Dark Futures: the loss of night in the contemporary city?

Abstract

Social scientists have previously understood the night through a frontier metaphor. This has pitched night as an empty or lightly inhabited space into which the urban, capitalist day has been expanding. The contemporary increase in nocturnal research has complicated this picture, showing an increasing multiplicity of complexly lived, structured and experienced nights across the globe. This paper looks to retrieve the concept of night as frontier by drawing on postcolonial theories to generate a more subtle conceptualisation of 'frontier', while also arguing that recent research reveals that this frontier is now fragmenting. By exploring research into a series of core themes - artificial light at night and darkness; night-lives; and global nights - I then explore what such an understanding of night allows us to say about current research. As nocturnal social science continues to mature, a more critical eye will need to be paid to the complexity of shifting power relations and identities within this fragmenting nocturnal frontier.