The Informal Nocturnal City (INF_NIGHT): Towards a new generation of research and policy agenda about urban informality and nightlife in the 21st century South Europe

Project Information

INF NIGHT

Grant agreement ID: 101028867

DOI

10.3030/101028867

Project terminated on 31 March 2024

EC signature date 22 April 2021

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 27 September 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 224 933,76

EU contribution

€ 224 933,76

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INF NIGHT (The Informal Nocturnal City (INF_NIGHT): Towards a new generation of research and policy agenda about urban informality and nightlife in the 21st century South Europe)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The aim of INF_NIGHT was to enhance debates in both the academic and urban policy and planning literatures concerning the in/formal night, through a transnational, policy-oriented study undertaken in Madrid, Rome and Lisbon. Through a novel combination of conceptual frameworks based on three fundamental pillars (informality, nocturnal life and urban security), and articulating these three with debates on urban governance, I have addressed the ways in which informal practices, many times conducted during night, are imagined, negotiated and (re)produced and how these fundamentally affect urban change in post-industrial Southern European cities.

INFNIGHT findings show how the criminalisation of In/formal Nocturnal Cities is a cornerstone used in governance processes in contemporary Southern European cities. The successive crises of the last decades (2008 GFC, Covid-19 pandemic crisis), have reinforced the nyctophobic discourses that for centuries have been reproduced around the night, the ‘obscure’, ‘gloom’ and ‘blackness’. This has a major impact on the public representation of subaltern nocturnal actors, in particular precarious (often racialised migrants) workers, whose survival activity is carried out during night-time hours. A major conclusion of INFNIGHT is that dark time-spaces can be used both for work, escape and struggle in a context of high precarity, persecution and criminalisation of this informalised workforce in Southern European cities. The effect of a ‘darkening’ public approach has been making informalised workers (street informal vending, sex work and domestic employment) more clandestine (displacing them 'into the shadows'), hence criminalising their labour activity in public and visible spaces based on moral and legal arguments, while permitting, tolerating or even favouring those same activities in private/less visible spaces. However, specially prominent for the Spanish case, new forms of collective action have emerged since the 2010: these new “communities of struggle” are highly hybridised with some previous feminist, anti-racist and urban grassroots, incorporating a mestizo character to the previous white, middle-class composition of traditional unions. The inclusion of the voices of these subaltern/precarious actors into policy-making is an indispensable task in the governance of Southern European cities in the coming years.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The results of INFNIGHT project have contributed significantly to the objective of the Action. The contextualisation carried out through a profound literature review, together with the documentary and public discourse analysis developed under WP1 and WP3, have been particularly fruitful. Among others, this is shown in the publication of a scientific paper, co-authored together with my former supervisor, Dr. Valeria Guarneros-Meza, in a prestigious journal in the field (Urban Studies). At the same time, fieldwork developed under WP3 is particularly prolific, even beyond the initial expectations of the project: 67 semi-structured interviews with key actors, 90 hours of participant observation/walking interviews and 20 hours of visual-based (recorded) ethnography have been developed. These results are particularly intensive in the Italian (Rome) and Spanish (Madrid) cases, and have already produced relevant publications (Forum Sociologico). The exploitation of the comparative analysis of the three cases (Spain, Portugal and Italy) is expected to produce high impact publications and policy guidelines in the future months, given the novelty and relevance of the fieldwork carried out.
INF_NIGHT Action has largely fulfilled the impact objectives originally proposed. Throughout the development of the INF_NIGHT Action, a strategy of dissemination of the results to academic audiences has been carried out. In this sense, two scientific articles have been published during the course of this Action, one of them in a very high impact journal (Urban Studies); and two other scientific articles are accepted and pending publication in the next volume. Throughout the Action, I have participated in six scientific conferences and academic workshops, organising one of them, [Post-Doctoral MSCA workshop, Sheffield], chairing another [International Congress on Nightlife Studies – Session “Night Work”, Lisbon]) and being invited as a keynote speaker in two others [I Transgang International Congress, Barcelona; and “City, Work and Precarity” Seminar, Lisbon].
INF_NIGHT has also engaged in a strategy of communication with non-academic audiences. To communicate the relevance of my research to the general public and reach non-academic audiences, as well as fostering the participation of often under-represented actors, I have developed a Communication and Public Engagement Strategy targeting local policy-makers, activists and urban grassroots leaders – including organised collective of precarious workers- in Madrid, Rome and Lisbon. Importantly, the organisation of an `International Conference on Sex Work Rights´ (Madrid, June 2024) is a major milestone developed as part of this strategy.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

INF_NIGHT has helped to progress beyond the state of the art regarding the intersection between nightlife, informality, security and governance debates. By addressing the role of the urban in/formal night in the ordering of neoliberal southern European cities, a new research agenda has been proposed, intended to be provocative, not only for nightlife scholars, but for urban studies more broadly (Aramayona & Guarneros-Meza, 2024).

Another milestone carried out by INF_NIGHT has been the exploration of the symbolic/discursive of darkness and its spatial/temporal implications, as shown in forthcoming publications (Aramayona, 2024). By coining a new term (“darkening”) I offer an original contribution to the (under-explored) intersection between darkness/nightlife and informality debates and moral geographies, Crucially, this analysis offers a novel contribution to the understanding of the (under-studied) role of nocturnal private spaces (eg. households, nightclubs) as space-times where criminalisation, survival and resistance might occur.

The implications of these findings in socio-economic and societal terms are important, in terms on how they shed light on the “double moral standards” played by Southern European national and local regimes, and their (mostly negative) impacts over an informalised workforce in the Southern European region. At the same time, the exploration of the alternatives that are offered by the ‘communities of struggle’ in the South European region, is another of the cornerstones of the social and policy-oriented impact of INF_NIGHT findings.

An International Conference on Sex Work Rights ("International Conference: Sex Work and Feminist Trade Unionism. Strengthening alliances towards a pro-rights approach in Southern Europe"; Madrid, June 2024) co-organised in collaboration with the a feminist and activist-based research network ‘La Laboratoria’, brings together 40 professionals, activists and organisations of precarious workers from Spain, Portugal and Italy in a local venue in Madrid, together with some relevant networks at European level (ESWA, Comitato per i diriti delle prostitute, Aspasie-Geneva). 150 people have already confirmed their participation as audience, among them three policy makers from the Spanish government and five professionals from some of the main Spanish NGOs on the ground.

International Conference: Sex Work and Feminist Unionism in Southern Europe