“Reclaiming Northbridge”: Urban (Dis)Order and Territorial Stigmatisation in Perth’s Night Time Economy precinct

Abstract

Cutting across three waves of Night-Time Economy (NTE) research, this paper is concerned with (i) the entrepreneurial shift in urban governance from which the strategic planning and development of NTEs arose; (ii) the stigma that came to surround some NTE precincts as these deregulated spaces became characterised as violent and disorderly; and (iii) the processes of securitisation and gentrification that are reterritorialising NTE spaces. The paper draws on the concept of territorial stigmatisation in presenting a case study of Northbridge – the largest nightlife precinct in the West Australian capital of Perth – exploring the media-circulated discursive utterances of a range of actors with symbolic power (politicians, business people, the police, bureaucrats, reporters, etc.), the stigmatised image of Northbridge (re)produced and reified by these utterances, and the suite of interventions these images have legitimated. These interventions, it is argued, constitute a process of reterritorialisation that is reordering and redefining who and what is (un)desirable and included/excluded. In doing so, they erode the counter spaces of the NTE – spaces where counter-hegemony and difference can take place, and which constitute the liberating potential of nightlife.