Reconciling Urban Lighting and the Nocturnal Environment: The Issues of a Sociotechnical Controversy
Challéat, Samuel
Reconciling Urban Lighting and the Nocturnal Environment: The Issues of a Sociotechnical Controversy - 2015.
44
Our paper explains the birth of an environmental problem, i.e. light pollution, viewed as a socio-technical controversy. Supported by the actor-network approach, it traces over forty years 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 “nocturnality” and define artificial light as a pollutant. Facing them, the “technicist” defends a segmented approach and defines artificial light as a nuisance. The introduction of this controversy into the political agenda leads to institutional decisions that grasp with difficulty all its social, scientific and spatial dimensions. The spatial spread of the controversy in the zoning and standardization process appears as a partial and segmented regulatory response to this problem.
Reconciling Urban Lighting and the Nocturnal Environment: The Issues of a Sociotechnical Controversy - 2015.
44
Our paper explains the birth of an environmental problem, i.e. light pollution, viewed as a socio-technical controversy. Supported by the actor-network approach, it traces over forty years 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 “nocturnality” and define artificial light as a pollutant. Facing them, the “technicist” defends a segmented approach and defines artificial light as a nuisance. The introduction of this controversy into the political agenda leads to institutional decisions that grasp with difficulty all its social, scientific and spatial dimensions. The spatial spread of the controversy in the zoning and standardization process appears as a partial and segmented regulatory response to this problem.
Réseaux sociaux