Schevenin­gen boasts one of the most beau­ti­ful beaches in the Nether­lands. Nature and big city living come head to head here – with all the poten­tial and prob­lems that entails. The sea­side resort, part of The Hague, is sit­u­ated around 50 km to the south-west of Ams­ter­dam and sits right at the centre of the extremely highly densely pop­u­lated »Rand­stad« mega­lopo­lis that is home to over 8 mil­lion people. The Hague is exper­i­ment­ing with the county’s first »Living Lab« project, with inno­v­a­tive »Smart City Hubs« that are look­ing at how smart tech­nolo­gies can make cities more intel­li­gent, and how these tech­nologies can be inte­grated into urban fur­nish­ings in a way that brings the beauty and appeal of the nat­ural sur­round­ings back into the fore­front. As part of the project, the first Lif lumi­naire columns were erected on the redesigned Noorder­boule­vard – as strate­gic sup­port points for an inte­grated smart city infra­struc­ture.

A mobile waste bin on a boule­vard? A self-dri­ving shut­tle bus to trans­port vis­i­tors? A robot that resem­bles a moon buggy and col­lects rub­bish from the beach? In Schevenin­gen, sce­nar­ios like this are not a vision of the future, they are the result of a Living Lab project: intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies are being applied to address the cur­rent chal­lenges of a big city with intel­li­gent solu­tions.

Adap­tively equipped mod­u­lar Lif system lumi­naires are being used as strate­gic sup­port points for this smart tech­nol­ogy. Spe­cial record­ing devices in these posts allow vary­ing func­tions to be inte­grated, such as a Cyrb micro­phone: it recog­nises vehi­cles moving along the prom­e­nade when they shouldn’t be and alerts the police or the public order author­i­ties. Acoustic mon­i­tor­ing is also able to iden­tify sounds such as break­ing glass, verbal alter­ca­tions and shouts. The light poles will soon also mea­sure air qual­ity and vis­i­tor num­bers.

In design­ing the light­ing con­cept, the plan­ners focused on envi­ron­men­tally com­pat­i­ble light­ing to respond equally to the needs of people and of nature. The Lif top ele­ment and Twinspot module handle the tra­di­tional light­ing tasks of gen­eral illu­mi­na­tion and accent light­ing. The top ele­ment lights up the boule­vard in an even light. The mod­i­fied Twinspot mod­ules allow the light points to be switched on or off and con­trolled as needed via the Remoti­com tele­m­an­age­ment system. Addi­tional spe­cial fea­tures of the lumi­naires include their coat­ing and colour: ref­er­enc­ing the colours of the North Sea, Lif is fin­ished in a project-spe­cific light grey var­nish. The var­nish on the columns is resis­tant to sea­wa­ter (C4) and has a spe­cial anti-sticker coat­ing.

The smart light­ing, as part of the »Living Lab«, thus allows vis­i­tors to the Noorder­boule­vard to enjoy the unique expe­ri­ence of the merg­ing of wild nature and urban living com­fort­ably and safely.

client: City of Den Haag

lighting designer: Studio DL

photographer: JuistInBeeld