General texts: The Concept of the '24 Hour City', Urban revitalisation, and the Development of the Night-Time Economy

This section encompasses a broad scope of work, from the early debates on town centre regeneration to discussions of localised night life, disorder and regulation.

Bianchini, F (1995) ”Night Cultures, Night Economies”, Planning Practice and Research , 10(2):121-26

Bromley, R and Nelson, A (2002) “Alcohol Related Crime and Disorder Across Urban Space and Time : Evidence from a British City” , Geoforum, 33, 239-254.

Bromley, R, Thomas, C and Millie A (2000) “Exploring Safety in the Night-Time City”, Town Planning Review, 71, 71-96.

Comedia (1991) Out of Hours: A Study of Economic, Social and Cultural Life in twelve Town Centres in the UK, Coluste Gulbenkian Foundation London.
A pioneering report which voices concerns about the gradual transformations of town and city centres.

Chatterton, P (2002) “Governing Nightlife: Profit, Fun and (Dis) Order in the Contemporary City”, Entertainment Law, 1(2), 23-49.
This article develops an understanding of the governance of urban nightlife. The starting point is that a night out in the post industrial, consumption oriented city is as much about issues of economic development a creativity, as it is about ‘law and order; and ‘social control. The main aim of the article is to highlight that a ‘consensus’ has been formed for how the night-time economy should develop, which is largely based around meeting the needs of the large and highly acquisitive property developers and entertainment conglomerates, profit generation and profit generation, and selling the city through upmarket, exclusive leisure aimed at highly mobile, cash rich groups. The article concludes by asking what are the implications for older, historic and alternative, independent forms of night life.

Chatterton , P, Hollands, R, Byrnes, B & Read, C (2002) ‘The London of the North? Youth cultures, urban change and nightlife in Leeds’, Case Study Report, Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, University of Newcastle.
This report is based upon research undertaken as part of an Economic and Social Research Council funded research project, looking at night-life and youth culture in three English cities – Newcastle, Leeds and Bristol. Over the last few years it has become increasingly evident to us that significant transformations are occurring in these and other cities, especially during the evening and at night. The experience of 'going out' is rapidly changing and it is our intention to explore some of these changes. This book is an attempt to highlight these changes in the city of Leeds. It is based upon fieldwork undertaken between July 2000 and January 2001 which comprised focus groups with consumers of nightlife and one to one interviews with venue owners, police, licensing magistrates and local authority representatives. Our intention is to examine change in two, interconnected, areas - city centres and the lives of young people. Both are contingent on the dramatic, if gradual changes which have occurred within British cities over the last few decades. Since the 1970s, they have been sidelined through the centralisation and suburbanisation of employment, depopulation, the domestication of leisure, national-local political wrangling and marginalisation by multi-national capital (Hudson and Williams, 1995; Pacione, 1997). The result has been widespread unemployment, physical and social decay, crime, homelessness and dereliction.

Chatterton, P & Hollands, R (2002) “Theorising Urban Playscapes: Producing, Regulating and Consuming Night Life City Spaces”, Urban Studies, 39(1), 95-116.
This article develops a theoretical understanding of the relationship between young people and city space. More specifically, our focus concerns what we have termed 'urban playscapes'--young people's activities in bars, pubs, night-clubs and music venues within the night-time entertainment economy. The paper theoretically and empirically explores three interrelated aspects of these playscapes: production and the increasing role of a small number of large-scale corporate leisure and entertainment operators providing sanitised, 'branded' experiences; regulation in which the development of urban playscapes can be understood through a night-time entertainment regime based around a modified relationship between state, developers and consumers, including enhanced forms of surveillance and control; and consumption which is characterised by segmentation and differentiation and based around more 'exclusive' and 'up-market' identities. We argue that these three aspects combine to create a dominant mode of 'mainstream' urban nightlife, with 'alternative' and 'residual' nightlife increasingly under threat or squeezed out. In conclusion, we discuss some of the interrelationships between production, regulation and consumption and suggest a number of potential future scenarios for nightlife development.

Florida, Richard (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, Basic Books.
Synopsis 
The national bestseller that defines a new economic class and shows how it is key to the future of our cities. The Washington Monthly 2002 Annual Political Book Award Winner The Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today-and where we might be headed. Weaving storytelling with masses of new and updated research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy. Just as William Whyte's 1956 classic The Organization Man showed how the organizational ethos of that age permeated every aspect of life, Florida describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant. Millions of us are beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always have-with the result that our values and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of time are changing. Leading the shift are the nearly 38 million Americans in many diverse fields who create for a living-the Creative Class. The Rise of the Creative Class chronicles the ongoing sea of The Creative Class now comprises more than thirty percent of the entire workforce. Their choices have already had a huge economic impact. In the future they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither.

Hadfield, P et al (2001) The "24-Hour City" - Condition Critical. Town and Country Planning, 300-302

Hadfield, P, Lister, S, Winlow, S & Hall, S (2002) “Location, Location, Location: Preventing Alcohol-related Crime and Disorder via Development Controls”, Criminal Justice Matters, Special Issue on Drugs, 47, p: 34-35.

Hadfield, P (Editor) (2009) Nightlife and Crime - Social Order and Governance in International Perspective. p: 361.
This innovative volume on the night-time economy and crime adopts an outward looking, international perspective on the area, which goes straight to the heart of contemporary debates on 'binge drinking', drug culture, sex markets and public policy discourse on nightlife across a wide range of countries. The book presents a pioneering collection of specially commissioned scholarly reports on crime and disorder in the night-time economies of 17 countries around the world.

Hollands, R And Chatteron P (2002) “Changing Times for an Old Industrial City: Hard Times, Hedonism and Corporate Power in Newcastle’s Nightlife”, City (6), pp. 291-31.
Here, focusing on the experience of Newcastle, Chatterton and Hollands continue debates around culture, capital and the 'creative' city already initiated in this journal (see Chatterton, 'Will the real creative city please stand up?' in City 4(3) (2000), and Harcup in City 4(2) (2000), for example). Research on the form, origins, regulation and ownership of the city's nightlife lead to an image of a city which in many ways exemplifies patterns of socio-economic adjustment following the decline of manufacturing evident in other UK cities, especially in the north east region. However, 'beset by problems of visible decay, social polarisation, and deprivation from its industrial past', Newcastle also has its distinct idiosyncrasies. The authors argue that in a more thoughtful approach to the city's development, room should be provided for the growth of a genuinely creative, inclusive and regionally specific urban nightlife, less dominated by large-scale corporations, and more responsive to local cultural factors. Their optimistic conclusion is that the opportunities are still there to 'strike a balance between commercial and local need, and the interests of corporate capital and users of the city, whoever they may be'.

Hughes, G (1999) “Urban Revitalisation : The Use of Festive Time Strategies” , Leisure Studies (18) 119-35.
The widespread use of festive promotions, in the urban management of the 1990s, represents an extension in the practice of city marketing. This interest in festivity might be accounted for in two ways; as an economic strategy to combat the deleterious impacts of globalization on local economies, and as a social strategy to combat the growing alienation and insecurity felt in public space. However this paper offers an additional, more cultural, reading. Because of its highly competitive character, the practice of city 'imagineering' demands continuous innovation. Recent attention has turned to the liminal possibilities of 'economically underexploited' temporal periods. Temporal patterns of celebration are being mined for their touristic potential in a process that robs them of their commemorative depth as it simultaneously strives to retain their festive form. This paper examines two such initiatives- the 'Night-Time Economy' and the Hogmanay Street Party. While these have been promoted for economic and social gain this discussion, employing Giddens' concept of ontological insecurity and Lebfevre's concept of rhythmanalysis, explores the links between such innovations and their impact on place making.

Landry, C and Bianchini, F (1995) The Creative City, Demos: London. 65

Lovatt, A and O’Connor, J (1995) “Cities and the Night- time Economy”, Planning Practice and Research, 10 (2).

Lovatt, A (1996) “The Ecstasy of Urban Regeneration: Regulation of the Night-time Economy in the transition to a Post Fordist City”, in O’Connor, J. and Wynne, D (eds) (1996) From the Margins to the Centre: Cultural production in the Post-Industrial City, Aldershot: Arena.

Measham, F and Brain K (2005) “’ Binge Drinking, British Alcohol Policy and the New Culture of Intoxication”, Media, Culture and Society Volume 1 (3).
Against the backdrop of a long-standing British ‘binge and brawl’ pattern of alcohol-based weekend leisure and concomitant recurrent anxieties in the media surrounding youth and young adults at play, this article considers the cultural distinctions of contemporary British leisure and the evidence for a ‘new’ culture of intoxication.. The study concludes that the pursuit of altered states of intoxication must be positioned in late modern society as behaviour which is a vehicle for consumer and criminal justice discourses, both encouraged by economic deregulation and constrained by legislative change, indicative of the ambiguities at the heart of British alcohol policy.

Montgomery, J and Owens, P (1995)” The Evening Economies of Cities”, Regenerating Cities, 7 , p32-39.

Montgomery, J (1995) Urban vitality and the Culture of Cities. Planning,Practice and Research, 10 (2) 101-109.

Oc, T and Tiesdell, S (1997) The Twenty-Four Hour City Concept, Paul Chapman Publishing: London.

O’Connor, J. and Wynne, D (eds) (1996) From the Margins to the Centre: Cultural production in the Post-Industrial City, Aldershot: Arena.
A key text often referred to in later works on the night-time economy.

Roberts, M (2006) “From ‘creative city’ to no-go areas- the expansion of the night-time economy in British town and city centres”, Cities 23 (5), pp.331-338.

Roberts, M Turner, C, Greenfield, S &. Osborn, G (2006) ‘A Continental Ambience? Lessons in Managing Alcohol Related Evening and Night-time Entertainment from Four European Capitals, Urban Studies, 43 (7), pp.1105-1125.
Attempts to revitalise the centres of British towns and cities in the 1990s drew on the concept of the 24-hour city and, by extension, into liquor licensing reform. The protagonists for the 24-hour city, and many magistrates and local authorities, assumed that a relaxation of British licensing laws would bring about a more civilised mode of alcohol consumption and deliver a `continental ambience' to urban life that would extend into the night. This paper brings forward evidence from a cross-cultural comparison of four European cities to demonstrate that a `continental' style of alcohol consumption is supported by a variety of controls and enforcement measures. It concludes that British free market attitudes to licensing reform will undermine the government's professed aspirations for an `urban renaissance' of cultural inclusion and animation.

Thomas, C & Bromley, R (2000) “City-centre Revitalisation: Problems of Fragmentation and Fear in the Evening and Night-time City”, Urban Studies 37(8), 1403-1429.
Over the past 30 years the pre-eminent commercial status of the city centre in the retail system of British cities has been challenged by the competitive impact of retail decentralisation. A contemporaneous decentralisation of office and leisure activities has exacerbated the situation, At the same time, early redevelopment strategies have created significant degrees of spatial fragmentation between functions and the loss of a substantial residential population. In the contemporary social climate, these changes have resulted in negative implications for the perception of safety and the generation of fear and anxiety amongst all users of the city centre, Consequently, safety issues have accentuated the emerging problems of the city centres, particularly for evening and night-time activities. City-centre revitalisation strategies have increasingly aimed to extend 'vitality and viability' beyond the temporal divide associated with the '5pm flight'. This has involved the incorporation of the '24-hour city' concept. However, this strategy has proved problematic due to the negative perceptions of safety, which are associated with the emergence of an 'exclusionary' youth culture in many major cities in recent years. This paper seeks to examine the nature and scale of the obstacles to the revitalisation of the evening and night-time economy and culture of Swansea and Cardiff in order the better to inform strategies which aim to instigate the 24-hour city concept. The study reveals substantial obstacles to the realisation of a vibrant 24-hour city, the scale of which suggests the need for considerable and concerted planning and development efforts if they are to be overcome. Many opportunities exist but the impediments suggest that progress in the direction of a 'liveable' 24-hour city is likely, at best, to be slow and incremental in the British situation.

Winlow, S and Hall, S (2006) Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture, Oxford: Berg.

Worpole, K (1992) Towns for People: Transforming Urban Life, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Zukin, S (1995) The Culture of Cities, Oxford: Blackwell.