Time, like space, is a key variable in the management of cities. The streets and public spaces do not have the same use at ten in the morning as at ten at night. However, the 24-hour cycle is not always taken into account when designing urban policies.
As a concept, the 24-hour city is not a new model. In the 1980s, the American sociologist Murray Melbin drew an analogy between the scarcity of land and the scarcity of time, turning the latter into the “new frontier” in the urbanization process. A few years later, the term24 hour city” emerged almost simultaneously in different parts of the world as a platform to improve nighttime safety in urban centers and a catalyst for regeneration processes. However, from its origins, the concept was fraught with mistrust on the part of those who feared that activating cities during the night would leave no room for rest, leisure and the mental health of citizens.
30 years later, the 24-hour city acquires a broader meaning: one that uses time as a strategic resource. In other words, a city that understands that time, like space, is a scarce resource that needs to be managed. This implies having a detailed knowledge of its nocturnal assets —the broad spectrum of productive, social and cultural activities that take place at night— and distributing them geographically based on their costs and benefits. This task not only involves having physical elements such as lighting and night transport (the hardware), but also requires rules and principles that serve to program the city’s nightlife in a conscious, inclusive and sustainable way (the software).
The concept of a 24-hour city was fraught with mistrust on the part of those who feared that activating cities at night would not leave room for rest, leisure and mental health for citizens
The question is, who should take charge of this task? The term nighttime governance refers to the growing network of public and private institutions involved in nighttime management. They are already more than 60 cities worldwide that have a “night mayor” or an office specialized in monitoring and dimensioning problems, and proposing innovative solutions to enhance the other half of the day. However, these new night managers have found themselves with the challenge of mediating between those who want to work or socialize at night, and those who just want to sleep.
The pandemic had an unprecedented impact on the temporal rhythms of the city. The most popular measures to contain the spread of the virus were curfews and the interruption of night transport services, as is the case of the New York subway, which for the first time stopped operating 24 hours a day since its inauguration in 1904. These disruptions, although temporary, exacerbated already existing differences in the perception of nightlife in the city. On the one hand, the neighbors got used to living with less noise. On the other hand, the owners and workers of bars and restaurants experienced a historical disruption of their activities. Young people, for their part, explored new opportunities for socialization and turned to virtual spaces to satisfy leisure and recreation needs. These differences —together with changes in social habits, a greater use of public spaces, the return of tourism and crowds, and a growing energy crisis— mean rethinking the most efficient distribution of the activities that take place in the city .
The night provides a unique space to test new models of governance and collaboration
Some cities are innovating in this regard. From the point of view of hardware, alliances between public and private entities are becoming more and more common to improve the offer of night transport, such as a pilot between Uber and Lyft to improve nighttime mobility in downtown Orlando, Florida. From a software point of view, metropolises like London seek to create special areas of prolonged nocturnal activity in order to generate new sources of income and socialization. However, the most exciting innovations are happening at the institutional level, as the night provides a unique space to test new models of governance and collaboration.
During my time at Harvard University I had the opportunity to develop a participatory methodology that seeks to build a night vision from spaces for dialogue and co-creation between the different interest groups of a city. To date, I have had the opportunity to put it to the test in two Latin American cities —Valparaíso, in Chile, and Tegucigalpa, in Honduras— and recently in Barcelona, through workshops with representatives of the nightlife, tourism and restaurant sectors; representatives of neighborhood associations; representatives of youth associations, and representatives of the public administration. The result of these exercises is a long-term action plan that takes into account the needs of all citizens and serves as the basis for building a governance model to proactively manage coexistence, productivity and urban culture, both day, as at night.
Night management is not only within the reach of large cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. Cities with a vocation and cultural heritage such as Seville and San Sebastian, those with port activity and night-time distribution of goods such as Malaga and Valencia, and university cities such as Pamplona or Zaragoza, are also great beneficiaries of a strategic vision of their night-time activity.
What will be the next city in Spain to join this trend?
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