Urban Nightscape and Nightscape Lighting Analysis and Evaluations on Typical Nightscape Cases in Nanjing

Abstract: A city’s nightscape can be treated as a re-introduction of the city during the night. Due to the development of city economy and citizens’ leisure life, people are paying more attention to their nightlife. With appropriate lighting design and illumination systems, a city can draw very impressive pictures as its ‘identification card’ to the whole world. Recently, more and more Chinese cities have also started to attach importance to nightscape. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hongkong, as the biggest Chinese cities, have already made notable progress since 1980s. This leads more and more Chinese cities put nightscape design into their urban planning and urban design process. However, as a new subject, nightscape is usually treated as a topic which belongs to urban planning or illumination technology. Few of the recent studies on nightscape in China are done from the scope of urban design. Due to the lack of multidisciplinary studies on nightscape, some Chinese cities mistreated nightscape as simply lighting the urban spaces up with bright lights. This misunderstanding brings up a nightscape fever and makes some Chinese cities jump into a brightness competition. This thesis aims to make some contributions for the studies on nightscape from the scope of urban design. To achieve that aim, this thesis has three main research questions: 1. How could a typology of nightscape in Chinese cities be constructed based on available literature and the practical situation in Nanjing? 2. What are the strongpoints and shortcomings of the nightscape in the chosen cases in Nanjing? 3. This paper sets out to address a series of strategies in nightscape design which can be applied in different types of urban public spaces in Chinese cities. The final goal of this thesis is to achieve a series of strategies about urban public spaces’ nightscape design. This thesis studies on the available literatures and Chinese official documents about urban nightscape to make a conclusion of the definition of nightscape. A typology of nightscape in Chinese cities is constructed by combining existing theories about urban open spaces with municipal regulations about nightscape lighting in Nanjing. This thesis uses graphic analysis, urban night space evaluations and interviews to figure out the strongpoints and shortcomings of the nightscape in the chosen cases in Nanjing. And at last, a series of strategies are addressed for the future nightscape designs based on the theoretical studies and sites analyses.