Beyond Night-Time Economy: Affective Atmospheres of the Urban Night

Shaw, Robert

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.005

Beyond Night-Time Economy: Affective Atmospheres of the Urban Night

Shaw, Robert

Authors

Robert Shaw

Abstract

This paper develops the use of the concept of atmosphere in an ‘assemblage urbanism’ approach, as a way of reevaluating how we understand the night-time city. In doing so, this paper rejects what it sees as an overuse of the term ‘night-time economy’ as a synonym for ‘urban night’. Instead, it seeks to describe the night-time city center as an affective atmosphere, emerging from the arranging of practices, bodies and materials. In this vision, an affective atmosphere is best understood as a form of ‘placed assemblage’. My studies of taxi drivers and street cleaners in a British city are used to illustrate and explore how this occurs, drawing from an analytic framework developed out of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. As such, this paper offers a broader vision of the urban night, which sees the perspective taken by ‘night-time economy studies’ as reflecting just a portion of the practices which generate the affective atmosphere of the night-time city center.

Citation

Shaw, R. (2014). Beyond Night-Time Economy: Affective Atmospheres of the Urban Night. Geoforum, 51(1), 87-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.005

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2014
Deposit Date	Oct 21, 2013
Publicly Available Date	Jan 13, 2014
Journal	Geoforum
Print ISSN	0016-7185
Publisher	Elsevier
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	51
Issue	1
Pages	87-95
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.005
Keywords	Night-time economy, Assemblage, Affective atmospheres, Urban geography, Practices.

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Copyright Statement
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Geoforum. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum, 51, 1, 2014, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.005