A Review of Robert Shaw, The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge, 2018, 126 pр.

Abstract

This review focuses on the book The Nocturnal City written by the British social geographer Robert Shaw. The author’s major objective is to put the night at the center of the research agenda in urban studies, to contribute to urban theory in general, and to open up a new research field — nightology. The theoretical ambition for Shaw is an attempt to establish a dialogue between planetary urbanism (critical urban theory) and the post-structuralist understanding of the city (assemblage thinking). The author employs the conceptual model of ‘three ecologies’ developed by Felix Guattari; it considers the city as consisting of three interconnected layers: ‘self — society — earth’. Another important analytical tool is the post-colonial metaphor of the night as a frontier, which Shaw develops, considering specificities of the nocturnal city: infrastructures of artificial lighting and cleaning, the night-time economy, the changing aesthetics of cities at night and the experience of night-time at home, beyond the public space. The book does not offer a ready-made solution to theoretical problems and reveals just a little of the empirical diversity of nocturnal cities, but it is recommended as an introduction to a new field — nightology (especially for the Russian social sciences) — and as an elaboration of the discussion around the compatibility of critical urbanism and assemblage thinking in urban theory.