Night is a distinctive time and place that has been widely disregarded, culturally associated to darkness and its prevailing negative values. However, there is a growing scientific concern of the global impacts on health and ecosystems of current excessive artificial illumination. This places the night as a critical matter for the future of cities. Much light pollution is formed in urban areas, yet nocturnal conditions remain largely underexplored in urban design theory and practice. Interventions are often focused narrowly on lighting technology, while neglecting the rich cultural imaginaries and experiential dimensions that locally shape human relationships to night and darkness.

This thesis addresses the absence of nocturnal expertise in urban design. It questions how to gain richer, more holistic and situated understandings of the world after dark, and how these insights could inform urban design practice. Drawing on extensive travels and my photographic practice in diverse nightscapes across the globe, I develop an embodied, practice-based methodology that brings together mobile methods, autoethnographic case studies and visual methods. This research, conducted from my dual perspective as an architect and a photographic artist, includes in-depth explorations of urban, rural and architectural dark environments in both Western and non-Western contexts, ranging from the megacity of Mumbai to the Greek island of Cythera, from African wildlife parks to symbolic dark spaces like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A central research device emerging from this work is the Atlas of Night Visions, a tool to collect, organize, and interpret place-specific knowledge about the night. Through this, I demonstrate the diversity, tensions, and generative potentials of darkness and nocturnal qualities for urban life and the design practices.

This research outlines the contours of a new night sensitive, urban design practice,using fieldwork and photography to build a body of comprehensive, situated, and nuanced visions of places after dark. The main contribution of this work is a flexible framework for urban night design, intended for use by both design practitioners and architecture educators. A first output of this framework is the prototype for a Night Guide: a handbook offering a set of general guidelines for design practitioners, an array of design tactics and a fieldguide with templates to investigate multiple dimensions of night.

Ultimately, this work challenges nocturnal stereotypes and binary views of light and darkness. It proposes new perspectives for the night, as a restored place of darkness, a sensory refuge, a place of enchantment, of social soundness and a ground of resistance to uninterrupted pulse of production. This study and its future extensions may contribute to more mindful strategies of intervention (or non-intervention) in the nocturnal environment, towards the preservation of natural variations of light and dark and their cultural implications.