Introduction

The global crisis ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 hit cities the world over hard. Even harder hit, through lockdowns and stretched essential services, has been the world of the NTE and management. Yet, at the same time, the movement to institutionalize and discuss and campaign for the night in cities (depicted in previous chapters) also laid some important ground for tackling this, and NTE movements are already afoot. Drawing from media reports, current research, events and direct experiences by the authors, this chapter analyses how these night-time governance structures have responded to COVID-19 and shares some insights into how this crisis might reshape the way night scenes are managed around the world. The goal of the chapter is to contextualize the ‘primer’ introduction of the previous sections in the wake of one of the deepest disruptions of our century: what will the NTE look like in the future? What can be learnt and leveraged from the way COVID-19 unfolded after dark? What will happen to the trends, themes and institutions that flourished up until 2019 in a world radically challenged by the health, and economic, crisis of COVID-19? Our goal in this chapter, then, is to underline how the crisis has been impacting the trajectories and realities discussed thus far, seeking to look ahead at how these might change or return to the fore, rather than simply drawing conclusions as to the outcomes of COVID-19 when the global crisis that emerged from the pandemic is still, almost certainly, under way.

Deepening night-time challenges?

It would be hard to conceive of a practitioner-oriented primer for urban governance without accounting for the deep disruptions ushered in by 2020 in cities the world over. Undoubtedly, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis has been staggering for urban development. From our point of view, this is especially so when we consider its bearing on the NTE and its associated industries. It might still be too early to tell what the full extent of the COVID-19 disruptions is on NTEs more specifically, or nightlife more in general, but as many night advocates and policymakers from the cities chronicled in this book have already underscored, the crisis might have set much of the advancements detailed in previous chapters back by years.