Introduction: Geographies of the urban night

Changing meanings and experiences of urban darkness and nights

Urban darkness has long been described in negative terms – for instance, as the ‘dark side’– and the ‘forces of darkness’ have been conceived as the opposite of that which enlightens and illuminates. In the academic literature a similar trend can be identified, with the exception of the work on illuminated urban landscapes by, for example, Edensor and Millington (2009) and Edensor (2013). Electricity entered urban life in the 1880s and spread throughout the modern cityscape in several waves. Initially confined to the mansions of the wealthy and to department stores aimed at attracting customers, it then expanded into public street-lighting schemes and along major transport routes. The rise of public street-lighting has been fundamental to new attitudes towards the urban night (Koslofsky, 2002). Street-lighting was intended to promote law and order. Bringing light to places of darkness where fear and crime are presumed to be common is still considered a widely shared solution to crime (Painter, 1996) as lighting tends to reduce the fear which crime engenders (Pain et al., 2006). Very little is known, however, on how consumers of nightlife entertainment experience lighting within the continuously evolving situations in which they are enmeshed on nights out (see Brands et al., 2013).

Street-lighting, however, also beautifies cities, provides convenience and reflects a new willingness to use the city at night. Successive technologies of artificial illumination have opened up the night to broader, more diverse space-making social practices as the frontier of darkness has been progressively pushed back (Melbin, 1987). A new landscape of modernity has been produced whereby the city is transformed ‘from a dark and treacherous netherworld into a glittering multi-coloured wonderland’ (Nasaw, 1999: 6). As such, electric lighting has had a decisive impact on the ‘psychogeography’ of urban space (McQuire, 2005). Modern illumination has thus transformed the nocturnal urban experience, producing cityscapes of regulation, hierarchical selectiveness, consumption, fantasy and imagination. At the same time, it should be appreciated that local and national and rhythms and temporalities of illumination vary enormously (Edensor, 2010, 2012).

Those rhythms and temporalities are one reason why simplistic dualisms of night versus day and dark versus light are often inaccurate and unhelpful, but there are also deeper philosophical arguments about why thinking in terms of absolute oppositions is misleading. As Morris (2011) insists, the efficacy of both light and dark cannot lie in the triumph of light over dark. They are both present in each other. Moreover, darkness and illumination are loaded with contested values and are experienced differently. The meanings and emotional experiences associated with dark/light are also culturally inflected (Edensor, 2012) and darkness fosters contradictory emotions; it creates ‘a sense of surrender which is unsettling, but also a feeling of liberation which can be uplifting’ (Horlock, cited in Morris, 2011: 316). What may be a quiet site of gloom for some may be a realm of terror and suspicion for others, and what might be experienced by city planners and club owners as a brightly illuminated consumption space might be conceived by marginal groups as a site of surveillance and exclusion. There is still much to explore in terms of people’s appreciation of and experience with dark and light spaces. Post-phenomenological work on landscapes within geography is an excellent field for further research on the relational understanding of nocturnal landscapes.

The evolution of the night-time economy

City centres have always had late-night amenities in some form but, since de-industrialisation, concrete policies have been designed to regenerate post-industrial cities and to draw the attention of potential newcomers, tourists and entrepreneurs (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003). In response to the decentralisation of governmental power from the national to the local level, cities have become more proactive in enhancing inter-locality competitiveness and stimulating economic growth (Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Harvey, 1989). This neoliberal rationality and strategy gained widespread prominence during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a strategic political response to the declining profitability of traditional mass-production industries and the crisis of Keynesian welfare policies (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). In the UK in particular, the discourse and strategy of the ‘24-hour city’ was a direct response to the rapid growth in out-of-town activities driven by suburbanisation (Heath, 1997). The withdrawal of people into their private spaces and suburban home-based activities meant that city-centre nightlife was dominated by residual groups and users, such as youth groups, prostitutes and drug addicts (e.g. Lovatt and O’Connor, 1995). The ‘24-hour city’ concept was applied to city centres that were suffering from a lack of safety and were declining because they had become spaces where people work and shop between the hours of nine and five and that were subsequently abandoned (Heath and Stickland, 1997). The main idea of this strategy was to attract visitors back into the city during the evenings and at night-time, and informed by experiences in continental European cities which have developed cultural policies to revitalise their urban nightlife (Bianchini, 1995) and to develop an evening economy.

The term ‘night-time economy’ (NTE) has its origins in the work of academics associated with the creative cities organisation Comedia Consultancy (1991; Shaw, 2014). The term first gained currency in urban planning circles in the UK, more specifically in the post-industrial cities of the north of England. The concept was invented as part of broader attempts to encourage the deregulation and development of the alcohol and leisure industries at night in the early 1990s (Bianchini, 1995; Shaw, 2014). Up until then, the night was widely considered as a ‘dead’ time with little economic potential or market value. The NTE discourse that emerged in the UK in the 1990s represented the urban night as allowing the city’s economy to be ‘doubled’ (Bianchini, 1995). Nowadays, the term NTE is telling with regard to the obvious links between nightlife, profitability and inter-urban competitiveness (e.g. Shaw, 2010; van Aalst et al., 2014). With the socio-economic changes mentioned earlier, neoliberalisation strategies and cities re-inventing themselves as consumption sites, the NTE discourse has been widely embraced by policymakers and city marketing officials, not only in the UK but also abroad. The term NTE now tends to refer to the assemblage of bars, clubs, cinemas, theatres and cultural festivals and events at night time which are, in a context of urban entrepreneurialism, supposed to contribute to urban regeneration and local economic growth.

Optimism about the potential benefits of the NTE has, to some extent, been displaced by growing concern. First, Chatterton and Hollands (2003) showed that many British urban nightlife districts are experiencing a ‘McDonaldisation’, where big branded names are taking over large parts of downtown areas, leaving consumers with an increasingly standardised experience. The exclusion of lower-class, non-white and non-mainstream revellers from UK city centres reflects the homogenisation of the types of nightlife facility on offer and the spatial marginalisation of such nightlife spaces as traditional community pubs, ale houses and venues playing alternative music – both are a consequence of the branding and ‘theming’ of mainstream nightlife by corporate actors aiming to maximise profits by attracting relatively risk-free cash-rich consumers such as students and young urban professionals (see also Talbot, 2007; for critiques, see Jayne et al., 2008; Latham, 2003). Second, the promotion of the NTE has, in many places, sparked into being conflicts between nightlife visitors and (gentrifying) residents in and around city centres (Hae, 2012), often over noise levels and litter.

Third, attention has been drawn to the social exclusion of particular social groups from urban nightlife (Boogaarts, 2008; Measham and Hadfield, 2009; Schwanen et al., 2012; Valentine et al., 2010). Class, age and ethnicity are key axes of social differentiation along which such social exclusion is organised, while the licensing practices of local authorities, the programming of music, drink and entry prices, entry requirements and marketing techniques of venue owners (such as the use of online registration and members-only strategies) in combination with ‘voluntary’ self-regulation are important techniques and mechanisms through which processes of exclusion are enacted (Boogaarts de Bruin, 2011; Measham and Hadfield, 2009; Schwanen et al., 2012; Valentine et al., 2010; Talbot, 2004). Apart from further work on patterns and processes of exclusion, more research is needed on the accessibility of nightlife – i.e. the spatial access, affordability, acceptability and suitability of bars, clubs, cinemas and other nightlife entertainment establishments – for different social groups in a city. Here too, special attention should be devoted to differentiation along lines of class, age and ethnicity, as well as gender (on the latter, see Hubbard and Colosi, 2013; Schwanen et al., 2012; Sheard, 2011).

The intensification of regulation

The final reason why optimism about the NTE has been tempered relates to the moral panics about binge-drinking, substance use and the related health risks in both the popular press and certain sectors of the academic literature (Hadfield et al., 2009; Measham and Østergaard, 2009; Roberts and Eldridge, 2009). People who go out at night are increasingly portrayed as problematic in discourses that involve negative cultural signifiers such as drinking, making a noise, vandalism and hanging out in groups (Bromley and Nelson, 2002; Jayne et al., 2008; Roberts and Eldridge, 2009). Greater knowledge about the health implications of drinking (Jayne et al., 2011; Measham and Østergaard, 2009) has increased particular concerns about excesses of urban nightlife consumption (Hadfield et al., 2009; Roberts and Eldridge, 2009) among politicians, academics, journalists, policymakers and parents alike. As a result, urban nights are increasingly portrayed as space–times of transgressive and anti-social behaviour that need to be regulated. Discourses of policing, disorder, alcohol and anti-social behaviour have come to occupy a very central position in the regulation of night spaces over the past two decades (Crawford and Flint, 2009; Hobbs et al., 2003; Talbot, 2004).

Discourses of disorder, anti-social behaviour and the ‘alcoholisation’ of urban nightlife constitute a danger for any city that wishes to appear as an innovative, exciting, creative and safe place in which to live, visit, play and consume (Bannister et al., 2006; Harvey, 1989; Helms, 2008; van Liempt and van Aalst, 2012). The rationality of urban renaissance, where city centres are imagined as safe and comfortable places to live and consume, is thus competing with the narrative of violence and alcohol-related problems usually associated with nightlife districts (Eldridge, 2010). The aforementioned theoretical perspective on governmentality and biopower can aid in the unravelling of how the rationalities compete and interact. This is because it is at the level of strategies for intervention upon the night-time spaces of the city in the name of wellbeing and competitiveness that these rationalities are aligned and reinforce each other: in many cities techniques that follow from the rationality of violence and disorder are legimitised with reference to that of wellbeing and competitiveness (see also Helms, 2008).

The perspective of governmentality and biopower also highlights that the intensified regulation of the night-time economy needs to be placed in the context of broader strategies of facilitating the flow and mobility of people, goods, information and capital deemed ‘desirable’ and blocking and preventing ‘risky’ forms of circulation (with the latter ranging from viruses, terrorists and sub-prime mortgages to pan-handling and the homeless). These strategies of securitisation manifest themselves in numerous sites, including all kinds of borders (Adey, 2009; Amoore, 2006; Bigo, 2002) and urban spaces of consumption, such as shopping malls, leisure complexes and also nightlife districts in cities. According to Bigo (2002) and other scholars inspired by Foucault, what is happening is not so much a response to pre-existing threats and sources of unease but rather their active construction and determination in a process involving broad and heterogeneous constellations of social actors. In the context of the NTE, this has resulted in the introduction of new forms of surveillance and preventative safety measures, such as technologically advanced CCTV systems and identity scanners used at nightclubs, in order to keep the ‘unwanted’ out and make consumers of night-time entertainment behave in ways that are in alignment with the social codes that are embedded in discourses about health and wellbeing of the individual and collective that are promoted by such authorities as the (local) state, the police and public health professionals. It is also expected that a reduction of fear, of feelings of anxiousness and of stress will increase people’s motivation to spend money. The increasing number of actors having a say and determining who and what are considered to be ‘unwanted’ in nightlife districts, combined with a shift towards more preventive measures (Koskela, 2003), have resulted in a broadening-up of the category of the ‘unwanted’ visitor in nightlife districts and more people coming under surveillance.

Dynamics in practices of going out

The growth in the NTE and the increasing public demand for going out in the city and having a good time at night is not only due to the aforementioned broad socio-economic changes and the restructuring of the economy (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003); the structural transformation of youth as an (extended) phase of life itself is also an important societal transformation which has resulted in nightlife entertainment becoming very important in the construction of young people’s identity (Cattan and Vanola, 2013; Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Hollands, 1996). Within current youth-oriented nightlife, relatively new groups of consumers can, however, be identified.

First, students are a growing and dominant group in nightlife areas in certain inner cities. Their numbers have clearly risen since the democratisation of access to universities and the expansion in higher education in the 1960s (Chatterton, 1999; Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). ‘Studentification’ (Hubbard, 2008; Sage et al., 2013), is a recognised phenomenon in many British cities. It is a process by which specific neighbourhoods become dominated by student residential occupation and by which nightlife venues cater exclusively for students and their distinctive lifestyles during ‘students-only nights’ or in student-specific pubs. Students sometimes have a problematic position in nightlife, built on typical stereotypes represented by the media. Local residents often complain that the presence of student groups undermines the viability of neighbourhoods suffering problems of pre-loading (consuming large quantities of alcohol at home before going out), noise, vandalism, vomiting and public urination (Hubbard, 2008; Sage et al., 2013).

Second, the studies of Boogaarts de Bruin (2011), Böse (2005), Kosnick (2008), Measham and Hadfield (2009), Talbot (2007) and Valentine et al. (2010) show that ethnicity is an important line of division in urban nightlife districts. The marginalisation of ethnic minorities occurs through entry requirements, members-only strategies and discrimination by door staff. The criminalisation of black music and the refusal of certain clubs to host black-music nights on the basis of racist stereotypes is a telling example (Talbot, 2007). Research amongst ethnic clubbers in the Netherlands also showed that Dutch-Turkish youngsters often defect from mainstream nightlife because of an experienced lack of belonging and safety (Boogaarts de Bruin, 2011). And in the UK it was found that their culture of abstinence from alcohol tends to exclude many Muslim youth from the city-centre night-time economy (Valentine et al., 2010). On the other hand, the increase in the cultural and ethnic variety of contemporary urban clubbers has also resulted in some clubs deploying new strategies with which to incorporate novel and diverse programming. Instead of arranging all of the parties themselves, clubs increasingly rent their venues out to external companies or DJ collectives. These collectives bring their own networks to the club, which makes it relatively easy to ensure the success of a new style of party. This changing clubbing landscape has made it possible for ethnic-event organisations to arrange their so-called ethno-parties in popular clubs (Boogaarts de Bruin, 2011).

Lastly, girls and women have been identified as consuming night-time entertainment and leisure spaces in much greater numbers than before (O’Brien et al., 2009). They are enjoying higher levels of disposable income than women of previous generations and increasing numbers of them are choosing to delay motherhood. Over recent decades, drinking has become widely more accepted and women tend to drink more visibly, although it should be acknowledged that drinking cultures differ strongly and patterns are deeply rooted in local and national traditions (Eisenbach-Stangl and Thom, 2009).

At the same time, alcohol consumption has become more problematised in most countries in the global North in recent years. Binge-drinking is one of the most prominent moral panics today, and women feature prominently in this panic. Their consumption of alcohol is often seen as unacceptable behaviour and the sense of moral transgression is stronger when it involves teenage girls and women in their twenties. According to Hubbard (2008), such double standards about the gendering of alcohol consumption underline that women face more opprobrium than men when they drink. The impact that young women have had on transforming the character and atmosphere of urban nightlife is huge, in both negative and positive terms (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003). Hubbard (2008) shows that ‘alternative’ nightlife venues, in particular, offer women comfortable spaces in which they can develop positive femininities based on a shared search for pleasure and excitement. Nevertheless, simultaneously there is a tendency – more specific in mainstream clubs – for men to view women as sex objects or ‘meat’ (Anderson, 2009; Hubbard, 2013).

These three examples of relatively new types of clubber show that it is not possible to homogenise urban nightlife into a singular cultural form, with one sort of experience for all. Anderson (2009: 919) found that the night-time economy in different places in the global North features highly variable events and a diversity of nightlife venues. He concludes that nightlife has different layers. On the one hand, there are commercial places with popular, mainstream music in so-called High Streets, described by Chatterton and Hollands (2003) as ‘brandscapes’. On the other, there are smaller, independent nightlife spaces often located on the fringes of the city –‘underground scenes’ (see Gallan, 2013). Most nightlife venues, however, fall somewhere between the two poles. There appears to be a need for more research on the heterogeneity and complexity of patterns of going out, nightlife venues and the subcultures and scenes oriented around night-time spaces.

Changing meanings and experiences of urban darkness and nights

In his paper, Edensor describes the historical and cultural shift from the fear of darkness towards more positive nocturnal qualities and experiences. He argues that, rather than considering the nocturnal and diurnal to be opposing states, it is more productive and realistic to develop a relational understanding of these conditions. The importance of such understandings also emerges from the paper by Brands, Schwanen and van Aalst in which responses among young night-time economy consumers to street-lighting in nightlife districts in the Netherlands are analysed. These authors show those understandings to be ambiguous and to depend upon the assemblage of human and non-human elements in which encounters with street-lighting are enmeshed.

The evolution of urban night-time economies

The ongoing evolution of the night-time economy is central to Shaw’s paper. He describes how bridging the gap between the end of the working day and the start of the ‘night-time economy’ has, for a long time, been the golden goose of urban night-time policy strategy in many British cities. Using the case study ‘Alive after Five’, which seeks to extend shopping hours in order to encourage more people to use the city at night, Shaw explores the planning, translation and practice of this project in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, drawing on actor-network-theory and political economy thinking on neo-liberalism in the UK. Tadié and Permanadeli show that a neoliberal way of thinking with regard to the night applies not only to the UK, but is also apparent beyond the global North, for example, in Jakarta’s nightlife districts. The authors demonstrate how some leisure venues in the city resemble others throughout the world when international benchmarks are adopted to prove the modernity of Jakarta. At the same time, however, the governing and regulation of urban nightlife districts is mediated by the local context, producing unique types of territory and relation. High levels of informality (penertiban in Indonesian), for example, are characteristic of the processes through which the city – and thus also the night-time city – is ordered and regulated. Additionally, morality and religion have started to clearly inform governmental action in Jakarta under Islamist pressure; current public discourse is all about removing ‘sin’ from the central nightlife districts of the city.

The intensification of regulation

In her contribution, van Liempt shows how a growing diversity of agents is involved in the process of governing the city at night. Ordering and surveillance are usually not undertaken by one set of actors but emerge out of allegiances and assemblages. So-called ‘safe nightlife policies’ fit neatly into the wider context of ‘integral’ local safety policies, where many different actors are expected to collaborate and take responsibility in surveillance assemblages. Brands, Schwanen and van Aalst show that responses among young night-time economy consumers to policing measures such as the presence of the police, bouncers, or CCTV, are ambiguous. They found that the number of police officers patrolling the streets and the equipment they carried elicited a range of responses and some ambiguity as to whether a visible police presence reduced or intensified fear of crime amongst their study participants. ‘Hard’ policing technologies were often anticipated as signals for future harm and ‘soft’ policing was generally welcomed. Middleton and Yarwood explore the work of one particular ‘soft partner’ in monitoring nightlife districts in the UK – street pastors. These faith-based regulators, introduced in 2003, provide care in the nocturnal city to young clubbers who have trouble standing on their own two feet or finding a cab, or who can no longer walk in their high-heeled shoes. As such street pastors are informally contributing to the wellbeing of some late-night clubbers. In their article, Hadfield and Measham explore how negotiations within partnerships between regulators and the regulated take place. They show how negotiations of compliance increase trust, the flow of intelligence and effective responses to crime. But these negotiations also breed complacency, inaction and regulatory capture that creates obstacles to the effecting of real cultural change.

Dynamics in practices of going out

Apart from providing geographical diversity within studies on the NTE, we also identify a rise in new forms of consumption and entertainment within the night-time economy of several cities. Pottie-Sherman and Hiebert provide an interesting case study on transnational nightlife with their research on Chinese night markets in a Canadian suburb. One aspect of diaspora culture finds itself seriously mismatched with the realities of life in the suburbs of Vancouver as the Chinese culture of ‘late day’ bluntly contrasts with the quiet Richmond landscape after 6 pm.

What happens at night in the city is clearly more than just economy, it is also about meeting others, creating identities and having fun. Gallan posits that nightlife spaces are important for cities, and also for the subcultures and music preferences of young people. This article seeks to revisit Foucault’s understanding of the temporalities of heterotopia by describing the complexities and experience of marginal space. Based on a case study, the author defines how going out to the Oxford Tavern in the Australian city of Wollongong can be a space–time in which significant ‘rites of passage’ are experienced and remembered. Similarly, Roberts’ contribution is about the social practices of a ‘big night out’ and adds an interesting dimension to research on the geographies of going out. It shows that spatiality plays a significant role in the formation of drinking experiences, cultures and the production of atmosphere, based on research in two different British regions about the way in which young (mainstream) people understand the city centres at night to be ‘their’ space–time and as culturally and economically approved sites for the performance of their ‘rituals’ (pre-loading, drinking, bar-hopping, dancing and late-night snacking). Within so-called ‘drinking circuits’, the feeling of territoriality turns out to be very important: being recognised and respected in an environment where people behave similarly.

Finally, Hubbard and Colosi explore the gender dimension of the night-time city in England and Wales. They argue that the existence of ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ at the heart of the city underlines the gendered nature of the night-time economy, a space–time which continues to privilege the male sexual gaze by putting women on display for men’s consumption. The removal of these clubs has been hailed by some as an important step in the creation of more gender-equal cities, challenging long-standing assumptions that women’s access to nightlife can only be on men’s terms.