Everynight Life in Informal Settlements

In rapidly expanding cities in the Global South, life in growing informal settlements requires wrestling with questions of accessibility every day and, importantly, every night. Residents of informal settlements are often faced with long daily commutes, including walking in the dark hours of the early morning or night to access opportunities. Residents of informal settlements must also go outside at night to use shared basic services, such as taps and toilets. These nighttime outdoor activities form part of what we call everynight life and are often associated with fear and insecurity, despite the explicit link safety and security has to the quality of life the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 11, are designed to create. As we approach the five-year anniversary of the SDGs, many cities have made progress towards achieving SDG 11; however, our research on nighttime and public lighting in informal settlements suggests that the provision of inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable access to urban life at night remains a complicated task. Public lighting is a useful lens through which to consider SDG 11 because it touches on technocratic questions of infrastructure access as well as less tangible, socio-spatial aspects of access and what it means for urban space to feel safe, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Our research in Cape Town studies everynight life experiences in order to understand the socio-spatial relationship between public lighting, nighttime accessibility and societal needs in informal settlements. Some early lessons from our work highlight the existing barriers and opportunities to develop new public lighting solutions in informal settlements that could improve everynight life and contribute to achieving SDG 11 in cities with high rates of informality.