Exposition au bruit, gêne sonore, plainte et mobilisation habitante : de la cohabitation à l'appropriation de l'espace-temps nocturne festif

The ‘In/formal Nocturnal City’: Updating a research agenda on nightlife studies from a Southern European perspective

“…Although some relational approaches to the study of the night and in/formality have been made (e.g. Walker, 2015, 2017), we observe a general tendency to take both social phenomena as separated: nightlife scholars studying night-time spaces and events on the one hand; urban in/formality scholars describing informal settlements and precarious conditions on the other. Instead, by focusing on the intersection of nightlife studies and urban in/formality, scholars might enrich their insights about (post-)pandemic urban scenarios in at least three different ways: (i) by helping to unpack the positive (as well as negative) aspects behind the (often unquestioned) stereotypical definitions about ‘the night’ and ‘urban informality’, and how both affect the governance of (diurnal) cities; (ii) by overcoming the implicit reproduction of hierarchical classifications in social and urban research, observed in the priority of diurnal activities over nocturnal practices in urban planning and research, or the tendency to regularise/formalise informal activities and overlook the informalisation of formality; and (iii) by critically examining – as recently suggested by feminist approaches (see Stevano et al, 2021) – the usefulness (or not) of maintaining traditional dichotomies in social science, such as the division between public/private spaces, state/non-state actors or productive/reproductive practices.…”

“…However, the ways that urban restrictive regulations (e.g. prohibition against mini-markets selling alcohol at night, anti-noise pollution policies) can push or force some businesses and individuals towards informality at night is still underexplored (for exceptions, see Aramayona and Garcı´a-Sa´nchez, 2019;Walker, 2015Walker, , 2017, hence they are crucial to include in future nightlife research.…”