Beyond night-time economy: Affective atmospheres of the urban night

Abstract

This paper develops the use of the concept of atmosphere in an ‘assemblage urbanism’ approach, as a way of reevaluating how we understand the night-time city. In doing so, this paper rejects what it sees as an overuse of the term ‘night-time economy’ as a synonym for ‘urban night’. Instead, it seeks to describe the night-time city center as an affective atmosphere, emerging from the arranging of practices, bodies and materials. In this vision, an affective atmosphere is best understood as a form of ‘placed assemblage’. My studies of taxi drivers and street cleaners in a British city are used to illustrate and explore how this occurs, drawing from an analytic framework developed out of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. As such, this paper offers a broader vision of the urban night, which sees the perspective taken by ‘night-time economy studies’ as reflecting just a portion of the practices which generate the affective atmosphere of the night-time city center.