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CITIES AND THE NIGHT TIME ECONOMY
PART III

First published in Planning Practice and Research, Vol.10, No.2, 1995

Email: a.lovatt@mmu.ac.uk and j.oconnor@mmu.ac.uk

III The Night-time Economy

What has this got to do with the night-time economy?

The festivals, the cultural initiatives aimed at bringing people back into the city, the office and residential developments that either incorporated or pointed to the cultural facilities of the centre, the promotion of the city as a culturally vibrant realm - all these explicitly or unconsciously incorporated the idea of the night-life of the city, a realm of play, of socialisation, of encounter and of evasion associated with the night-time. Yet as an object of cultural policy it has been strangely marginalised. It seemed that this night-life was not a legitimate object of attention other than as something to be regulated and contained. Despite its inextricable link with the image of the vibrant city it was primarily an object of attention for agencies concerned with licensing, health and safety, planning and policing. It was a heavily regulated zone of space and time; a location for transgression conceived in terms of social disfunction. In short - a problem.

The reasons for this are complex. A phenomenological or anthropological description of the night time is beyond us here, but the descent of darkness, the arrival of sleep, the suspension of work mark it out as a time and space of choice as well as fear, of rest and of dreaming. Such a crucial ordering structure in traditional society - night following day - makes it, as with all boundaries, a site of transgression. It is a space and time of the other, the other self, other people and the other economy; but it is also a space of encounter with this other. It is a time of both crime and desire. The great suspensions of the diurnal order were to be found in festivals and cities. They represented a victory both for and against the night-time. In many ways the night-time of cities could represent the possibility of the permanent festival - the revels of the night.

A crucial point in the struggle for mastery over night-time is the installation of gas and then electricity in cities. Both were seen as a victory of culture over nature and thus at home in the city. The extension of both these technologies to the countryside was a staggeringly visible sign of the civilisation of the dark night of nature. In the city it meant the domestication of the night - a proud duty of the municipality, like the provision of clean drinking water. But this also meant that the night became 'night-time' - less a suspension of work but the clicking into gear of a new economy. Emerging in London and Paris from the mid-18th century (and fuelled by candle power) this night-time economy emerged to shadow the daytime. It was marginal, and those associated with it as producers dubious; but it did interact with the daytime in that it represented not just crime and sin, secret pleasures, obsessions and obscurity, but also an extension of the public realm, a new space and time of socialisation. This sense of schizophrenia, of choice, of fascination and anxiety was present then and has persisted to this day.

The gas lights in London and Paris were unnatural - they burned for many in godless defiance. But the societies of these cities were self consciously unnatural; the public realm was based on the artificiality, the artifice of culture (Sennett, 1976). The night-time as public realm persisted into the 19th century. Now, however, the night-time economy became one of mass production. In two senses. Firstly, it involved more than the small (though relatively open) circles of the 18th century. These economies were dealing with the growing industrial cities of Europe. Secondly, they were increasingly associated with a new mass consumption. The Arcades conquered and preserved the night by turning the exterior into the interior, and vice versa. The first location for both gas and electricity, the light was there to illuminate the goods on display and the people attracted to them (Benjamin, 1973; Giest, 1983). Artificiality here referred to the false nature of the man-made day light and to the cheap artefacts that fuelled the desires and the interests of the punters.

These shadow economies - in terms of goods and services, but also in moral and social terms - were always inserted with difficulty into the increasingly regulated fabric of the 19th century city. As sites of transgression they mixed sin and political unrest - disease, corruption and revolt (enshrined in the figure of the Bohemian and the Cabaret; Seigal, 1986). But as boundary, and as site of encounter with the other they could only ever be policed and not eradicated.

As a liminal zone then the night-time has always been ambiguous and dangerous. It is important to recognise this in the re-assertion of the values of urbanity and sociality at night. Coming out of the concert, or the pub or the meeting or the shop into the hustle and bustle of the street was and is one of the great experiences of urban life. But it was one that was infrequently attested to, and one that differed between classes and between men and women. Indeed, it was an experience that differed between cultures.

The experience of the 'urban' and of the public space of the night time is not universal, even in 'Europe'. Attitudes to pleasures, to sin (or peccadilloes) to sexuality (male and female), to sociality in civic space, the possibility of connecting pleasure and civic space, the attitude to cities, crowds, the mingling of classes, the anxiety of shifting identities, of the charlatan, the cheat, the social climber, the 'dukes for a night' (Clarke, 1985) - all these represent histories as yet unwritten. They point to two things: first, that the night-time economy is part of a wider social and cultural economy. Secondly, that the promotion of urbanity and vibrant nightlife in the new city centre needs to be examined more critically.

To take the first point. Even though the city has moved from one of production to one of consumption the regulatory authorities may not automatically realise or change to accommodate this. As the 'regulation school' has shown, economies are complexly articulated with culture and social structure (Harvey, 1989). Just as planners were faced with a 'culture' they new little about, the magistrates and police, along with the other regulatory agencies may have little sympathy with a growing call for 'de-regulation'. Certain sections of the city may desire and/or stand to benefit from the city as carnival, but others may see it as a re-assertion of threat. In this specific accounts are needed.

There has been much debate as to what extent Britain and the cities of northern industrial Europe ever had public spaces of sociability and how this may have been frowned on more than in the Latin countries with a strong civic tradition (and hot weather). But there are many accounts of cities like Manchester in the 1960s as exploding with clubs, pubs, and cafes - and the age range of the people who came into the centre was much wider than it is today. Whatever the case, this night-time activity was rooted in the lives and works of a large, wealthy industrial city which had nothing to prove to anybody, was out having fun and anybody who didn't like it could go elsewhere. But the thriving city centres of the 1960s were often deserted by the 1970s. There are many reasons for this. The withdrawal of people into privatised leisure - whether through TV, suburbanisation, DIY and the greater attractions and comforts of home based activities - was compounded by a general tightening of the regulatory noose; by bad planning, the restriction of shopping and markets, and over-zealous policing.

Thus the liminality of night-life turned into the pathologisation of city centres, riven by those residual groups who used the city - youth, prostitutes, drug addicts etc. Survey after survey found that the majority of women and the elderly did not go into the centre through fear of (male) violence. In this context the police increasingly saw the situation as one of crime and (drunken) disorderly behaviour, especially by young working-class males.

We cannot here go into the 'reality' or the 'mythology' of this; other articles here will have something to say about these perceptions. Any attempt to 'reclaim' the city at night would have to address these problems and would demand as much thought as had the development of arts and cultural strategies or the physical renewal of the urban fabric. In order for regulation to be supplemented by positive management further research and a wide-ranging debate has to occur.

This issue will attempt to address certain practical solutions to these questions but it will also argue for a holistic view of the night-time economy, that there are a whole complex of factors involved to this positive management. It is no longer possible to see policy makers as 'planners' in the traditional sense and the role they must play is both difficult and frustrating. It is also new. As with other developments in the 1980s it involves them in co-operation with people with whom they would not normally deal. In the eighties it was the agents of capital and a dominant market-led economy. They must now begin to talk to nightclub owners and bar managers not as the 'licensing authorities' to potential problem makers but as partners in the regeneration of the city centre.

This brings us to the second point. The promotion of the night time economy must recognise that it is about a public realm and one that is by its nature difficult to plan. The night-time is a liminal time in which the world of work is seen to loose its hold. A time of (for) transgression, a time for spending, a time for trying to be something the daytime may not let you be, a time for meeting people you shouldn't, for doing things your parents told you not to, that your children are too young to understand. This is now being promoted as vibrancy. But this invitation to transgression, marginal in the Fordist city of work is now central to contemporary consumerism. It is organised no longer by the shadow economy of the night but by the corporate bodies of the day. It is big business and all products now ask you to let yourself go (to them). If we are not careful the city will turn out to be no different from the bland consumerist playground of chain stores and fast food outlets which punctuate the day-time economy.

In the reorientation of the city towards pleasure it is easy to define it in purely consumerist terms, a space of consumption from which undesirables are excluded. Planners must certainly look at widening access to the city, as we argued above, but not at the price of sanitisation. The problem has often been seen in terms of 'youth' and 'undesirables', where attracting the middle aged and the middle classes to the centre depends on somehow shielding them from these groups or even removing the offending article (as some cities have attempted). Cities should not aim to replicate the sanitised spaces of corporate consumption; their fluidity and inverted parameters resist such prescription. City centres demand a level of civility in the interaction of different groups and people. But it must also be about mixing with people you would not mix with normally and seeing things and people you would not normally approve of. These skills may need to be re-learnt but should be seen as an opportunity, not a threat.

This is the civic space of the late 20th century. We are more aware than ever of the diversity and the disturbing relativity of our lives and values, through the newspapers and the TV. One of the crucial questions of our cities is whether this new public realm can be made to work in the flesh, on the streets, or whether this is some nostalgia for a 19th-century city that never was. The example of Los Angeles is cliched but apt. It stands as warning for a collapse of this public space. Social justice and local democracy are crucial here, but so too is the culture of cities that is found in a vibrant and interactive public space. The creation of this in our cities in the evening depends as much on overcoming the intolerance and the prejudices of the 'respectable classes' as it does on curbing the violence of the bad people.

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Send email to: a.lovatt@mmu.ac.uk and j.oconnor@mmu.ac.uk