Introduction

Night-time has often been seen as the end of formal activities and the start of rest, respite or fun for many. Considered ‘after hours’, the dark period of our days has, in many contexts, been residual time for policy attention, public discussions and major initiatives beyond perhaps those emerging from the entertainment and hospitality sectors. Cities around the planet have been scantily planned for, imagined and debated at night. Yet, the night-time is all but inconsequential for our lives, especially on an increasingly urbanized Earth. All life on our planet experiences darkness to some extent. Most mammals are, after all, nocturnal. Around one in 15 employees in North America, and one in nine in Australia, work at night-time. Internationally, energy use tends to peak in the evening hours. Yet, precious little going on at night is still subject to scholarly and policy scrutiny. Here is where our primer for managing cities at night comes in. We take a cue from an emerging and, we would argue, exciting interdisciplinary crowd of ‘night studies’ (Gwiazdzinski et al, 2018), which has expanded over the last few years as a collaboration between night-time practitioners and scholars, and we step in with an intervention aimed at offering an accessible introduction as to why, and how, our cities’ night-time should be governed. We start in this chapter by stressing this growing call of night studies to put the ‘after hours’ in the spotlight, and we make a case for both the importance of governing the night-time and the necessity to do so in a way that recognizes the value of the many international experiences out there, setting night-time governance as a trend, rather than a passing fad. We introduce here some of the grounding stances of this primer, as well as some of the core ideas emerging from the book and this mounting practice. For instance, we first meet: ‘night mayors’, as representatives standing in as voices for the urban night of many cities; the ‘night-time economy’ (often abbreviated as NTE), as the agglomerate of the economic activities (and people) keeping cities ticking after hours; and ‘night councils’ and other ‘night-time governance’ bodies, which have been designed in cities around the planet to formalize the way we engage strategically with what happens at night-time on our streets.