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RESEARCH PRODUCT

"Save the Night" : light footprint, urbanism and territorial governance

subject

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Our society maintains a complex relation with night, space-time often outside the diurnal cadences which facilitates the reflection, the imagination, the creation, the listening and the link with the other one, while revealing the segregation, the fear, and thus the restriction. By this research, we put compared to the urban lighting – real light project carrier of a strong symbolism – the socio-cultural, ecological and sanitary costs engendered by the artificial light. The urban lighting generates a geographical interlacing of bright imprints of differentiated scales, which we approach by various modellings, without forbidding us the sensitive analysis. We clarify, at various scales, the games of institutional actors and the constraints surrounding the governance of the street lighting in France, and we underline the reproduction of the possibilities offered for its local management. A characterization of the various impacts of the nocturnal artificial light by means of abstract tools of the economy of the environment allows to define as real pollutions the ecological and sanitary damages, and as nuisance the decrease – even the loss – of the accessibility to the starry sky. We show how the environmental good "starry sky" was seized by the astronomers to carry a positive project integrating henceforth the nocturnal environment in general: "Save the night". Oppositions to this project marked out its history, but the necessary energy savings and the budgets of territorial communities bring henceforth the local actors to reconsider with more interest the various propositions made by the associations of "protection of the nocturnal sky and environment". But the difficult efficiency of the mechanisms of coasian bargaining brings us to defend that the protection of these pure public goods, not unbargainable, must be taken care by the public authorities.