On Friday, November 4, 2022, the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), in partnership with LightJustice.org, will hold a day-long virtual symposium entitled “Light + Justice” to explore the intersection of lighting in the public realm with environmental justice and social equity. It will center on three 90-minute sessions featuring a moderator and a panel of experts. The sessions will examine 1) the history of lighting injustice, 2) current knowledge and policy opportunities, and 3) just lighting in practice (past and current).

“Light Justice” is an idea rooted in an ongoing conversation between Edward Bartholomew and Mark Loeffler, both lighting designers and IES members, about their mutual recognition of harmful disparities in lighting quality and inequality in the public realm. In 2020, they coined the term “Light + Justice” as the title and subject of numerous presentations and published articles exploring the unjust impacts of bad lighting and opportunities for the lighting industry to overcome those social and environmental inequities. In early 2022, they established the website LightJustice.org as a resource and forum for planners, designers, educators, policymakers, and community groups. As they have come to define it, “Light Justice” is the practice of planning, designing, implementing, and investing in good lighting for under-resourced communities through a process of stakeholder engagement and community-supported placemaking.