Cities After Dark - Lockdown Nights [episode 6]

[Music] Hi, I'm Shelby Bassett, and welcome to the final episode of the Cities After Dark series by Connected Cities. [Music] All of Cities After Dark has been created during the COVID-19 pandemic, recording from our different spots around the world, or sometimes just around the corner, but unable to meet because of lockdown laws. So it seemed natural to ask, at the end of every interview, how do you think COVID-19 has changed our cities at night? In the UK, the creative industries have lost the scenes, the pandemic already, more than for 100,000 jobs. Night time accounts for 8% of UK's employment and revenues, which is calculated around 66 billion pounds a year. The Night Time Industry Association fears that if we fail to protect the sector, the Night Time sector, we will see the permanent closure, not only of night time venues, and here this is a very important point. Not only on night time venues, but also of those businesses that form the supply chain of the night time economy. The Night Time Industry Association, and TIA, which is a membership organization, representing thousands of small and medium enterprises, forming the UK night time economy, has urged the government multiple times to provide specific support in the form of grants and job retention schemes. And something has that has happened in NIGGLE, but across the world, sadly, is an increase in farms of police brutality. Since the curfew and the lockdown have given police and primary military task forces new emergency powers, and these I would say has been unleashed with even more intensity at night, which was already a temporary that's more policed, but the curfew has increased that even more. And I think the last aspect has been the rise of insecurity, so not just that state-inforced brutality, but also just like armed progress. I wouldn't know if they have actually increased, but the discussion around armed rubberies and around insecurity at night has gained also more intensity. People have loved images of empty time square and empty normally festive places. There's millions of images, and I started collecting them at one point of people at night banging on pots and pans to thank healthcare workers, or just generally to create a sense of excitement. So we've had images both of how the night was taken away from us, but also how people have tried to go out and reclaim it. One of the potentially hopeful things is that, you know, for a time, our nightlife has to organize itself without tourism on a large scale, and without the festivals and other mega events that rely on tourism. And both of those, of course, rely on air travel, which is self has been cut back. So in Montreal, there's been a lot of not just people staying at home, but, you know, traveling within what is a province, Quebec, going to small town, small cities, because the downtown, which is where festivals tend to happen is kind of uninhabited and empty. There's been a lot more going on in neighborhoods and the city administration has moved to turn streets into pedestrian avenues and so on. They could do more, but I have a sense really now of living in neighborhoods and of also going to other neighborhoods and experiencing bits of night life there. I think people are, you know, in the short term, are becoming used to engaging with urban spaces differently through less use of public transport, more walking, more cycling. To be happy, becoming slightly more comfortable with quieter urban spaces, if you've been out and about in cities during any form of lockdown, actually it's kind of like a lot like the night. When we were under our lockdown back in March, we've got a three year daughter and so during the days, I was doing a mixture of work and childcare. So actually my kind of one exercise a week, one exercise a day, sorry, became a nighttime walking my wife and I would take it in terms to go out on a walk. On a walk after kind of the toddler's bedtime at about eight o'clock, maybe for a kind of an hour to two hours and it was really interesting. The city was was really quiet. It was like being out and about at sort of four or five a.m rather than than in the evening, but actually even during the day, the city was quiet. It was more likely overnight, even though obviously the light it was, you know, and the clubs weren't open in that sense. It was almost in a way like a permanent nighttime in terms of kind of the use of public space. We've gone back to curfews. So I learned living in Berlin that the Berlin hasn't had a curfew since 1949 and all of a sudden under COVID does. And I recognize that there are real public health imperatives to limiting hours or limiting mobility around cities in the short term. But I think there's been so much good work done in past years about acknowledging that so many cities are 24 hour cities and need to be planned as such and shifting back to curfews for a variety of reasons. I'm anxious and curious to see how the 24 hour city discourse is going to change in the coming years. Because I think when we think about reduced capacity in spaces, when we think about the need for social distancing that seems like it will stick around for a while, I think we can take two paths. We can either really lean into that policing and restriction and limitation or think about how do we use nighttime and all the hours of the day as an asset. I'm working with the global nighttime recovery plan right now, working with folks out of Harvard and pen praxis and by lab. And we've got a guide on the future of dance floors coming up just next week and the one of the case studies in that upcoming chapter is about the village underground club and arts base in London, which has reopened kind of seeing itself through the COVID closures as a cycle hub with partnering with a local cycle shop to offer by parking and repair during the day. And weekends and evenings as a socially distance bar and listening bar. So to me, I think that's an example of what we can do and can lean into of this moment where everything seems to be sort of on the table or up for grabs to leaning into things that have multiple benefit. I think COVID may inadvertently expand, I think it may inadvertently expand instances of informality at night. So I don't think it's actually impinging. I think it's potentially expanding instances of informality at night. In the past week, I was just looking through the news feed and two stories in particular sort of made me realize perhaps there is this expansion of informality at night in our current circumstances of COVID-19. The first story is with regard to a very popular nightlife district in Vancouver. There was an incident where because of physical distancing, social distancing measures, the crowd capacity in nightlife venues are now limited. There's a quota, which means that some venues are turning away potential patrons, creating additional people gathering on the street. Now this new story was such that the crowd now waiting on the street spontaneously created their own impromptu street party. Complete with DJs and music. The police soon after intervened and the crowd dispersed. Shortly after that story, I was slipping through my news feed again and came across another one. This time, the story was about a family in New York City who at the point of time didn't feel comfortable eating out in restaurants. But wanted to support local businesses nonetheless. So they started a ritual of ordering takeout meals from their favorite eateries and setting up informal pop-up dinners with their portable table and chairs. And they brought these portable table and chairs to, you know, very iconic and landmark sites around their city. And occasionally there might be a bottle of wine or two. Okay, these two stories of informal practices at night in times of COVID-19 reinforce in my mind. It reinforces the argument that urban life after dark matters. It matters even in these extenuating circumstances of a pandemic. It matters so much so that ordinary individuals, ordinary actors, have found informal ways to claim, appropriate, transform public space that defy formal rules and regulations. And the two stories also I think serve as a litmus test of what society is willing to tolerate in terms of acceptable or not acceptable informal practices from public health standpoint during this ongoing pandemic. And if I were to take this further, if I were to continue on this trajectory, I think more of such litmus tests will arise, the longer we find ourselves in this pandemic situation. And to me, it'll be very interesting to observe the degree to which the results of these litmus tests. How do they stick? Will they at all be carried forward in our post-COVID planning and design of the nocturnal city? What you heard just now was a collection of reflections from some of the many researchers and advocates from around the world. I've interviewed across the series. Together, we've explored the realms of night shift work. We've met nightmares. We have tried to define the nighttime economies and ask tough questions about who has the right to the night. To help me unpack and use over the future of our midnight municipalities is Andrina Sejas. Welcome back, Andrina. Thanks, Shelby. It's great to be back. So we heard in the intro, there were ideas that kept coming up again and again with lots of people I spoke to, things like curfews, job losses, closed businesses, but a lot of this tied back to inequities. Yes, Shelby, I totally agree with you. And as I was listening to me think about how the COVID pandemic has raised so many important questions about who owns the night, particularly in light of the restrictions and how they're impacting people's livelihoods. And like we mentioned in previous episodes, the night is not a monolithic field, but rather it is a vast collection of experiences, of meanings and interpretations that vary greatly from person to person and from city to city. And this all makes me think about Jane Jacobs and her notion of ice on the street, which has come to have a new meaning in the context of this crisis as we see that there's new ways in which people have been appropriating the use of spaces throughout the day. And I believe that from this perspective, the current crisis has created an available opportunity to discuss ways in which we can make nocturnal environments more inclusive and more responsive to people's needs. Well, the first time we got together on this podcast, and Drina, we were talking about nighttime economies. How has that been affected and how have cities been responding? It's very interesting to see that while the impact of this pandemic has been global, city responses have varied considerably in terms of scale and in terms of scope. Most of the measures implemented to contain the spread of the virus, assume the need to restrict, but only the spaces, but also the hours in which socialization can occur. This has led to curfews into lockdowns in many cities around the world, as well as the temporary suspension of nighttime urban services, which is the case of cities like New York, where the subway has stopped running 24 hours for the first time in its history, as well as London, where the night tube service has stopped as well. Social activity and interaction are an essential part of urban life, particularly life at night, and the shutdowns and curfews are key measures to prevent the propagation of the disease. However, they also affect the idea of this nocturnal ecosystem, as nighttime jobs disappear, supply chains are broken, and habits, particularly social ones, are eventually changing. And it's important to note that nightlife and creative industries were already vulnerable before the pandemic. As of 2016, Leesha and hospitality jobs outnumbered retail employment in the United States. And while these industries had been growing steadily after the 2008 recession, they are known for their low-profit margins and limited worker protection. As a result, some studies even point out the greatest hit these industries have faced since prohibition. Tocque with James Faire, who is a professor of sociology and director of the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sofia University in Tokyo. He also put this into a really interesting historical context. Tocque after the war, there were many black markets, and they left a whole scat, a very small scale, tiny nightlife places, little eateries, little Izakaya, little bars, little tiny brothels. And actually in thousands, but the scale of these things is tiny. And they still exist. And so if you go around many stations in Tokyo today, you will find many bars on a very tiny scale. So this has an impact, I think, also in terms of how COVID has been managed, and also how people experience this. So normally in Japan, the typical pattern, as you find a little bar, it's very hard to walk in. It's like five people sitting in there. Is it okay? It's like a semi-private space. If you decide to go in, or maybe somebody brings you there, you might become a regular. So the typical pattern in Japan is you want to find your regular spot. And other than that regular spot, you may do some bar hopping around and visit other places. Or maybe you'll have, if you're very active, you'll have several regular spots. Right? You're a real nightlife junkie. But you will participate in nightlife through this intimate space of very small spaces. So I'm not an epidemiologist. I can't say, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? It certainly means that you're coming into contact with people very closely, but a very few of them. And typically, you might be in a bar that can literally only fit five people at the bar. That's it. So it's not 50, not 50, five. So you might be there the whole night, in which case you're only going to be with those five people. So one reaction in Tokyo, been to keep a lot of those places open. People still go there. People still go to their regular spot. Sometimes the owner says, I'm scared of this. I don't want to have any part of it and they've closed it down. Some owners have said, oh, I'm young. I'm fine. Let's keep it open. So a lot of these little spots have survived. Some of them are not. In general, of course, I should say the nightlife, of course, has been affected by COVID. Many people don't want to go out. I think in Japan, you've had this kind of on and off scandals about the nightlife. Behind that is the reality that many places never closed at all or only partially closed. And there's, they exist on such a tiny scale that they've all made rather different decisions based on all sorts of factors like every other place. Do you think this is serious? Do you think this is really dangerous? Are you going to starve to death without this job? Overall, things are grim for a nightlife in Japan, but these little places have to some extent survived. The COVID-19 virus is the same everywhere, but the responses by cities have been really different. I know you've been working in Drener on the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan. What have you seen in your work? Yes, Shelby. So we're going to respond to all the challenges and all the difficulties we've been talking about in this episode. Experts and academics and advocates through all over the world have joined forces to work on what we call the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan. And this is a collaborative, practical guide that aims to provide cities with knowledge and tools to plan for safe, equitable and sustainable reopening. And instead of talking about best practices, we like to talk about practical ideas or pilot interventions and solutions that can be tested in different contexts to respond to the minimum. One of the main challenges that have become clear from this collaborative project is the reactive nature of nighttime policies, and this is particularly true in the context of the crisis. I'd like to talk about this and to refer to this as the pendulum effect in which say, even those with a progressive and a very open agenda tend to move back swiftly towards restrictive measures such as curfews. And the inconsistency and enforcement measures, such as going back and forth between curfews and re-opinings, causes mistrust in the public and affects businesses even more. Unfortunately, in many cases, it is restaurants and venue operators who have to take the blame for these inconsistencies. And that's why there needs to be more collaboration and more communication now than ever. And as we know, it's not the first, it will not be the last crisis to shock and to destabilize systems of governance, particularly in the globalized world that we live in. And this calls for stronger networks and platforms of collaboration that can bear these shocks. So can you give us an example for our listeners so they can understand what this looks like and drain up? Sure, a great example comes from New York City. A city that has been investing in very large communication campaigns that are focused on shifting the responsibility from businesses to the community at the same time. For instance, by using slogans such as, it's up to you in New York, the city is encouraging citizens to behave appropriately in public spaces as well as in businesses during the night as well as throughout the day. And in this way, talk about the system of governance that we're talking about in the first episodes by involving a broader set of actors in managing the city at night, which leads to greater collaboration and more sustainable responses. Not only to react to what's happening right now, but also to plan for future more sustainable and safer environments. If you're listening, and you want to learn more about the global nighttime recovery plan and download the chapters, I put a link to it in the show notes for you. Diana, who we heard from earlier in the series has also been a key editor of the plan, as has Michael Fitchman, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, who are about to hear from now. The producers, the economic producers in the nighttime economy have been the hardest hit. I mean, it's always really hard for those who own the bricks, the people who have the title to businesses that can't operate and all that sort of thing. But they are, at least, on paper. They have, in many cases, formed fairly aggressive and good lobbies. They have the ear of politicians, and they have at least asserted their value. And it's not going to be good for bars, restaurants, sporting events, all sorts of other things. You know, they're able to really make a go of it because they are a little more formalized and official as economic entities. Everybody else is in a real world of hurt. Not just economically, but I think something that's massively overlooked is that there is a real mental health crisis going on with people who are not just people who are freelance workers and people who are sort of economically marginal because of the nature of their work, but also a lot of single people who are participating in social industries that are gone. And the reason why these were there was a mental health crisis to begin with, you could argue. And there's evidence based on survey research of creative communities in the UK that really points to this. So I think that will take a long time to sort through, but that is very real. People who are producers, we were very consumption oriented view of the nighttime economy, especially because it's fallen into the sort of economic booster is a category for a lot of cities in terms of how they treat it. Like we can stimulate the service economy and tourism and food and drink and downtown revitalization and festival marketplaces. It really, you know, it checks a lot of those kinds of boxes that are very consumption oriented and driven by tax revenue and tax base from the perspective of cities and how all these things were looked at. And the producers, whether it's in the creative economy or I mean if you work at a food distribution center, lots of these places that rely on economically and socially marginal communities in many places across the globe, those workers alongside gig workers, creative gig workers, all those industries, they work in a gray area. They don't have contractual relationships with their employers that makes them very hard to reach with subsidy. They're maybe not even on the books, so you don't even know they were working and you can't reach them with subsidy. They're not well measured. They're not well effectively categorized for economic purposes. So they're really unreachable. They were in a bad situation beforehand, but now it's especially bad. And in many cases, I don't think they're really even being acknowledged. There's an anthropologist who works out of the UK, his name is JC McCquery, who talks a lot in his ethnographic research about the fact that people are of this description are both economically unseen, socially unseen, but also really physically not seen. People do not see these people because they work at night and they don't know they exist. This episode has asked how night has changed during the pandemic, but it's not just night that has changed. We have to, and in that process, we've all lost something, but we can all gain something too. Our hope is that by listening to this series, you might have found a new appreciation for the night. Over the course of this mini series, we've heard from a huge range of experts on a number of different nighttime issues, from why we need new concepts to understand the multifaceted nature of the night to the emerging role of the nightmare. Those who work the night shift and on issues of mobility, equity and access. And if there's been one recurring theme, even through COVID-19, it has been that the night is experienced so differently by each and every one of us. It means there's no one-size-fits-all solutions to its unique challenges. And perhaps most importantly, it means that solutions focus on the day simply cannot be applied to the night. A key lesson learned, I believe, is flexibility. We've learned throughout this series that the urban night is an emerging field of study, and one that has been overlooked due to a very restrictive and conservative view of this timeframe. This is as encouraged cities to innovate and to test new ways to allow businesses, artists and many others to operate more freely in what is known as a highly regulated space. I hope that these episodes encourage others to think about the night as a space of opportunity and for positive change. Well, we started this series together and drew in us, so it's only fitting that we ended together. So thank you so much for joining me today and all the previous episode. It's been a really, really huge pleasure. Thanks so much, Shelby. It's been a pleasure for me too, and I hope a listeners enjoyed learning more about the night and good night to everyone. If you'd like to hear more about our work on cities after dark, check out our show notes. You can follow the Connected Cities Podcast channel on all good podcasting apps. In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter @NetworkCities. That brings us to the end of this episode and the series. We'll leave you with some final thoughts from Will Straw. Well, it's very interesting because the months of, let's say, November, December, 2019, January, February, 2020, before COVID was really on my radar or that of anyone in Canada, I was thinking, this is the most exciting time in the history of activism around the night. The agent of Change principle, which I know Melbourne has adopted, whereby new developers in a city, for example, are required to accommodate the needs of already existing music venues. And so on Toronto had just adopted that. Toronto had also named its first equivalent of a nightmare already in Berlin in response to the closing of a couple of important clubs. There was a real activism about getting the city to not only give money to the club sector, but to recognize its importance. So all of this, you know, was a very lively time. And I think when COVID happened, it didn't so much put an end to that. But first of all, you had all of these, this organized advocacy and militancy supporting the night that moved very smoothly, despite the context, into the COVID situation. So you've got activism of the, say, German club managers, promoters and so on, quickly moved towards, you know, not just how can we move some of this online, how can we ask for government money, but also developing some of the most elaborate plans for coming back, relaunching nightlife as COVID moves away. So it's been interesting because, you know, if COVID had happened five years earlier, there wasn't the same infrastructure of people thinking and working and devising ideas about the night. COVID forced people to ask the question of, you know, what do we want of our nights? We've been deprived of our festive nights. So let's really think seriously about where we can go after this. I've never seen so much fresh thinking about the night as I have since the COVID pandemic and the lockdown swept across my world. The connected cities lab acknowledges the indigenous peoples of the lands of on which we work and meet to create this podcast. For us at the University of Melbourne, we pay our respects to the were run jury people of the cool in nation. Wherever in the world you're listening to this, we invite you to pause and consider the traditional owners of the land upon which you stand.