INF NIGHT · The Informal Nocturnal City (INF_NIGHT): Towards a new generation of research and policy agenda about urban informality and nightlife in the 21st century South Europe

The Informal Nocturnal City (INF_NIGHT): Towards a new generation of research and policy agenda about urban informality and nightlife in the 21st century South Europe

The aim of INF_NIGHT was to enhance debates in both the academic and urban policy and planning literatures concerning the in/formal night, through a transnational, policy-oriented study undertaken in Madrid, Rome and Lisbon. Through a novel combination of conceptual frameworks based on three fundamental pillars (informality, nocturnal life and urban security), and articulating these three with debates on urban governance, I have addressed the ways in which informal practices, many times conducted during night, are imagined, negotiated and (re)produced and how these fundamentally affect urban change in post-industrial Southern European cities. INFNIGHT findings show how the criminalisation of In/formal Nocturnal Cities is a cornerstone used in governance processes in contemporary Southern European cities. The successive crises of the last decades (2008 GFC, Covid-19 pandemic crisis), have reinforced the nyctophobic discourses that for centuries have been reproduced around the night, the ‘obscure’, ‘gloom’ and ‘blackness’. This has a major impact on the public representation of subaltern nocturnal actors, in particular precarious (often racialised migrants) workers, whose survival activity is carried out during night-time hours. A major conclusion of INFNIGHT is that dark time-spaces can be used both for work, escape and struggle in a context of high precarity, persecution and criminalisation of this informalised workforce in Southern European cities. The effect of a ‘darkening’ public approach has been making informalised workers (street informal vending, sex work and domestic employment) more clandestine (displacing them 'into the shadows'), hence criminalising their labour activity in public and visible spaces based on moral and legal arguments, while permitting, tolerating or even favouring those same activities in private/less visible spaces. However, specially prominent for the Spanish case, new forms of collective action have emerged since the 2010: these new “communities of struggle” are highly hybridised with some previous feminist, anti-racist and urban grassroots, incorporating a mestizo character to the previous white, middle-class composition of traditional unions. The inclusion of the voices of these subaltern/precarious actors into policy-making is an indispensable task in the governance of Southern European cities in the coming years.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз