Night-time Leisure Research Articles

The Influential Image of Nighttime Urban Public Park in Forming Place Identity

The design of urban public park is an important factor which influence urban community leisure. The objective of this study is to investigate the community perceptions on nighttime leisure activities in urban public park. The questionnaire survey is done in Padang (green field) located in the urban center of Shah Alam and Putrajaya using random stratifies technique. There are four types of variable studied related to nighttime leisure in an urban public park namely comforts, conveniences, safety and nighttime leisure. The findings from this study are expected to show a positive perception of nighttime leisure in urban public park towards urban community.

How Urban Community Perceived Nighttime Public Park for Leisure Activities

The design of urban public park is an important factor which influence urban community leisure. The objective of this study is to investigate the community perceptions on nighttime leisure activities in urban public park. The questionnaire survey is done in Padang (green field) located in the urban center of Shah Alam and Putrajaya using random stratifies technique. There are four types of variable studied related to nighttime leisure in an urban public park namely comforts, conveniences, safety and nighttime leisure. The findings from this study are expected to show a positive perception of nighttime leisure in urban public park towards urban community.Keywords: Image; urban public park; place identity; nighttime leisure activitieseISSN 2398-4295 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. http://dx.doi.org/10.21834/ajbes.v3i11.106

Relationship between Nighttime Leisure Behaviour and Urban Park Setting in Shah Alam

Public parks play a vital role in the social life of urban communities. The purpose of this paper is to show the social behaviour and activities of a community during nighttime in outdoor spaces exclusively in public urban park in Shah Alam. However, literature reviews regarding nighttime social behaviour and activities of urban community are limited. Improved understanding of relation between community activity and urban park setting could be used to influence the development of public park design, to create nighttime urban outdoor environments more conducive to community leisure activity.Keywords: Human behaviour; leisure; nighttime activities; public parkeISSN 2398-4295 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.

Affective economies of Beyoglu in Istanbul: The construction of ‘Disgust’ and ‘Fear’ in neoliberalization of nightlife

This study contributes to understanding neoliberalism in Beyoglu, by examining how neoliberal discourses create and circulate normative meanings in nightlife. I suggest that neoliberal discourses and practices inform a value structure in everyday life which identifies subject positions in terms of affiliation and marginalization in Beyoglu's nightlife scene, based on the affective economies of Beyoglu. Affiliation/marginalization distil through moments of contact, imbued with various affective dispositions. I argue that spaces of affiliation shape and are shaped by the affective dispositions of (middle-)classed night-time euphoria. Conforming to norms of desirability, attractiveness and safety, they present a cultural and economic model attuned to neoliberal rationalities. Two dominant stereotypes of ‘undesirability’ emerge in affective terms: (i) those of ‘ineligible’ dispositions which produce emotions of ‘disgust’, and (ii) those of ‘fearful’ bodies constantly moving across the night-time leisure places of Beyoglu. By examining the relationship between neoliberalism and affective economies in Beyoglu's nightlife, this study contributes to research on night-time leisure places, providing insight into linkages between emotional subjectivities and rational thinking.

‘They look at you like an insect that wants to be squashed’: An ethnographic account of the racialized sexual spaces of Manchester’s Gay Village

This article explores the interactive relationship between sexuality, ‘race’ and space. By drawing on ethnographic research with bisexual and lesbian women, it looks at the lived experiences of the intersections of sexuality and ‘race’ in a particular sexualized space, namely Manchester’s Gay Village. The article argues that this ‘primarily’ sexualized night-time leisure space is simultaneously racialized through the ways in which it is structured around whiteness, which is perpetuated through a somatic norm that operates in different ways. It explores perceptions of the Gay Village as a ‘racially neutral’ space, exclusionary practices such as door policies, practices of looking and touching, and expressions of sexual desire, all of which racialize bodies and spaces. Examining ways in which ‘race’ and sexuality work together to constitute space and how sexualized space that is inherently racialized constitutes racial-sexual subjectivities, the article demonstrates the significance of the spatial dimension of everyday intersectional experience and therefore calls for researchers to pay more attention to ‘space’ as a concept when researching intersectionalities.

Changing the Beat

Opportunities for crime are related to specific times and places. However, studies on alcohol-related violence have mostly focused on the role of neighborhood-level factors over large areas and long periods of time, meaning that we know surprisingly little about how people’s interactions with the environment at specific times and places affect alcohol-related violence. In order to explore opportunities for violence in public places with high alcohol outlet densities, we conducted a multiple case study of two nighttime leisure microenvironments in Bogota, Colombia. Based on more than 150 hrs of participant observation in each site during nighttime activity over 4 months, we characterized each setting in terms of physical risk factors, actor heterogeneity, incidents of aggression, alcohol use dynamics and routines, and the intervention of different types of guardianship in these contexts. Results show that, despite similarities in the physical characteristics of the environment and alcohol availability, there are important differences in place-based dynamics that increase or decrease opportunities for violence and crime. We discuss how our results contribute to the development of opportunity theories and conclude with policy implications and opportunities for intervention.

Neoliberal Governance and the Homogenization of Substance Use and Risk in Night-Time Leisure Scenes

Neoliberal Governance and the Homogenization of Substance Use and Risk in Night-Time Leisure Scenes

The social organization of masculine violence in nighttime leisure scenes

Recent scholarship on masculinity and crime suggests that men who have difficulty asserting their masculine status due to social marginalization (across age, class, and racial lines) have a higher likelihood of engaging in violent behavior to offset their lack of social power in other areas. While marginalization can abet the development of masculine violence, in this article I suggest more attention to the mitigating effects of structural changes and cultural contexts is necessary for a richer understanding of how masculine violence plays out. Drawing on multi-method ethnographic data from a case of one major US city with a thriving nighttime cultural economy, I aim to show how the structural characteristics of nighttime leisure scenes create situations for the enactment of particular forms of violence that reflect a number of subterranean convergences with the masculinization of the cultural economy.

Comfortable and safe spaces? Gender, sexuality and ‘race’ in night-time leisure spaces

This article aims to contribute to the fields of emotional geographies and geographies of sexualities by exploring the relationship between emotions and gender, sexuality, and ‘race’ in sexualised night-time leisure spaces. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manchester's Gay Village, the article highlights the importance of taking into account intersections of social identities when exploring how people feel in certain spaces. It explores how relations of ‘othering’ work through emotions, in particular how people are othered through feelings of comfort and safety. Whilst these feelings are triggered by a particular reading of bodies and spaces, they also produce bodies and spaces that are gendered, sexualised, and racialised (and classed). The article offers a rethinking of comfort and safety as not just feelings individuals have but as being constitutive of sexual, gender, and racial subjectivities and spaces.

Urban Community Perception on Nighttime Leisure Activities in Improving Public Park Design

The design of urban public park is an important factor which influence urban community leisure. The objective of this study is to investigate the community perceptions on nighttime leisure activities in urban public park. The questionnaire survey is done in Padang (green field) located in the urban center of Shah Alam and Putrajaya using random stratifies technique. There are four types of variable studied related to nighttime leisure in an urban public park namely comforts, conveniences, safety and nighttime leisure. The findings from this study are expected to show a positive perception of nighttime leisure in urban public park towards urban community

Holding back the beers: maintaining ‘youth’ identity within the British night-time leisure economy

An expanding body of work on Britain's night-time alcohol-based leisure economy has acknowledged the importance of collective forms of alcohol consumption in the establishment and reinforcement of key aspects of both subjective and group youth identities. This research project has addressed the ways in which drinking behaviours and leisure characteristics usually applied to 18–25 year olds are retained and continue to structure the identities of older consumers of the night-time leisure experience. Field data suggest that in the absence of traditional forms of community and social order, the night-time economy now functions as the field upon which many people attempt to develop a sense of communitas and belonging. However, there is also crucial critical evidence to suggest that these consumers are essentially encouraged to heed the siren call of contemporary ideology by consistently reaffirming their commitment to consumer markets that often fail to yield the pleasures and freedoms associated with them. Not taking part in the commodified pleasures of the drinking strip can have a quite profound impact upon the individual, and the perceived freedoms of alcohol-fuelled hedonism often continue to draw the adult consumer towards social behaviours that act against the construction of stable adult identities.

Authenticity with a bang: Exploring suburban culture and migration through the new phenomenon of the Richmond Night Market

This paper considers the suburban night through the recent cultural phenomenon of the Summer Night Market in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. Night markets have existed in China since the 8th century, and have followed Chinese migration, first to Southeast Asia, and more recently, to Canada. Richmond, because of significant Asian settlement in the 1990s, is known as the ‘new Chinatown’ ethnoburb of Metro Vancouver. Its night market is a weekend evening event where predominantly Asian vendors sell clothing, food and a range of other products to the Chinese community and others attracted by the spectacle or seeking a bargain. The Richmond night-time landscape contrasts sharply with the 24/7 cultures of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China. But the Richmond market makes possible a cultural use of night-time space – for strolling and meeting at night – in a suburban landscape that is quiet after 18:00 h. In the last three years, the market has been re-branded as a multicultural, rather than Chinese, space. We explore the role of this market in the night-time leisure culture of Metro Vancouver, through themes of the changing nature of the suburbs, suburban night places, and the (messy) question of authenticity in an age (and place) of ongoing migration and super-diversity.

Work and play in the city: some reflections on the night-time leisure economy of Sydney

This article examines changing patterns of work and play in the context of Sydney's night-time leisure economy. It documents some of the substantial changes that have occurred to the structure of work which have had clear ramifications for the leisure industry, including the proliferation of part-time, service-oriented labour within the leisure industry itself. These consequences include continuing and new manifestations of youth culture, and of anxieties concerning it. In examining such leisure phenomena it is argued that general, global trends can be discerned as well as specific, local adaptations produced by Sydney's specific history, geography and socio-cultural complexion. There is also some consideration of how political interventions through planning and even the hosting of mega events such as the 2000 Olympics have varied and contested impacts on the city, its leisure provision and ‘lifestyle’ amenity. It is concluded that Leisure Studies can make a significant contribution to the analytical understanding of after-dark life and the emergence of the 24-hour city.

Performing in a Night-Time Leisure Venue: A Visual Analysis of Erotic Dance

This article analyses a range of different meanings attached to images of erotic dance, with a particular focus on the ‘impression management’ ( Goffman 1959 ) enacted by dancers. It presents a visual analysis of the work of a female erotic performer in a lesbian erotic dance venue in the UK. Still photographs, along with observational data and interviews, convey the complexity and skill of an erotic dancer's diverse gendered and sexualised performances. The visual data highlights the extensive ‘aesthetic labour’ ( Nickson et al. 2001 ) and ‘emotional labour’ ( Hochschild 1983 ) the dancer must put in to constructing her work ‘self’. However, a more ambitious use of the visual is identified: the dancer's own use of images of her work. This use of the visual by dancers themselves highlights a more complex ‘impression management’ strategy undertaken by a dancer and brings into question the separation of ‘real’ and ‘work’ ‘selves’ in erotic dance.

Tender for the night: After-dark cultural complexities in the night-time economy

The concept of the night-time economy emerged in Britain in the early 1990s in the context of strategies to counter de-industrialization and inner-urban decline. Despite registering a shift towards more fluid, fragmented and diversified structures and rhythms of work, leisure and urban space, a framework that acknowledges cultural complexity has not, in practice, characterized night-time economy policy. After-dark cultural complexity has been obscured, instead, by a discursive concentration on those night-time economy leisure practices entangled with rapid, high-level consumption of alcohol, especially among young people. This reductionist discourse – oscillating between stimulating and controlling leisure cultures – has restricted policy development within a complex governance environment composed of many (in)formal organizations and levels of government. This article addresses the confusing, contradictory influence of a polarized night-time economy policy agenda and exposes the contrasting multilayered complexities of the diverse cultural practices of urban nightlife. By engaging with cultural complexity as integral to the city after dark, new conceptual trajectories are proposed that can point the way towards a more effective framework for understanding the lived experience of night-time culture.

Violence between Young People in Night‐Time Leisure Zones – Edited by Amadeu Recasens Rioting in the UK and France – Edited by David Waddington, Fabien Jobard and Mike King

The article reviews the books Violence between Young People in Night-Time Leisure Zones, edited by Amadeu Recasens and Rioting in the UK and France, edited by David Waddington, Fabien Jobard and Mike King.

The `White Slave Trade' and the Music Hall Affair in 1930s Malta

The music hall affair in 1930s Malta serves as a window into wider social, political issues embodied in the recurring furore that was `white slavery'. Sparked by accusations in London newspapers about sexual exploitation of English women who had come to work as music hall artistes, politicians, newspaper editors, the police and the church in Malta addressed the issue. Although the claims about English women were not true, the stories raised larger questions about prostitution in Malta's night-time leisure economy, and sexual exploitation of foreign artistes and Maltese barmaids did occur in this context. The British reaction followed the pattern of response in other colonies: military authorities chose to focus on the health threat to their personnel posed by what they saw as an indigenous problem of prostitution, rather than acknowledge the effects of colonial rule on local society. Maltese authorities chose to avoid political and economic truths of colonial rule as well: they decided to make the immoral character of the women involved the problem to be addressed. The music hall affair did not champion international human rights, but reflected parochial fears of foreigners and colonial others.

Degenerate Sex and the City: Djuna Barnes’s Urban Underworld

In a remarkable but largely overlooked 1918 interview with New York City Police Commissioner Richard Enright, Djuna Barnes made this stunning admission: some of the nicest people know are either potential or real (Commissioner 301). Before the interview was over she reiterated: I have a lot of friends, as before said, who are either potential criminals or (304). Barnes's so-called criminal friends were the gays and lesbians who were part of her social milieu in Village in the 1910s, where she resided before relocating in 1920 a similar community of American expatriate sexual dissidents on Paris's Left Bank, whose lives she memorialized in Nightwood. Richard Enright was the commissioner who publicly pledged stamp out the depraved tastes of the in the Village, make it unattractive the sightseer and restore it to its previous status as a respectable residential and business (Enright), which it had been in the mid- late-nineteenth century, before the likes of Barnes took up residence there. The interview ends with Enright breaking out in uncomfortable laughter as Barnes, apparently, sits silently relishing her minor triumph, her brief disruption of the procedures that police the geographical borders of sexual difference. The Village's was a real and imagined territory of prostitutes, gay men and women, and bohemian artists and writers. The trope of a criminal, socially disruptive, and morally licentious sexual underworld in Village appears repeatedly in sociological, urban-planning, and popular discourse in the interwar period, when Barnes was writing articles for numerous New York newspapers. Though Village in the 1910s and 20s is remembered for its sexual, social, and aesthetic freedom and experimentation, a proper accounting of this period is not complete without understanding the geographic and discursive forces that constructed, regulated, and quarantined the spatially and socially marginalized populations whose liberation has been celebrated in many cultural histories. (1) These forces included the City Practical urban-planning movement of the 1910s, the emergence of a new nighttime leisure economy in the Village, the heated gentrification battles in the neighborhood between Italians, gays and lesbians, and a new class of urban corporate professionals, and the campaigns by civic reform societies and the New York Police Department prosecute queer subcultural sexual practices. Out of these forces emerged what writers and reformers labeled a sexual underworld. An investigation of the social meanings of this underworld in the 1910s illuminates how sexual identities and communities are geographically constructed and how the spaces of those identities and communities are contested in the midst of a cultural sex panic. Barnes's journalism (impressionistic sketches, interviews, and articles from 1913 1919, many of them collected by Alyce Barry in New York), and her novel Nightwood imagine urban space from the perspective of the marginalized neighborhoods that were targeted by municipal authorities, police, urban planners, and real estate developers. As will argue, urban planning initiated new methods of spatial and social control produce what Michel de Certeau calls a planned and readable (93). Against the panoptic, abstract, implicitly (and at times explicitly) heterosexual spatiality of urban planners--the City Practical architects in New York in the 1910s and Georges-Eugene Haussmann in Paris in the 1850s--Barnes's was a secretive city of queer desire and pleasure. Her work underscores the erotic possibilities of a territorial politics where the sexualized and gendered nature of urban space is foregrounded, and where the relays between bodies and architectures create frictions that rub the city's dominant powers the wrong way. Among Barnes's numerous articles, will consider four devoted Village--The Last Petit Souper, Greenwich Village As It Is, Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians, and How the Villagers Amuse Themselves--focusing on how they articulate from an insider's perspective a clandestine queer subculture. …

Night-time leisure and violence in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process

A stubbornly high level of interpersonal violence in town and city centres across Britain every weekend is gradually being recognized as a key aspect of the general problem of crime. In this article we want to explore some of the important criminological outcomes of night-time leisure in a culture dominated by hedonism and the logical needs of the free-market consumer economy. Our ongoing research into the night-time economy in its broader social and economic contexts suggests that alcohol-related violence is emblematic of British society at this point in its history; a point we have conceptualized as the ‘breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. Since the 1980s, the altering cultural norms accompanying Britain’s enthusiastic adoption of the free-market consumer economy seem to have opened the door for specific types of interpersonal violence, the containment of which is proving very difficult for traditional-informal techniques of control and state-centred agencies alike.

Safety and Pleasure in the Night-Time Economy

The night-time economy could be understood as referring to the provision, servicing and expanding consumption of a range of night-time leisure activities that accompany nighttime patterns of public socialising: including collective drinking, eating and seeking out different forms of paid entertainment. In recent years, the night-time economy has been a focus of more attention for crime researchers and crime prevention officials. Most obviously, some of the commercial transactions of the night economy - like illicit drug dealing or some forms of sex work - have a direct link to criminal activity. But the association with crime and the need for crime prevention are more expansive subjects.