Light infrastructures and intimate publics in the vertical city

Laing Ebbensgaard, Casper (2022) Light infrastructures and intimate publics in the vertical city. Urban Geography, 43 (5). pp. 735-754. ISSN 0272-3638

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Abstract

This paper explores how the uneven distribution of light and darkness in the vertical city conditions residents’ capacities to form meaningful attachments to the places in which they dwell. Drawing on ethnographic material collected on a recent high-rise development in London, the paper explores how residents illuminate their homes in improvisatory engagement with the basic infrastructures that support their domestic lives and with the wider urban context. Four biographic vignettes reveal how people alter, adapt to or overturn the inadequacies of domestic infrastructures to carve out intimate spaces of inhabitation. The paper advances the idea of “light infrastructure” as a conceptual proposition for attending to the affective, esthetic and performative compositions of infrastructures in the night, and as an analytical proposition for developing a more hopeful and inclusive outlook on the ways people come to dwell, inhabit and feel at home in the vertical city at night.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Environmental Social Sciences
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	27 Nov 2020 00:49
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2022 07:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/77820
DOI:	10.1080/02723638.2020.1850001

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