Urban

The temperature of night

Spall 002: Light, memory, and the infrastructure of feeling

An orbital view of Toronto reveals a patchwork of colour temperatures—sodium, mercury, LED—layered across the city. Photo by Oleg Kononenko, ISS.

I grew up in a duplex apartment. While short of a bird’s-eye view, the living room window offered just enough elevation that the nearest streetlamp stood nearly level. As such, it occupies an outsized presence in my earliest memories. Fashioned in the “acorn” style common across Toronto from the post-war period through the 1990s, its incandescent