Introduction

The trajectories of night-time governance presented in Chapter 4 speak to the need to understand the institutionalization of how we manage the NTE within the broader context of urban governance. Numerous factors that are often sidelined in much of the practice, and some of the literature, stand out already. Questions of scales of governance, political-economic continuity, embeddedness of the NTE into a progressively 24/7 society (Crary, 2013) and contestation and inequalities at night all stand out as key learnings from the stories of Sydney and London, and their Melbourne and New York counterparts, sketched out in Chapter 4.

We move here, then, to look in more depth into these themes, introducing four more case studies: those of Tokyo in Japan, Berlin in Germany, Valparaiso in Chile and Bogota in Colombia. In doing so, we stress the necessity of paying closer attention to the scalar depth of night-time governance and the ‘bottom-up’ attention for the NTE that might emerge, as the Tokyo story tells us, in the absence of strong government action. Yet, to counterbalance this view, we also spotlight the challenges that might emerge from the opposite, as in Valparaiso, where local government buy-in to the NTE might not have translated directly into action and continuity (24horas.cl, 2017). In between these two cases is Berlin, a case that stresses further how the non-governmental realm is still a critical one for night-time action, and how the action of committees or associations should not be underplayed due to their capacity to animate night-time governance. We also provide a comparative insight stemming from Bogota, which illustrates how cities’ night-time policies can evolve significantly from restrictive towards more enabling regulations in the wake of changing social, economic and political priorities. Overall, then, we also seek to gesture explicitly to the need to decentre stories of the night-time beyond the much-discussed ‘West’ (whatever that unspecific geographical marker might mean) and account for stories and histories hailing from different ‘Eastern’ and ‘Southern’ experiences. An important lesson that stands out to us from this additional mix of cases is that of the necessity to both situate and attend to the broader urban politics that the NTE unfolds in, while keeping a close eye on the capacity of non-governmental realities to drive the trajectory of night-time governance.