Nocturnal rewilding on a Luminous Planet: The politics of urban illumination as infrastructure ecology

With the increasing recognition of nocturnal illumination as an environmental and endocrine disruptor, the night is emerging as a contested socio-ecological terrain of governance, characterised by efforts to conserve, restore and preserve darkness by a range of actors, including municipal and regional authorities, state agencies, as well as NGOs and citizen-led initiatives. Recognising the imaginary of restoring darkness as a pre-urbicene environmental condition that drives these efforts to control and regulate the night, we term this emerging paradigm of environmental governance nocturnal rewilding . Drawing upon semi-structured and walking interviews with over 30 experts, participant observation at public and professional events concerning nocturnal environments, and an analysis of policy documents and planning frameworks in Switzerland, we conceptualise nocturnal rewilding as an evolving socio-ecological process, in which darkness is actively produced through the interplay of several technical strategies. We sketch the contours of this emerging paradigm by identifying darkness zoning, intermittency and algorithmic modulation as three key strategies of this mode of environmental governance. Recognising the limitations of these strategies and possible socio-environmental injustices they produce, we argue that the governance of the night must move beyond approaches that reify binaries of light and darkness across space and time, towards post-conservation, post-restoration paradigms grounded in relational and situated practices of negotiation, attunement to multispecies infrastructure ecologies and adaptive governance. Drawing on our empirical material, we show how these practices reconfigure the infrastructure ecologies of urban illumination, enabling more ecologically attuned and context-sensitive forms of nocturnal environmental governance instead of conservation- and restoration-oriented approaches that reproduce fortress conservation paradigms reproducing nature-culture separation.