The Nighttime Economy

Preface

Grateful for the Dark

Years before I ever said the words “nighttime economy,” I was juggling fire in a pitch-black public square, grateful for the dark. Darkness made the flames pop, and the flames earned me bigger tips. It took me two decades to understand what I was actually standing in: aside from the occasional piece of utilitarian task lighting, not one venue I ever performed in possessed even a hint of beauty or artistry in its illumination. The stage that paid my rent was a neglected public space—and every city has hundreds of them.

This book is about the night and the stark absence of beauty in our twilight hours. Improving our nocturnal environments is what I’m passionate about: how do we make public spaces more engaging after dark and create places where people actually want to gather? Most of the time, the night feels completely neglected. I want to change that.

It was never my childhood dream to do this work. When the kids in first grade were announcing that they wanted to grow up to be firefighters, I certainly was not sitting there thinking, I want to design exhilarating nightscapes for a living. Not even close. I arrived here by a long, twisted road, having barely spared a thought for design or the night until much later in life.

Looking back, however, the seeds were undeniably there. I have always been an artist, an adventurer, and an entrepreneur. Art was my favorite subject in school, and I harbored an early love of public speaking and performing. As a young man, I hitchhiked across the globe, believing that my payment for a ride was to entertain the driver with funny stories. I never enjoyed having a boss, and I failed at numerous ventures—through pure youthful naivety at first, and later by choosing the wrong business partners. Every detour pushed me further down an unconventional path.

Oddly enough, the catalyst was the circus. It sounds strange, but artistic lighting design is very much like circus: creative, demanding, and immensely satisfying when executed well. A childhood friend who’s a gymnast had joined Cirque du Soleil, and he invited me to a show when the tour hit Seattle. I had no prior exposure to that world; I was simply going to visit a friend. Before I knew it, they had painted me up in makeup, thrown me off the Russian Swing, strapped me into trapezes and bungees, and introduced me to juggling. I remember thinking, Where has this been my whole life?

From that moment on, I performed anywhere I could, my love of public speaking and my desire to be my own boss fueling the fire. What I failed to notice at the time was that most of my street shows—juggling, throwing fire—took place after sundown, in exactly the kind of unlit, unloved spaces where this preface began. Back then, I was simply grateful for the dark.

The seed had been planted.
Then my shoulder blew up, and my circus career ended abruptly. The artistic drive remained. By then, I had married, started a family, and transitioned into working as a high school teacher—street performing might be fine for a single life of adventure, but it doesn’t provide the steady income a family needs. And because I had hated school growing up, my entrepreneurial mindset immediately found a new mission: changing the educational system.

I was given the opportunity to reshape how students graduated in British Columbia through an alternative, inquiry-based program rather than traditional coursework. At the time, I was mentoring a couple of exceptionally bright students who were passionate about engineering, and since math and engineering are not my strong suits, I went looking for outside help. A single block down the road from our school sat a small, unconventional, and highly creative engineering firm called Limbic Media.

One day, I walked the students down to see if the firm might mentor them. Stepping inside, we were greeted by that unmistakable creative-startup energy: wild mechanical contraptions hanging from the ceiling, disassembled computers, wires piled in corners, and a room buzzing with inventive focus. The students were in heaven. The founders, Justin and Manj, were incredibly receptive and eager to collaborate, and the partnership yielded project after project—LED cubes for event lighting, an aquaponics alarm system, an enterprise software application for which the kids wrote over 60,000 lines of code.

Over time, Justin, Manj, and I became close friends—just as a perfect storm was brewing in my life. My shoulder injury kept me from performing, and I felt a deep void from the absence of creative work. Meanwhile, I was coming to realize that fighting a government bureaucracy to reform education was a losing proposition. I desperately needed a change.

Limbic Media was preparing to launch its flagship product: Aurora, arguably the most advanced sound-to-light control technology on the planet. The concept thrilled me and reignited my entrepreneurial instincts. When they mentioned needing someone to take the product global, I raised my hand. Here was my chance to return to full-time artistry, and I jumped.

When we launched, we failed spectacularly. Everything we had assumed about the product, our ideal customers, and our target markets proved completely wrong. Cash was burning fast, and we pivoted.

That pivot led me to municipal governments. It was a slow process of trial and error, but I gradually recognized that cities had a massive, unaddressed need for nighttime engagement. I began speaking with municipal leaders—first dozens, then hundreds—and I learned a great deal along the way. I learned that managing the nighttime economy is tricky, and that very few people have it figured out. I learned that aesthetics matter tremendously after dark, yet quality, artistic lighting design is remarkably difficult to achieve. Somewhere in those hundreds of conversations, I became a passionate advocate for the night, determined to revolutionize how we approach nocturnal urban design. What started as a spark had turned into a raging fire.

Today, my mission is to make public spaces more beautiful. I consider myself lucky to wake up every morning asking which location I can transform that day. It has been a long, winding road with many unexpected turns, but my rebellious spirit—built on art, performance, learning, and entrepreneurship—has carried me exactly where I need to be.

Naturally, this is also how I earn a living, but nothing in these pages is a pitch. My aim is to show you what is possible after dark and to give you clarity: a clear-eyed picture of what the night can do for your city, what it actually costs, and where to begin. I have no attachment to being the one who builds it. In business, one of my favorite lines is simply, “Tell me no.” If a concept does not align with your goals, say so immediately—it saves everyone time and energy. The same freedom applies to this book: take these ideas, run with them, hire whomever you like, or do it yourselves. The night gets better either way, and that is the outcome I am after.

This book is primarily a reflection of my experience and a manifesto for what I want to see in the world. I sincerely want your city to become more inviting and beautiful at night, and I have filled these pages with actionable ideas to make that happen. My company offers these services, but my broader goal is to present a compelling argument for why the night matters: by ignoring the nocturnal hours, cities forfeit half of their experiential and economic potential. Too often, I arrive in a new city only to be greeted by harsh glare, clinical task lighting, and an absence of artistry.

It’s time to change that paradigm and make our shared spaces as welcoming by night as they are by day. Somewhere in your city tonight, there is a square as dark as the ones I used to perform in. This book is everything I have learned about lighting it.

Introduction

Half of Your City is Switched Off

“There are two kinds of light—the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.”1James Thurber

Urban design is home to a great paradox.

Nighttime is exactly half of the urban experience, and yet cities and towns barely design for it. Every evening, across time zones, the sun sets on thousands of plazas, parks, and main streets, all of which received meticulous attention from urban professionals. Yet every evening, that attention mysteriously expires with the daylight. For over a century, we have planned, financed, and engineered our cities for the daytime hours alone, as though the other half of urban life were someone else's responsibility. It is a failure not of budgets or engineering but a failure of urban imagination.

While often treated as mere decoration, light is in fact the emotional infrastructure of a city: it draws the edges of a plaza, it tells women walking alone what to expect from the next block, and it stamps a signature on a skyline that no other city can forge. When a city designs its nightscape with intention, interactive light sheds its reputation as a luxury and becomes something closer to a civic language—a cue for belonging, a distinct local signature. But again, most cities, even major ones, don't plan for nighttime.

Humans navigate the dark by thigmotaxis—namely, the primal instinct to hug well-defined edges and boundaries rather than cross open, unpredictable ground—and you can watch it operate any night of the week: a person entering an empty parking lot after dark will trace the perimeter every time. In the twentieth-century, urban professionals largely ignored this instinct as engineers flooded streets with uniform, high-intensity glare, served the automobile faithfully, and stranded the pedestrian in psychological limbo.

How do we reverse this failure? There is a solution, and it has a name: sequential, rhythmic lighting. By restoring the edges our brains hunt for, this system delivers orientation and visual richness. The effect reaches beyond any single street: a city lit this way reads as legible, cared for, and safe to explore—the type of place where people leave the house after dinner and stay out.

None of this demands a mega-project. When a city sinks its budget into one flashy, fragmented showpiece, the showpiece glows while the community around it stays dark. It is much wiser to spend that capital connecting the successful nodes the city already owns. Link an established asset, such as a beachfront, to a vibrant entertainment district, and the corridor between them—once a gap people drove past—becomes a safe, multisensory path where they actually want to stroll, gather, and linger. These illuminated routes act as connective tissue: they pull organic foot traffic block by block, reward exploration after dark, and stitch disparate neighborhoods into one continuous, welcoming fabric.

Make no mistake: beautification is not the reward a city earns after economic development. Beautification is where economic development starts. A beautiful night draws people, people draw money, and public belonging—the feeling that this street is ours—pays a double dividend, strengthening the psychological well-being of citizens and the financial health of the community in the same stroke.

See, our brains are hardwired for patterns, faces, and stories, and when a space denies them—monotonous blocks, car-first corridors, glare without warmth—it does more than look bleak. It manufactures cognitive fatigue, anxiety, and chronic urban stress, one commute at a time. Jane Jacobs taught us that “eyes on the street” keep a street safe, and her principle matters most after dark: a street lit at a human scale invites the small, unplanned interactions that make a neighborhood feel watched over rather than watched, and the security that follows draws people out of their living rooms and back into the public sphere.2

Playful, adaptive light is not decoration. It's medicine for the streets.

The stakes are not abstract. A city that leaves its corridors dark and disconnected forfeits, year after year, exactly what it can least afford to lose: its tax base, its local businesses, and its young talent—each migrating to the walkable urban centers that understood the night first. The competition among cities is already underway, and the ones that thrive will be those that treat the night not as a period of dormancy but as the largest undeveloped district they own.

The Safety Trap

I spend much of my professional life in rooms with city planners, managers, community and economic developers, and local councils, all of us circling a shared vision: nightscapes that transform how a city feels after dark. And no matter the city, no matter the budget, the moment we sit down to discuss a dark corner, an underused park, or a desolate alleyway, one word takes over the conversation: safety.

Rightly so. Safety is non-negotiable. It's the baseline of civic duty and the first metric any municipality must satisfy. No nighttime economy exists without it: nobody strolls, gathers, or lingers on a street they do not trust. The standard civic response to safety, however, runs on an outdated philosophy—one that treats the night as a liability to be managed rather than an asset to be designed. The playbook is always the same: flood the space with utilitarian task lighting, and the box gets checked. And the result—a sterile, garish glare—feels less like a community hub and more like a prison yard. The lighting satisfies the code while undermining the very vitality it was meant to protect, because nobody stays, plays, or spends money in a place that feels hostile to the senses.

In chasing the first requirement of the night, the city forfeits everything the night could earn.

Here is the paradox we can't get past. We take meticulous care with our daytime spaces—the vistas, the seating, the way a plaza welcomes people at two in the afternoon—and then, at sunset, we abandon that entire design ethos. The same city that agonizes over bench placement will throw up a few dozen floodlights and call the space finished. It may be safe. It is also empty.

The returns run the other way. Making a space beautiful attracts people, and attracting people attracts money—which makes beautiful nighttime environments, exceptionally rare as they are, one of the most underused levers of economic development a city has. And here's what the compliance mindset misses: beauty does not compete with safety; it compounds it. A street full of people at nine in the evening is safer than an empty one lit like a stadium. No one brings their family to gather under bright white floods. They should not have to.

In my experience, municipalities that do act tend to miss in one of two directions. Some go all in: the giant, multi-million-dollar entertainment zone with world-class projection mapping and a price tag to match—spectacular, and out of reach for the vast majority of cities and towns that will never drop millions on a single location. Others barely try: a few sad strands of fairy lights strung across an alleyway, expected to conjure a crowd on their own—a token canopy of string lights has never made anyone linger.

Between those extremes lies the conscious middle ground this book occupies: not flashing screens, not institutional floodlights, but cohesive, intentional design at a scale real budgets can reach: smaller visual vignettes distributed throughout a district—elegant and scalable interventions that highlight the architecture and natural environments a city already has, celebrating local character and never compromising on safety.

Most people have never seen this middle ground, and so they do not know to ask for it. Utilitarian lighting has become so commonplace that the alternative never crosses their minds; it does not even occur to them that safety and beauty can coexist. But introduce something genuinely beautiful into a neglected space and watch what happens. Attitudes shift immediately. People slow down, and the community reclaims a corner it had surrendered to the dark. Most importantly, if you removed that lighting a year later, they would feel the void within a week. That is the difference between the two kinds of light: task lighting answers to building codes and compliance; artistic lighting answers to human emotion.

The night is exactly half of a city's economic and social potential, and when a district loses its character at sunset, it loses its revenue with it. Safety must always be the first step. It should never be the last. By moving past the era of the prison-yard aesthetic toward intentional, emotional lighting design, any city—whatever its size—can turn its nights into a competitive advantage. The transformation is easier to execute than most councils assume, but it demands a shift in mindset: stop thinking like an inspector, and start thinking like an artist. That shift is what this book teaches.

A Blueprint for the Forgotten Half

This book is a blueprint for reclaiming the forgotten half of your city, and I have organized it the way I wish every council conversation could go: first the opportunity, then the method, then the proof.

We begin with the opportunity, because you are standing in the middle of it. Every city, including yours, is full of blank canvases: the alleyway that bustles at noon and empties by eight, the park families abandon at dusk, the dead corridor between two districts that thrive. These spaces are not problems to be patrolled. They're assets waiting for their second shift, and the opening chapters will train your eye to see them that way—to walk your own downtown at night and notice, perhaps for the first time, how much of it is simply switched off.

From there, we turn to method, and this is the heart of the book. You'll learn how to connect the successful places your city already has, so that the corridor between a waterfront and a restaurant district stops being a gap and starts being a destination. You'll see how glow parks give families free evening entertainment and a reason to leave the house on an ordinary Tuesday. You'll also discover why walkthrough experiences have become one of the most reliable economic drivers a mid-sized city can build, and how the holiday season—the one time of year most cities do invest in light—can be reinvented so the investment pays beyond December.

You'll learn what it means to light for the human brain rather than for the building code, and why the difference decides whether people hurry through a space or settle into it.

Then we confront the two roadblocks I hear more than any others. The first is “we can't afford it,” and one chapter is devoted to showing what cheap lighting actually costs a city because the arithmetic of doing nothing is worse than most councils realize. The second is “we're too small,” and the truth runs in the opposite direction: small towns, with their compact cores and tight-knit communities, often see the fastest transformation of all.

Whatever your size and whatever your budget, there is a version of this work within your reach.

Finally, the proof. The closing chapter set theory aside and walk through real places that said yes: what they built, what it cost, what changed on the street and in the ledger. I have spent ten years in these conversations—watching projects stall for reasons unrelated to money, and watching others succeed on budgets everyone thought were too small. The wins in this book are streets you can visit, in cities that were asking the same questions you are asking now.

Before you begin, two suggestions. First, read with one specific place in mind—the alleyway, the plaza, the underused park you already know needs help. Every idea in this book gets sharper when it has an address. Second, when you finish, turn to the appendix and put your city through the Nighttime Economy Index. It will score where your nights stand today, show you where the gaps are, and hand you a starting point for your first project—or your next one.

The night is not coming for your city. It's already there, every evening, waiting to be designed.

1. 1. James Thurber, quoted in The Thurber Carnival (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945).
2. 2. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 35.

Chapter One

So Many Blank Canvases: The Nighttime Assets Your City Already Owns

“People don't fall in love with parking lots at night.”3Jeff Siegler, Why Your City is Sick

Blank walls.

We see them everywhere we look, screaming to be activated: the towering, featureless sides of shopping centers, the drab concrete flanks of office buildings, and the lifeless, shadowed alleyways that connect them. Drive through your own downtown at dusk and count them—every one stands in front of an audience of headlights and passersby, and every one says nothing. To most people, these are just walls, the mundane, invisible background noise of a city. To me, they are missed opportunities: dormant canvases waiting to be activated.

Nowhere is this truer than in retail and urban commercial spaces, where property owners and stakeholders are trying to drive profits and increase foot traffic, yet routinely overlook their most visible assets. They stare right at these empty structures and seem at a loss for how to turn them into attractive, vibrant destinations that can thrive and drive the crucial nighttime economy. And if you manage a city, the stakes run deeper still: every one of those walls sits on a corridor you are trying to keep alive after dark, which makes each of them a piece of civic infrastructure waiting for its second shift.

When modern property managers do try to capture attention, they default to an outdated playbook dominated by traditional advertising: think digital billboards, giant screens, and ads. The world does not need any more screens, and the modern citizen has become far too savvy, fatigued, and desensitized to digital noise.

If you want to catch the eye of today's public, you have to offer them beauty and novelty. According to Gensler, the world's largest architecture firm, these two factors reign supreme in public spaces, forming the foundation for a subtle, gentle, yet powerful form of advertising. The goal is not to demand attention but to create a memorable space that people actively want to inhabit and share.

Retail is the one industry that needs to attract as much attention as possible, yet, in my opinion, it is doing the least with what it already has. In my own hometown of Victoria, British Columbia, every major mall faces heavy road or foot traffic, and every single one is plagued by dark, blank walls that act as black holes of engagement—swallowing attention and giving nothing back.

Creating a visual spectacle that gets noticed and transforms a property doesn't have to break the bank. Commercial real estate runs on a myth that breathtaking design requires a multi-million-dollar budget, and it simply isn't true. For the cost of running a single, full-page advertisement in a major Sunday newspaper—a piece of ephemeral media glanced at once and thrown into the recycling bin—a property could permanently adorn itself with a gorgeous piece of light art, catching the eyes of passersby 365 nights a year, year after year.

Consider a collaboration we undertook with a Canadian Tire location (for readers in the US: a national retail institution), where we worked with a store owner who is arguably the most technologically forward-thinking operator in the entire company. Together, we transformed an ordinary glass exterior into a brilliant facade of light. It served a beautiful civic purpose by brightening the neighborhood, but most importantly for the business, it created an undeniable sense of wonder and place. Today, everyone in the city knows exactly where it is, and the store has earned an endearing nickname: “the store with the lights on it.” It has been going strong for nearly ten years and counting, delivering a continuous return on investment we will tally in a moment.

Yet visionaries like this owner are still the exception, and I have spoken with many of his corporate colleagues who struggle to see the value, assuming that lighting design has to be a hyper-complex, intensely interactive tech nightmare. It doesn't. It requires thoughtful, intentional design that anchors the space—morphing a dull structure into a living piece that constantly changes and breathes life into its surroundings.

When major properties fail to realize this potential, the results are financially and culturally regrettable. A couple of years ago, a large mall in my hometown underwent a massive, $75 million renovation, and you would think a budget of that scale would buy interest, traffic, and civic pride. Instead, the renovation produced even more blocky, uninteresting, blank concrete walls that do nothing to drive foot traffic or engage the community. For a sliver of that seventy-five-million-dollar budget, we could have helped them integrate art technology—installations in which the light itself is the artwork, engineered to change and to run all night, every night—so that even when the mall doors were locked, the property continued to captivate the traffic passing by on the busiest street in the city. The renovation bought square footage; it bought no attention.

By converting dead, uninspiring walls into dynamic pieces, these areas can instantly elevate their public profiles and leave the kind of lasting impression that makes visitors want to return. Attention is the scarcest resource on the modern street, and art technology exists to win it: making the boring captivating and the dull alive, and nurturing a vibrant nighttime economy that supports the bottom line while invigorating the community. The fastest way to see it is in dollars.

Running the Numbers: A Landmark for the Price of a Newspaper Ad

To understand the value of dynamic architectural lighting, we have to stop viewing it solely as an infrastructure cost and start seeing it as a marketing asset as well. When you shift that perspective, the math becomes attractive in a hurry.

Consider the traditional corporate playbook for brand visibility. Running a single full-page advertisement in a major national newspaper costs between $5,000 and $12,000, depending on the day and placement. Commit to a modest campaign of one full-page ad per quarter, and you've made a $20,000 to $48,000 annual commitment. Over a decade, that traditional media spend can balloon to half a million dollars.

And what do you actually get for that half-million-dollar investment? A medium that fewer than a quarter of the population subscribes to, and an audience actively looking past your content. Traditional ads are fleeting, easily ignored, and entirely detached from the local foot traffic that actually sustains a brick-and-mortar market. It is a large expenditure for a momentary flash of attention.

Now, let's see how a permanent architectural facade installation stacks up dollar-for-dollar.

The investment for the Canadian Tire installation of a high-impact lighting system—premium fixtures, advanced control technology, and professional installation included—was roughly $30,000. For the price of just a few newspaper ads, the store bought a permanent landmark. Over a standard ten-year lifespan, that initial $30,000 investment breaks down to just $3,000 a year. That works out to only $8.21 per day.

For less than the price of a couple of morning coffees, a business—or a city—can own a stunning, dynamic canvas that commands attention 365 nights a year. Unlike a static ad, the installation actively evolves, changing colors and patterns to celebrate every holiday, season, and major local event, constantly renewing its relevance to the community. And the practice extends far beyond December: fly the local team's colors on every single game day. Would that foster a deeper sense of civic pride? Absolutely.

These systems are engineered for longevity with almost zero maintenance. A well-built installation doesn't stop at a decade; it is built to keep shining. Push that lifespan to twenty years, and the daily cost plummets to $4.10. Economically, it does not get much more effective than that.

We got lucky with the store's owner: a visionary who served as the company's chair of retail-tech innovation. His journey was a classic rags-to-riches story, which perhaps explained why he remained such a deeply caring individual; within the organization, he was known simply as the most technologically advanced mind in the business. It was impossible to ask for a better champion.

With this influence, he threw his weight behind our project, trying to get us into his colleagues' stores and even working to secure us a presentation slot at their annual corporate conference. Yet, despite having the most forward-thinking ally in the company fighting for us, the momentum stalled. We managed to launch just one more location, in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and then there were no more takers; the rest of the corporation preferred the safety of traditional print ads over the future of retail.

The lesson for your city is uncomfortable but useful: the arithmetic doesn't sell itself. Even an $8.21-a-day landmark needs a champion in the room—and in most rooms, that champion will have to be you.

Murals: The Tourism Engine That Shuts Down at Sunset

A chapter on urban blank walls cannot possibly be complete without a discussion of murals. Murals are universally beloved: a vibrant, welcome form of public art that breathes life into empty corners of towns and cities. It is difficult to think of a single modern city without them. Some, like the painted alleyways of San Francisco's Mission District or the politically charged walls of Belfast, have become world-renowned landmarks, proving that these large-scale paintings are far more than decoration.

At their core, murals are powerful economic engines and legitimate tourist attractions. Consider Chemainus, a small town nestled just an hour away from my hometown of Victoria, British Columbia. Chemainus has achieved international fame as the “Mural Capital of Canada”: over seventy murals scattered throughout its streets, an outdoor gallery that successfully pulls travelers off the highway. This public art literally saved the seaside mill town from economic collapse, transforming it into a tourism powerhouse that supports local restaurants and retail. Yet despite this massive success, Chemainus is leaving money on the table—because once the sun sets, the murals go dark, and that segment of the nighttime economy grinds to a halt.

Luckily, Chemainus boasts a thriving local theater scene that anchors its evening foot traffic; without it, the town's nighttime economy would be a fraction of what it is today. Still, there is zero illumination on the murals. None. When darkness falls, the art vanishes, and so do the potential evening dollars that could be infused into the community. Imagine the town lit those pieces and gave tourists a compelling reason to linger after the theater lets out. How many more dollars could be captured in food and beverage alone? Local boutiques and galleries could comfortably extend their hours during the high season, capturing a whole new wave of tourism revenue that currently disappears at dusk.

In all my years collaborating with municipalities, I have yet to see a single city that actively, artistically illuminates its murals to drive nighttime activity and foster a nocturnal sense of place. Think about that: an entire continent of public art, switched off every night. We are currently working on a project in Santa Cruz, California, featuring half a dozen ocean-themed murals clustered in a central alleyway. Predictably, they are shrouded in darkness at night. We have proposed a design to wash these walls in dynamic, colored light—not only highlighting the artwork but giving it a subtle sense of underwater motion. The benefit is double: the artwork can be experienced from a new perspective, and a dark alleyway that doubles as a pedestrian thoroughfare gains vital passive safety infrastructure.

Moving forward, cities should look beyond just washing a mural with light. Future mural projects should embed lighting elements directly into the design phase to create a seamless artistic experience that transitions from day to night. In my experience, however, most muralists lack the engineering background needed to integrate complex lighting systems into their work. For a firm like mine, comprised of artist-engineers, collaborating with local creators to bring these multidimensional visions to life is where the magic happens.

Years ago, we designed a concept for a project in York, Pennsylvania, though the funding unfortunately fell through. On the exterior wall of a beloved local jazz club, a mural featured a musician playing a trumpet. We designed a flexible, animated neon tube that would spiral out of the instrument's bell—the jazz vibrating inside the club made visible to the street. From a technical standpoint, this is neither difficult nor prohibitively expensive to execute, yet it remains another missed opportunity. Every year, I speak with dozens of cities, and every year, I encounter the same story. By treating murals strictly as daytime assets, cities are forfeiting half of their potential.

It's time to turn on the lights.

The Walls That Got Away and the Owners Who Said Yes

One of the worst examples of a wasted blank wall I've ever encountered sits right at the primary entrance of a flagship shopping center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Instead of a welcoming threshold to a premier destination, visitors are greeted by a giant, uninspiring concrete slab. Years ago, we proposed transforming this stark facade into a vibrant celebration of the island's state flower: a sweeping mural enhanced with embedded lighting to activate the space after dark. The proposal went nowhere. In the four years since we pitched it, thousands of patrons have walked directly into this urban dead zone, day after day. Will it change anytime soon? Inertia suggests otherwise.

This apathy is not unique to retail hubs. I have observed a recurring flaw in the architectural design of performing arts centers across the country, including the one in my own hometown. By necessity, these structures require huge, windowless exterior brick walls to house the intricate backstage rigging and set-design systems. While the interiors are masterfully crafted for the arts, the exteriors are often left entirely devoid of life.

Countless times, I have pitched a solution to these centers: activate those huge brick walls with an interactive lighting design that syncs in real time with the philharmonic playing inside. When the curtains close, the system could transition to pre-recorded symphonic performances, offering a dynamic, nightly light show for the public—a seamless way to build both artistic and civic pride in a downtown core. Yet, despite the obvious benefits, I have still not found a single taker.

This visual fatigue extends to suburban architecture as well. Drive past almost any shopping mall, and you will be met with drab, wearisome external walls. I continually pitch concepts to revitalize these structures, especially to bring warmth and energy to communities during the bleak winter months, only to be met with constant resistance.

The resistance isn't always about a lack of funds; often, it is a lack of vision. Consider the clock tower atop the main visitor center in my hometown's inner harbor. This prominent structure has remained virtually untouched and un-upgraded since the day it was built. I engaged in discussions with city leadership to transform the tower into a vibrant nighttime beacon, a visual anchor designed to draw pedestrians from the waterfront straight into the downtown retail corridor. The projected cost to execute this transformation was a modest $50,000. Ultimately, however, the project succumbed to a wave of civic apathy that proved insurmountable.

While much of this book might lean toward the critical, I am, by nature, a deeply optimistic person. If these pages occasionally feel a touch negative, it is not a cynical outlook; it is the sheer volume of missed opportunities and poor decisions I have witnessed throughout my career, and the genuine obligation I feel to share these experiences.

Thankfully, there are positive exceptions. A few years ago, the historic Anheuser-Busch Budweiser Brewery in St. Louis decided to activate its facade using our lighting design, and the result was spectacular. The historic brick architecture came alive, beautifully highlighted by RGB LED lights framing the building's perimeter and window sills. We were slated to illuminate the rest of the campus, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted those plans. It was a heartbreaking pause, particularly because they had planned to film a commercial featuring the iconic Clydesdale horses galloping out of the stables, with the lighting on all the surrounding buildings reacting to their hooves hitting the cobblestones in real time. It would have been an incredible display, and it remains one of my greatest “what ifs.”

We found a similarly forward-thinking partner in a property developer just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. They understood the value of the nighttime economy and refused to leave their walls dark and blank. Much like the brewery project, they lit multiple buildings within the development, creating an exciting, vibrant nighttime vista that naturally drew people to the local bars and restaurants. They understood the assignment.

Unfortunately, they are the outliers. I have spoken with a hundred property developers who simply do not grasp the concept—or who possess an inkling of the potential but refuse to invest in activating their nightscape. In my experience, when developers refuse to invest meaningful capital, they inevitably end up with uninspired, generic fixtures chosen straight from a manufacturer's catalog. You cannot buy captivating, artistic lighting design from a catalog.

This hesitation remains deeply perplexing. Recently, I spoke with the developers of a billion-dollar mixed-use project in Scottsdale, Arizona. The lead developer confessed to me that he frequently woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, terrified that his investment would look identical to the property just down the road. We presented him with a series of fantastic, differentiating concepts, yet he ultimately passed. We tried to ascertain why, but no explanation was ever given. Consequently, his development will likely blend into the background because he was unwilling to invest even one percent of the overall budget to stand out at night and drive foot traffic to his tenants.

Sometimes, I wonder what it will truly take for people to make that leap. When an investor is having literal nightmares about his property looking boring, yet passes on a direct solution to make it extraordinary, it reveals a psychological barrier that runs deeper than any budget line. Budgets do not explain it; mindsets do—and mindsets can be changed.

So here is what I want you to take from this chapter. Tonight, or any night this week, walk one block of your own downtown after sunset and count the blank walls. Each one is an asset your city already owns—bought, built, and standing in front of an audience every single evening, waiting for its second shift. The canvases are already hanging. The next chapter is about the smartest thing you can do with them: connecting the places in your city that already work.

1. 3. Jeff Siegler, Your City Is Sick: How We Can Improve the Economic, Social, Mental and Physical Health of Millions by Treating Our Cities Like People (Lulu Press, 2023).