When Shadows Fall on the City That Never Sleeps, How Do We Respond with Light?
- Brainz Magazine
- 12 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Ashley Chan is an accomplished lighting and interior designer with over a decade of combined experience in the Philippines and the United States. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to designing transformative, functional, and visually compelling spaces across diverse sectors.
They say the brightest light casts the darkest shadow. In New York City, that shadow often falls across the outer boroughs.
Seeing the brilliant glow of Manhattan fade into the muted haze of Brooklyn as the train crosses the bridge is always a jarring experience for me. Even the light fixtures in the station feel dimmer. Here in Brooklyn, walking to the station at night means walking under flickering streetlights and patches of darkness. The overground train station stands like a beacon, the brightest point in a street marked by shifting shadows and uneven, unreliable light.
Uneven lighting
Manhattan, with its buildings, billboards, and storefronts, benefits from layers of ambient light. Even subway stations feel alive, abuzz with light, music, and activity. There’s a surprising sense of safety, even familiarity. In the outer boroughs, that rhythm changes. Light becomes scattered, and spaces feel purely transactional: a platform, a street, a sidewalk. When lighting is broken, poorly placed, or overly harsh, there’s no buffer, only gaps of shadow and sharp contrasts that leave people moving tensely, not confidently.
This disparity is not an accident. It’s the legacy of uneven investment in the city. In the mid-twentieth century, gas light companies prioritized service to commercial properties, particularly within Manhattan’s centralized business district. As a result, light defined who could navigate the city comfortably, and who could not. Over time, that created a divide not just in brightness, but in visibility, safety, and dignity.
The gap between standard and implementation
The State successfully replaced 500,000 streetlights with energy-efficient LEDs through the Smart Street Lighting NY program, nearly three years ahead of its 2025 target. However, without thoughtful design, LEDs can overlight public spaces, disrupt circadian rhythms, and contribute to light pollution, concerns already raised by residents in Rochester. Lighting should be about more than efficiency, it’s about human experience.
Lighting standards for outdoor public spaces do exist, set by the Department of Transportation and the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES). These typically specify ranges rather than fixed values. For example, the IES-recommended average illuminance for pedestrian paths adjacent to buildings is 1 footcandle, with 3 as the average upper limit (one footcandle is like standing under a single streetlamp on a quiet Brooklyn block, while three footcandles feels more like standing outside a bodega). These standards also specify uniformity ratios, or the average to minimum illuminance within a space.
In my own neighborhood, I found areas lit as high as 12 footcandles while others were as dim as 0.3 footcandles, even without any shade or obstruction. The result isn’t safety – it’s waste and imbalance. Having too many light fixtures would only add to the power consumption and maintenance costs in addition to over illuminating sidewalks. They also disrupt natural sleep cycles, contributing to health issues. Above all, lack of uniformity in lighting leaves pedestrians vulnerable to loss of visual acuity, making it harder for the eyes to adapt as they move through bright and dark patches.
The flexibility in standards is intended to account for context: nearby buildings, pedestrian needs, and wayfinding. But too often, they are disregarded or applied as a one-size-fits-all fix, focused on technical compliance, and not the lived experience. The result is a patchwork of blinding hotspots and dim, neglected sidewalks, a city lit for efficiency, not for people.
Human-centered lighting
Lighting is more than just a utility, it’s about safety, dignity, and a sense of community ownership. That’s why we need community-engaged lighting, where residents and local organizations have a say in how light is used, where it’s placed, and what purpose it serves. It can’t be a top-down solution. Communities deserve to understand lighting standards, the reasoning behind them, and how lighting choices affect their daily lives. By involving residents early through workshops, surveys, public research, and collaborative design, we can ensure lighting decisions truly reflect local needs and values.
Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, service workers, students, and night shift employees, commute at night or early in the morning, often without the safety of a car. They need lighting that is safe, healthy, and welcoming, not too dim, not too glaring. The goal isn’t just illuminance, it’s balance. Lighting design should embrace a more nuanced mission, to be aligned with community and create a lighting experience that reinforces a neighborhood’s rhythm instead of overwhelming it, light that invites presence without erasing the night.
As I rush out from the brightly lit station, I contemplate how light touches everything, with its absence just as visible. Lighting design is inevitable, and human-centered lighting design should be at the core of how we light our cities across the globe. In a metropolis such as New York, it is as relevant and necessary as it has been since the first gas lamp illuminated the once dark streets of the city. It tells us who we are and who we want to be.
Read more from Ashley Elizabeth Chan
Ashley Elizabeth Chan, Interior and Lighting Designer
Ashley Chan is a lighting designer at Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design (HLB) in New York City. She started her career in interior design in the Philippines before transitioning to lighting design. Ashley holds a Master of Fine Arts in Lighting Design from Parsons School of Design, where she gained a deep understanding of light as both a technical and emotional element of space. Her interdisciplinary approach combines sustainable and socially impactful principles to create spaces that are both functional and centered on the human experience.
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