Consider the Darkness. From an Environmental and Sociotechnical Controversy to Innovation in Urban Lighting

Abstract

This article explains the birth of an environmental problem, light pollution, which is understood to be a controversial source of social innovation. Over forty years, in support of the actor-network approach, it traces the conditions of its emergence, transformation, and dissemination to local, national, and transnational levels, and through various professional disciplines. Schematically, “environmentalists” uphold a holistic approach of “nocturnity” and define artificial light as a pollutant. Facing them, the “technicist” defends a segmented approach and defines artificial light as a nuisance. In France, the implementation of this controversy on the political agenda leads to institutional decisions that grasp it with difficulty in all its social, scientific, and spatial dimensions. The spatial spread of the controversy in the zoning and the standardisation process appears as a partial and segmented regulatory response to this problem. However, these processes can be considered to be forms of social and spatial innovations.