Introduction

We move here to underline the importance of the urban policy context, its history and trajectory when considering night-time governance cases from around the planet. In order to think through the evolution of the governance of the night in cities with a deeper sense of context, our goal in this first of two in-depth comparative case-study chapters is to stress the value and the institutional positioning of the urban night and the underpinning economic imperatives that drive it in one or another direction. This chapter, then, is once again empirical in nature. It offers more information on the cases of London, Sydney and New York, building on our own work in several of these contexts. In Chapter 5, we move to think of questions of scale, non-governmental imperatives and continuity in the wake of changing political priorities. Overall, these are realities that deal with the issue of night-time governance in very diverse ways and present, in our view, valuable stories of institutionalization to be considered. This is not to privilege a specific set of cities, but rather to highlight the importance of stepping into the lived realities and long-lived pathways that might have cast different governance shapes in places as different as the UK, Australia and the US. Then, in Chapter 5, we speak of Tokyo, Berlin, Valparaiso and Bogota. This allows us to step beyond the summary and bird’s-eye-view approach of Chapter 3 to better account for complex private and community interests, how they intersect, and how a mix of public management institutions intersect with each other in the governance of the night-time. We take this point of departure to discuss the public– private relations that began to emerge in Chapter 3 as central to the ways that cities have dealt with the management of what happens after hours. We look at whose interests are represented and what complex urban developmental trajectories are in place. In Chapter 5, then, we highlight how the institutions and the scales depicted in the previous chapters are embedded in local histories. We do so as we seek to offer a more nuanced outline of how these play out through time in major cities around the globe. Practically, we move from the more vignette-based style of Chapter 3 to the longer case studies depicted here.