The Nocturnal City

Robert Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138676404
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317197225
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Night is a foundational element of human and animal life on earth, but its interaction with the social world has undergone significant transformations during the era of globalization. As the economic activity of the 'daytime' city has advanced into the night, other uses of the night as a time for play, for sleep or for escaping oppression have come increasingly under threat.

This book looks at the relationship between night and society in contemporary cities. It identifies that while theories of 'planetary urbanization' have traced the spatial spread of urban forms, the temporal expansion of urban capitalism has been less well mapped. It argues that, as a key part of planetary being, understanding what goes on at night in cities can add nuance to debates on planetary urbanization.

A series of practices and spaces that we encounter in the night-time city are explored. These include: the maintenance and repair of infrastructure; the aesthetics of the urban night; nightlife and the night-time economy; the home at night; and the ecologies of the urban night. Taking these forward the book will ask whether the night can reveal some of the boundaries to what we call 'the urban' in a world of cities, and will call for a revitalized and enhanced 'nightology' to study these limits.

1 Changing spaces, changing times

Urban futures

On New Year’s Eve, around the world, people in cities, towns and villages celebrate in a routine choreographed according to the globe’s complex and geopolitically constructed time zones. Where and when the New Year begins is somewhat contested: in 1995, Kiribati shifted the time zone of its most easterly islands, ostensibly to iron out logistical difficulties of having land either side of the International Date Line, but conveniently making Caroline Island the first inhabited land to reach the year 2000, an event which resulted in the island being renamed ‘Millennium Island’ and hosting a celebration viewed by a billion people across the world. Starting in Kiribati, New Year celebrations travel roughly westwards, bringing to cities in the middle of the night fireworks, public gatherings, dances, concerts, public broadcasts and other celebrations. Twenty-six hours later on Baker Island – actually a few hundred miles to the northwest of Millennium Island – the final celebrations are held by the few US naval personnel serving at this isolated base.

Between Kiribati and the USA, then, this celebration incorporates local, regional and national cultures, at the same time as marking a globalized system in which a European–Christian calendar has become the international standard. This nocturnal celebration is at once simultaneous – in that it occurs in all countries at midnight – and separated, travelling around the world. It is made up of both small moments (house parties, individuals with fireworks, families seated around the television) and large moments (spectacular events, with cities such as Sydney, Dubai, London, Paris and New York competing with one another to host the biggest or most extravagant firework displays). It is marked by its mundanity, as an annual reoccurrence, in which many people will not participate, but also by its rupture, as a moment of celebration and unity into which many people put a lot of emotional energy. It is notable in the almost unique centrality it places on midnight: while other festivals or celebrations contain nocturnal components, no other event brings a worldwide focus to the night at the same time, across cultures.

This moment and the contradictions that it contains reveal many of the difficulties that we face when considering how a globalized world connects together. How do we resolve the gaps between the specific or the individual and the general or the collective? Cities are sites in which many people collectively experience the same events, emotions, routines and so forth, but in which these experiences are vastly differentiated according to both individual circumstance and large socio-cultural groupings. As many people are alienated and excluded from urban life as are enchanted and enraptured by it. We could if we wanted describe New Year’s Eve in terms of the flows that go into making ‘event capitalism’; we could write with reference to the society of the spectacle, or to Baudrillard’s simulacra; we could contrast the excess of celebration with the waste and damage that it creates; we could discuss it as an event of globalization; we could explore the role of ritual within society; we could take a practice theory or actor-network approach, showing the complex processes of organization and coordination through which such events occur. To a greater or lesser degree, all these approaches have validity. However, each of them would tell us only part of the story about New Year’s Eve. They would reveal some of the ways in which different relations result in the production of spaces, moments and events in which the very being of urban dwellers is created out of their relations to the bodies and events around them. However, each narrative would also hide something, elide differences and overlook complexities.

In this chapter, I will offer my own narrative in relation to global urbanism. The aim will be to show how both conceptual development and empirical exploration of the urban night can expand our understanding of global urban life more broadly. I do so with the aim that this narrative and theorization be understood as adding something to previous accounts, rather than correcting or contradicting them. Therefore, I will address the city in this chapter before providing an introduction to the nocturnal in Chapter 2.

My approach begins with the premise that cities are machines which through all of the processes described above produce the people who inhabit the city, the built environment and the social norms that define urban life. My reading is inspired by the French philosopher, psychologist and activist Felix Guattari’s conceptualization of the machine:

If one broadens the concept of machine beyond its technical aspects and takes into account its economic, ecological and abstract dimensions and even the desiring machines that people our unconscious drives, one must treat the mass/aggregate of urban and architectural machinery as machinic components, all the way down to their smallest subgroupings.

(Guattari, 1993, p. 145)

Guattari is not the typical first choice of the urban theorist, but his work offers an interesting way for thinking about cities. In particular, I find him useful in helping frame urban life as at the intersection of what he calls the ‘environmental ecology, social ecology and mental ecology’ (Guattari, 1993). In other words, urban life emerges jointly out of the natural/built environment, social norms and power relations, and the psycho-social sense of self and identity. In a 1990 public lecture titled ‘Space and Corporeity’, given just eighteen months before his death, he predicted that urban studies would face the need to respond to shifts in the relationship between these ecologies and, as he outlined in more detail elsewhere, the necessary response would need to be an ‘ecosophy’ (a ‘knowledge of the home’) that would involve producing an ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari, 1995; 2000). In other words, the challenge for future urban studies would be to find ways of producing understandings of cities as inhabited machines which produce. In developing this understanding, researchers might offer small insights into the production of more egalitarian societies in which people live with both the ‘natural’ and ‘built’ environment around them. Guattari, in his own writing and in his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, developed a vision of the social world as emerging out of the intersections of the environmental, social and psychological. In conversation with contemporary urban theory, this can provide what is for me a persuasive vision of the urban world that can help us answer questions about changes to urban life today.

As cities become bigger, as speeds of communication become faster, as technology becomes more pervasive, the urban subjectivity machine is changing in both positive and negative ways. To focus on the more negative challenges that this transformation of urban life is bringing is to focus on multiple new and emerging challenges. Extreme rural poverty is being replaced with precarious urban poverty. Droughts and famines may become rarer, but insecurity increases in the informal settlements of megacities around the globe, in the deindustrialized cities of many developed counties and in the cities globally that experience a daily threat of terrorism. Basic services, information and other facilities are now more readily accessible by greater percentages of the globe’s population than ever before, but at the cost of reduced interactions with people, increased centralization of power, and a series of increasingly negative and alienating affective experiences (Berlant, 2011). Urban violence replaces rural oppression. Gentrification dispossesses the poor, so that the richest cities become more and more the playthings of a small, elite global group. In urban studies, the current desire to rethink the city can be connected to the empirical and conceptual recognition of these trends, which were predicted by many key theorists of the late twentieth century.

But in this list of contemporary problems, why then look at the urban night? My answer is that the night is uniquely placed at the intersection of the three ecologies (environment, society and self) that Guattari identifies. It helps us understand the intersection of these three fields, and the way in which they mechanically produce urban life. So while this book is clearly not the place for answering all the challenges of the contemporary city, it can offer two key contributions. First, it uses the urban night as a useful case study: how has this particular timespace been transformed, altered and shaped as cities have grown and time has accelerated? Almost uniquely, ‘night’ is a feature of every single city across the globe; some version of it is universal. As we shall see, during the twentieth century the night was repeatedly characterized as a time that was being ‘colonized’ by day; a ‘frontier’, akin to the spatial frontiers of the colonial era, into which daytime practices were expanding (Melbin, 1987; Schivelbusch, 1988; Gwiazdzinski, 2005). While globalization might mark the point at which this temporal expansion is completed, the urban night (like spatial frontiers) has continued to be a fluid and changing space, and this book aims to unpack some of these transformations.

Second, night can help us comment on the contemporary limits of urban life. If postcolonial work has shown how this depiction of the spatial frontier was at best a partial one which is becoming increasingly irrelevant (Roy, 2011), perhaps we should pay similar critical attention to this ‘temporal frontier’. Extending the arguments further, this focus on the intersecting spatio-temporal boundaries can inform some of the debates on the nature of the city that are emerging through these transformations.

Before turning to the night, however, I want to use this chapter to explore this understanding of the city in more detail. Urban studies has, in the 2010s, been an area of intensive and extensive theorization, in which there have been several attempts to use different frameworks to conceptualize urban life.

How is the world urban? Contemporary urban theory

The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be ‘urban’ is not fully or accurately measured by the proportion of the total population living in cities.

(Wirth, 1938, p. 2)

Wirth’s simple insight is a fundamental moment in urban studies. From this point onwards, the relationship between the built environment and ‘the urban’ starts to separate. The concept of the ‘urban’ or of ‘urban life’ becomes associated with a series of characteristics that extend beyond the presence of a dense population in an extensive built-up environment. Diversity of population, access to services, transport connections, presence of cultural and other activities, intersections of networks of business, manufacture, trade and finance, intensity of daily life and other concepts all become associated with ‘the urban’. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, urban theorists have continued to grapple with this disconnection in order to try to explore the processes and practices through which urban life is produced, and the broader socio-spatial impacts that this urban life has. Urban studies has moved through a series of different and intersecting understandings of how the world’s cities relate to one another, and the daily life of people in cities or living urban lives. Throughout this time, a series of ‘minor trends’ has sought to correct, push or challenge the dominant theorizations of any one moment. Ball argues that ‘the urban’ in many theories might be understood as either a ‘pragmatic concept with which to deal with empirical material or one spatial level out of a series of highly interlinked ones’ (Ball, 1986, p. 448). In other words, regardless of the particular focus, the city has typically been understood as either a series of empirical characteristics (as with Wirth) or as a particular scale within a hierarchy or series of scales. Throughout this history of theorization and retheorization, the question of what the city is or how cities connect to one another has thus come and gone.

It is fair to say that, at the time of writing, we are at a more intensive point of questioning the nature of cities. There is clearly no set starting point for the contemporary debate, but we can identify a series of prompts, both empirical and within the world of academia. As Hall and Savage (2016, p.82) summarize:

[T]he accelerated expansion of the urban in the landscapes and mind-sets of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by a renewed interest in comprehending current processes of worldwide urbanization. Longstanding questions of definition – ‘what is the city?’; ‘what is the urban?’ – are posed with new urgency as we engage with urban dynamism across the planet.

We might call this new worldwide urbanization the era of ‘post-globalization’ to refer to a planet in which the period of globalization has now happened. In this era, the ‘West versus the rest’ hierarchy established during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not quite collapsed but it is becoming frayed, with flows of people, material and information moving from city to city across the globe. What were once dominant states or businesses in the Global North are now met by cities, corporations and states from nations of the Global South; furthermore, these two categories are becoming increasingly less useful. Such moves have been associated with both economic growth outside of traditional power centres and stagnation in Europe and North America. What this is not, however, is a period in which North and South have become matched in wealth and opportunity. Rather, there has been a simultaneous global incorporation of more and more spaces into a single socio-economic system alongside increased fragmentation within that system, bringing Smith’s (1982) concepts of equalization and differentiation to mind. Wealth has been increasingly concentrated among elites who are free to travel and take advantage of global mobility, with the poor in all societies dropping back. Thus, the elite ‘world cities’, whether defined loosely or according to a series of metrics (Smith and Doel, 2011), have become increasingly dominant over the spaces around them. Furthermore, urban growth has been notable in its variation. It is well recognized that the cities of East Asia and the Middle East have grown by multiple orders of magnitude in under fifty years. Perhaps even more remarkably, older shrinking cities have in many locations seen new growth after decades of urban decline: for example, between 2001 and 2011, Manchester in the UK experienced its first population growth for forty years, and its fastest growth for a hundred years. Famously, various international organizations declared various years in the late 2000s as the year in which the majority of the globe’s population became urban, according to the different metrics that they used. As well as the sheer number of people living in cities, the emergent ‘megacities’ present a series of new phenomena, challenges and features for understanding cities.

So the academic desire to rethink and discuss the city has come from this repositioning of cities in global systems, and new forms of urban living. We can identify a step towards questions about the nature of cities occurring in the mid-2000s with Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums and Jennifer Robinson’s Ordinary Cities both offering positions that seem to mark the emerging divisions in understandings of cities (Davis, 2007; Robinson, 2006). Davis argues that the model of ‘world cities’, with its origins in Marxist ‘core–periphery’ models of global urban economics (Friedmann, 1986), is coming to an end. He sees the point of transfer from a majority-rural to majority-urban world as the moment when urban life becomes characterized by inhabitation not of cities as we had previously recognized them, but of either large megacities stretching over vast regions or ‘cityized’ suburbs, towns and villages which lose their rural characteristics to become effectively urban: ‘in many cases, rural people no longer have to migrate to the city: it migrates to them’ (Davis, 2007, p. 9). The result is a changed dynamic to the globe’s cities, in which ‘the exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies’ (p. 5). Davis’s analysis pulls apart the dystopia of contemporary capitalism, arguing from a perspective infused by Marxism and postmodernism that slums represent a future for cities in a world in which surplus capital has been translated into ‘surplus humanity’. He has little time for what he calls ‘portentous post-Marxist speculations’ (p. 201) about multiplicity and multitude.

As such, Davis’s analysis contrasts starkly with that of Robinson in Ordinary Cities. She sees urban studies as having analysed cities according to a binary of ‘modern’ and ‘not-modern’ in which two types have been studied: wealthy, global, Western cities as examples of the modern, and poor megacities as examples of the not-modern. Her critique is twofold. First, she aims to ‘dislocate modernity’ in order to move beyond a singular vision of modernity so that we start to understand the modern as consisting of ‘many different cultures in many different places … [which are] enchanted by the production and circulation of novelty, innovation and new fashions’ (Robinson, 2006, p. 7) The vision here is of a modernity which is multiple, which contains within it innovation, changes and difference produced from across the globe. Robinson’s suggestion is that urban studies needs to open itself up to ideas and comparisons from a wider range of sites, particularly those outside the Global North, in order to become ‘more cosmopolitan’ (p. 168). The second part of her critique is that urban studies needs to source its ideas from a wider range of cities in all contexts. This is the meaning of her term ‘ordinary cities’, which ‘draws our attention to cities as distinctive assemblages of many kinds of activities … [with] the capacity to shape their own futures, even if they exist in a world of (power-laden) connections and circulations’ (p. 170). Urban studies, for Robinson, needs to reject a focus solely on the largest and most powerful cities and instead use comparative methodologies to explore a diverse range of urban experiences. One might add that this means researching not just the experiences of people in city centres but also those of suburbanites, or those who are marginal in cities, or those who inhabit cities only transiently and so forth.

While differing in much of their analysis, both Robinson and Davis offer visions, to some extent at least, of an ‘urban world’: for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Changing spaces, changing times: urban futures
• 2. Fragmenting frontier: night, time and the city
• 3. Nocturnal ecologies and infrastructures
• 4. Nightlife and night-time economy
• 5. Aesthetics of the night-time city
• 6. The domestic night
• 7. Towards nightology and the temporal limits to urbanism
• Index