The Night-time Commons

About this pattern

Parks and other public spaces can be important cool commons in the evenings, when the heat of the day starts to dissipate from the public domain and when it becomes cooler outside than in the home. Well-known examples of night-time commons include night markets, festivals and outdoor film screenings, all of which tend to be concentrated in urban centres. As our summers get longer and hotter, the principle of the night-time commons needs to be adopted more widely in an overall strategy of rethinking how we use our local environments.

This pattern explores night-time commoning as a cooling strategy. An important infrastructure that can be activated as night-time commons are public parks and swimming pools. These environments are already cool commons, but they tend to close in the evenings, precisely at the time when they could best serve the community by providing a venue for socialising, swimming, dining or other community gatherings on a hot night.

Place-appropriate and engaging lighting is an important element in an overall cultural shift toward night-time commoning.  It is an attractor for alternative park uses, to create ambience and promote safe wayfinding and play.  An example is the Gates of Light art installation at Macarthur Heights, a park designed for stargazing. In addition to lighting, the activation of night-time commons are most successful when they provide signage, other communications and activation events to legitimise use and raise awareness amongst the local community of the opportunities to use these spaces at night. This is important as unlike in Australia’s regional neighbours, night-time commoning is unusual in Australia. This is where examples such as night markets, dance and exercise, or community cookouts, can provide inspiration for activating parks at night.

Kevin Lynch’s urban design principles cited in Dufner et al.’s (nd) night lighting study, focus on how people move through and experience the city.

Measures of success for night-time commons are minimised incidents relating to safety, minimised disruption to neighbours and maximised attendance.

Pattern Conditions

Enablers

• Increasing urban heat and the dangers of UV radiation (the Cancer Council for example recommends staying out of the sun between 11am and 3pm) create a need to explore the use of outdoor public spaces at cooler times of the day.
• Night lighting, as well as provision of public drinking water and public amenities, are important supportive infrastructures.

Constraints

• A challenge for night-time commoning might be that features of the day park, such as permanent shelter and shade fixtures, could create safety and visibility issues, and inhibit some night-time uses, such as star gazing.
• The impact of noise on surrounding residential neighbourhoods may also need to be addressed.

Commoning Concerns

Access: The space used for this common is accessible in the same way that it would be during the daytime and by the same people.

Use: Technical management could be entrusted by local government to a community of commoners if the use is different to the typical daytime use.

Benefit: The night-time commons provides cool spots in open space to those people who have free time during the evenings.

Care: The site is maintained per the standard daytime program, however, the commoning community and any contractors (i.e. cinema, food trucks etc.) must manage additional wear and tear to the common.

Responsibility: The common is governed by the asset or landowner and the commoning community would need to regulate their own behaviour and safety.

Ownership: The ownership does not change from the daytime structure.

A commoning concern related to the socially-activated night time space could be managing noise for surrounding residents not using the park (for example shift workers). If use involves cooking, this could also mean issues with smells. This might be ameliorated by designing dedicated events for quieter usage or determining times for noisier events like dancing, markets or films by a community scheduling tool or poll. Night-time commons need to be designed co-operatively with the communities who will use them in order to address these commoning concerns.