Introduction

Inequality is one of the most defining features of the ‘urban age’ (Gleeson, 2014): crucibles of opportunities and socialisation, cities are equally at the heart of today's greatest social disparities (McGranahan & Satterthwaite, 2014). The urban night is far from immune to these challenges, and potentially a key space for engaging questions of equity, participation and inclusion. In this chapter, we explore issues of what we could call ‘invisibilization’ (Vergès, 2019) in current approaches to night-time governance. Specifically, we argue that the ways in which NTEs are framed, discussed, defined, delimited and understood in policy conversations tend to obscure the intersecting racial, gender-based and socio-economic inequalities that shape and, indeed, maintain ‘thriving’ NTEs (and urban economies more broadly).

Reframing ‘the economy’ in NTEs

Cleaners, carers and nurses, drivers, logistics and factory workers, security agents, and sex workers, to name only a few, have been a foundational part of formal and informal NTEs for a long time. In addition, the 24/7 running of (urban) capitalist economies is enabled by the gendered division of work (Katz, 2001), with women undertaking the main share of the social reproduction tasks of cleaning and caring at home and at work during the day, late in the evening, throughout the night and early in the morning. As already argued elsewhere, whether concerned with equality or not, the work of government policy always involves the discursive construction of subjects to be governed (Smeds et al, 2020). This, in turn, shapes whose voices are included, excluded, taken into account or discarded in decision-making. In this chapter, it is our contention that the contribution and lived experiences of those who make cities run after dark, through paid and unpaid, formal and informal work, remain all too often invisible, and thus neglected, in mainstream visions of the urban night. Therefore, in asking ‘Whose night is it?’, we wish to draw attention to how enduring inequalities and injustices shape the ways in which different bodies can safely work, or just be, in the night-time city.

Throughout this chapter, we explore whose experiences remain largely absent from policy conversations about and dominant visions of NTEs.