Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters after Dusk captures the multifarious nature of the urban night and how it is lived, structured, and reflected upon in diverse cultural and artistic expressions. The volume acknowledges the urban night as an often-overlooked key dimension necessary to understand the complexities of today's urban spaces, including the often-polarizing question of migration. After dusk, urban social challenges are often magnified, as questions of who can be where and when, along ethnic, racial or gender lines, for example, gain an additional dimension. The volume underscores, indeed, the multi-dimensionality of night spaces, where bottom-up, grassroot initiatives provide opportunities for self-expression by traditionally marginalized and silenced groups. Chapters span disciplines of urbanism and urban history, literary, film and cultural studies, music, sociology of labour, anthropology of migration, alongside autoethnographic contributions and practice-based photo essays by artists for whom the night is their habitual setting and canvas.
List of Illustrations, Introduction by Sara Brandellero, Derek Pardue
and Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues, I Urban Policy, (Self-)Governance and
Infrastructures of the Night, 1: 'Dark Practices: Sensing the City After
Dusk' by Nick Dunn, 2: 'Spaces to Cope, to Connect and to Relax for Refugee
Youth' by Ilse van Liempt, 3: 'Queer Spheres: Making and Un-making Worlds and
Nations through London's LGBTQ+ Night Spaces' by Ben Campkin, 4: 'Planning
for Nocturnal Cultural Encounters' by Marion Roberts, 5: 'A Nightnography of
Food Couriers: Precarity and Inequality in After Dark Platform Work' by
Julius-Cezar MacQuarie, 6: 'Transformers of the Urban Night: Platform Work,
Migration and Smart City' by Laura-Solmaz Litschel, 7: 'Digital Day Labourers
- Sleepless in the Gig Economy. Photo Essay' - fieldwork photo essay by
Laura-Solmaz Litschel, II Cultural Narratives and Experiences of the Diverse
Urban Nightlife, 8: 'Pandemic Dusks' by Derek Pardue, 9: 'Spaces of
Night-Time Encounter: Nocturnal Politics in Global Cinema, 2018-2022' by Will
Straw, 10: 'Music within Nocturnal Constellations: A Photo Essay from Two
Irish Cities' by Ailbhe Kenny & Katie Young, 11: '(De)migrant(izing) Music
Nights: Intergenerational Cultural Flows and Transnational Belonging in the
Rotterdam Cabo Verdean Diaspora' by Seger Kersbergen and Kamila Krakowska
Rodrigues, 12: 'Tejo Bar: A Portal for the Cosmopolitics of Musicking' by
Alcides J.D. Lopes, 13: 'Night Spaces as Terreiros: The Case of Amsterdam's
Theatre Munganga as Ground for Intercultural Citizenship' by Sara Brandellero
and Francianne dos Santos Velho, 14: 'Let's Night Draw! Darkness and Light in
the Urban Night' - by Chantal Meng, III 'Contested Cities: Afterword' by Adam
Eldridge, Index
Sara Brandellero is a university lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She explores cultures of the Portuguese-Speaking world, with a particular focus on Brazil. Between 20192022 she was Project Leader of the European project Night Spaces: migration, culture and integration in Europe (NITE). Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues is an assistant professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She was a co-investigator in the HERA-funded grant Night Spaces: Migration, Culture, and Integration in Europe and is currently leading the ERC project City Tales: An Art-Based Participatory Framework for Studying Migration-Related Diversity. Derek Pardue is author of Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop (Palgrave McMillan, 2008/2011), Cape Verde, Lets Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal (University of Illinois Press 2015) and Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Bloomsbury 2021). He is an Associate Professor in the Global Studies Department at Aarhus University, Denmark.
