A Study on Ways to Enhance Nighttime Safety by Searching Current Lighting - Focused on Night Lighting in Magok District, Seoul -

Abstract

(Background and Purpose) Urban nightscape becomes colorful due to the development of lighting. Such colorful lighting makes urban nightscape beautiful and fancy, but excessive and unappropriate light also harm the citizens. All those elements of backfiring artificial light are defined as a general term. Each municipal government of Korea presents a guideline to light the city, control excessive light and placing lights in proper locations so that it could prevent light pollution, by generally analyzing, planning and managing artificial light. However, they actually establish a similar guideline whenever a new town is built, based on the frame of general regulations and recommendations not taking local features into consideration. Looking into the finished field built with lightning guideline, there are many cases with inadequate verification. Therefore, this study is to see if the guideline is proper, by understanding the status of nightscape after choosing the cases for preventing crimes at nighttime, which should be on top priority. (Method) For the method of study, nightscape guidelines are analyzed and field study is done. This study examined the concept and method of nightscape safety through case studies, and analyzed dominant law, system and relative planning of guideline, as well as its content. As the target site, Magok district, which considers the quality level of the urban landscape and reflects the guidelines in the design as a basis, is selected and case study is to compare and analyze the field and those suggested in the guideline. With prior analysis as a standard, this study considered what is guide of nighttime environment to improve citizens’ life quality, and presented basic data to build a nightscape which puts safety on top priority. (Results) Seeing the field study, there were large gaps between the use of developing area and the field, while those with relatively large scale generally observed the regulations and recommendations of guideline. For the standards to remove the harmful elements in nighttime environment such as accident, crime or crime spot, many cases did not comply with them, which should be more deeply examined from the view of recommendation and regulation of guideline. (Conclusions) Management, policy and enforcement are not recommendable but essential to form safe urban nightscapes. In planning light, experts, contractor, engineering company and administrative officers should keep watching safety, and it should be supported systemically. Along with more frequent nighttime activities, guidelines for nightscape has become essential. It is hoped that the results drawn from this study are to be used as a meaningful basic data to improve nightscape guideline.