Encountering The Night with Mobile Methods

Abstract

Nightlife settings both facilitate urban sociality and act as sites of social conflict, however little research has focused on experience and encounter in these places. This paper addresses this gap in the context of night‐time economic planning and recent research on encounter. The use of mobile methods in nightlife spaces is shown to garner a more nuanced understanding of how forays into planned night‐time spaces are experienced and understood by people using those spaces. I argue that emplaced, mobile methods unveil complex narratives of place, revealing prejudices and discourses at play in place. These narratives begin to erode privileged images of the city shaped by increasingly neoliberal governance and other cultural intermediaries, and draw out the potential of these methods to improve the lived inclusivity of place.