The More-Than-Human Night
A lighting designer's argument for darkness as infrastructure.
The night is often understood through a deficit model.
A lack of visibility. A lack of activity. A lack of safety. A lack of productivity.
Across cities, landscapes, and infrastructures, artificial light is routinely deployed as the solution to these absences. Light arrives to extend human agency, enabling movement, commerce, recreation, and control beyond the boundaries once imposed by sunset.
Yet this framing conceals a more fundamental reality.
The night is not empty. Long before streetlights, floodlights, and illuminated skylines, darkness was already occupied. It remains one of the most complex and densely inhabited conditions on Earth. Countless species have evolved within its rhythms, dependencies, and constraints. Their lives are structured not around the presence of light, but around its absence.
What if darkness is not a problem waiting to be solved, but an infrastructure that already serves countless forms of life?
From this perspective, every lighting intervention becomes something more than a technical exercise in visibility. It becomes an act of ecological reconfiguration.
A beam of light crossing a wetland may redirect a migration route that has existed for centuries. A brightly illuminated facade may alter the behaviour of insects that pollinate plants after sunset.¹ A pathway light may fragment a corridor used by bats to move through an urban landscape. Even beneath the ground, where light itself never reaches, consequences ripple outward through altered ecological relationships, changing patterns of activity and nutrient exchange.
As lighting designers, these side effects of our design medium are rarely visible to us. They do not appear in renderings. They are not captured in lux calculations. They seldom emerge during stakeholder consultations.
Yet they are no less real for remaining unseen.
This is not an argument against lighting human spaces. People need light. Cities need light. The question is not whether to illuminate, but whether we can afford to keep treating the ecological consequences of that illumination as someone else's problem, or no one's problem at all.
The illuminated surface of the planet expands each year. Between 2012 and 2016 alone, the Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew at an estimated 2.2 percent annually, with radiance in the visible spectrum increasing far faster in many regions.² Ecological systems that evolved under predictable cycles of light and darkness are increasingly exposed to conditions in which night never truly arrives. Species adapt, relocate, or disappear in response to environments permanently altered by the cumulative weight of our lit spaces.³ These are not remote wilderness concerns. They unfold in the same urban and peri-urban environments where most lighting projects are commissioned and delivered.
We are designing for human inhabitation. But the sites we illuminate are already inhabited, by relationships, dependencies, and living systems whose continuity we affect whether we intend to or not. Responsible lighting practice can no longer treat this as peripheral. The ecological dimension of a lighting decision is not a secondary consideration to be reviewed after the scheme is resolved. It is a design constraint, one that belongs at the beginning of the process, not appended to it.
The dominant story of lighting has been a story about humans: our comfort, our safety, our productivity, our experience of space. These concerns remain central. But they represent one chapter within a much larger and more consequential narrative.
Design disciplines across the board have begun to grapple with the recognition that humans are not the sole beneficiaries, nor the sole stakeholders, of design decisions. Forests, rivers, insects, fungi, birds, soil organisms, these actors participate in shaping the worlds we inhabit. They sustain systems, influence outcomes, and bear the consequences of our choices. Artificial light has largely escaped this reckoning. Its ecological consequences unfold across species and timescales beyond ordinary perception, slowly, quietly, and at scales that conventional design processes are not structured to see.⁴
Darkness, then, is not the opposite of progress. It is not unused space awaiting activation. It is a living condition, dense with relationships, histories, and forms of value that standard design practice has largely lacked the tools to perceive.
Addressing that blind spot requires expanding the frame before any luminaire is specified.
Before deciding what light should do, we need to understand what darkness is already doing. Who depends on it? What systems does it support? What movements, exchanges, and rhythms unfold within it? These are not supplementary questions. They are the questions that make responsible illumination possible.
As this thinking began to shape practice at Lightbahn, we recognised that many of the stakeholders most affected by lighting decisions, bats, insects, migratory birds, nocturnal habitats, ecological corridors, seasonal rhythms, were consistently present on site yet absent from the design process. No brief asked about them. No deliverable accounted for them. The risk they represented went unmanaged, not because it was deemed acceptable, but because no framework existed to surface it.
Nightprint was developed to close that gap. It is a pre-design analysis framework for understanding the full nocturnal character of a place before any intervention is proposed, bringing ecological relationships, species sensitivities, and existing night-time conditions into the earliest stages of design thinking. It can equally be applied to assess the current night character of any existing site, making it a tool for both new projects and the responsible review of sites already under illumination. Nightprint does not replace technical lighting design. It expands the conversation that precedes it, making the full range of constraints and dependencies visible so that decisions about artificial light can be made without the blind spots that have historically made those decisions incomplete.
Responsible illumination begins with knowing what we are intervening in.
References
Falcón, J. et al. (2020). Exposure to artificial light at night and the consequences for flora, fauna, and ecosystems. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 14, 602796. / Kehoe, R. et al. (2023). Mitigating light pollution impacts on arthropods based on LED properties. Insect Conservation and Diversity.
Kyba, C.C.M. et al. (2017). Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent. Science Advances, 3(11), e1701528. / Bará, S. and Falchi, F. (2023). Artificial light at night: a global disruptor of the night-time environment. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378, 20220352.
Gaston, K.J. et al. (2013). The ecological impacts of nighttime light pollution: a mechanistic appraisal. Biological Reviews, 88(4), 912-927.
Longcore, T. and Rich, C. (eds.) (2006). Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting. Island Press, Washington DC.