Policy for Informal Settlements

The transdisciplinary research project «Virtual Environments as a Decision-making Tool for Public Lighting in Bogotá» focuses on lighting technology and its performance in Bogotá’s densifying urban environments. New lighting approaches are co-created together with informal settlement dwellers and tested with Colombian policy-makers through a Virtual Environment.

Many self-built luminaires are installed in informal settlements by residents when no "formal" public lighting is provided by the authorities. The aims of this study are to analyse such existing "informal" lighting technology, to co-develop alternative lighting approaches based on this analysis, and to empirically evaluate these approaches using novel visualisation techniques with policy-makers. Through this, informal settlement-specific lighting technology will be developed that on the one hand incorporates promising design solutions from the current "informal" luminaires, and on the other overcomes shortcomings in existing lighting approaches.

To investigate informal lighting systems, an ethnographic multi-method case-study was conducted in an 183 m long pedestrian street in Bogotá’s settlement Caracolí. This included night-time street observations, walkthroughs, resident interviews, a dwelling construction survey, a lighting audit and illuminance measurements.

Michael Walczak and David M. Kretzer are both doctoral students, conducting research at the Urban Research Incubator of the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy as well as the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design from Prof. Hubert Klumpner, and the Laboratory for Energy Conversion from Prof. Reza Abhari.