Introduction

Whether we speak of night mayors, commissions or offices, and variations thereof, the current reforms towards night-time management have much to do with governance and urban policy. This is an area of direct relevance to a myriad of practitioners, as well as a political background to a vast variety of scholarly works, which we want to put an explicit emphasis on. Who governs the night in cities? This first research-based chapter of the book begins the investigation of how cities are managed at night through a comparative review of experiences from around the world, which stems from an explicitly political question regarding institutions and authority: how has the management of the ‘after hours’ of cities been formalized around the world? What we aim to do here is to kick off our ‘primer’ on night-time governance by looking at key lessons emerging from the recent movements to set up night ‘mayors’, ‘managers’, ‘offices’ and ‘commissions’ as tangible instantiations of night-time governance and comparing how these operate in diverse contexts. To do so, we offer some preliminary typologies of these night-time governance arrangements, framed mainly as both a graspable tool for practitioners to understand complex institutional set-ups in cities, and a guide for field researchers. When it comes to the age-old political science question of ‘Who governs?’ in the afterhours of most cities, and when it comes to the latest efforts by these cities as much as private sector and community groups to formalize an answer to this question, the evidence out there speaks of a thriving variety of possible responses and intriguing arrangements. In this chapter, we start from the individual roles that might be at play in night-time management, for example, mayors, ‘czars’ or managers, as well as the growing cast of nocturnal actors animating the ways in which cities are governed at night. We follow this up in Chapter 3 with a more institutional focus on the placing of these roles within or outside local government, and with a more direct review of what night ‘councils’ or ‘committees’ are.

A growing cast of nocturnal actors

Often referred to as ‘man's first necessary evil’, the night has always been subject to tight scrutiny and observation.