Meeting afterhours: on the work that night commissions do

ABSTRACT

Despite the sizeable impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on nightlife, the night-time economy (NTE) is still high on the cards in cities. Whilst much attention has focused on leadership figures of the NTE like "night mayors", there is a vast landscape of institutionalized forms of night-time governance requiring greater recognition. Consultative night-time governance systems offer particular opportunities for advancing research and practice. We develop a typology of these systems discussing comparatively the role that night “councils”, “commissions”, “boards” and “panels” play in eighteen case studies. We deploy our typology to unpack the form and function of these systems, and the urban governance challenges the NTE encountered during COVID-19. We call for more empirical work on urban governance afterhours to better attend to the ways NTE conversations are convened in cities, and highlight the role these systems play in giving voice to those who take part in the NTE.

KEYWORDS:

• Night-time governance
• night-time economy
• night council
• night mayors
• urban governance
• right to the night

Introduction

Before COVID-19 began unfolding across continents, the night-time had been taking hold in cities and scholarly circles around the world. Whilst debates on the night-time economy (NTE) that span geography, planning and sociology are now well established (Acuto et al., 2021; Lovatt & O'Connor, 1995; Nofre & Eldridge, 2018), the last few years have seen these thriving beyond their original framings (Hadfield, 2014; Shaw, 2018). We are seeing wider calls to better recognize the value of what happens after dark in cities (Dunn & Edensor, 2020). Some have even called for more formalized recognition of a sub-field of “night studies” (Gwiazdzinski et al., 2018) or greater experimentation with “nightology” (Shaw, 2018) and greater purchase for the interdisciplinary encounters of night-time research across academia (Acuto, 2019; Kyba et al., 2020). At the same time, many city leaders across both Global North and South jumped at NTE-centered reforms. Many have recognized the need for “night mayors” to represent night-time constituencies of entertainment and hospitality industry operators, or formalized “night manager” positions in local government (Acuto et al., 2021; Straw, 2018). Even where no governmental recognition has been in place, bottom-up movements of night-time advocates led to the informal or private establishment of some of these forms of representation. As COVID-19 hit, this all but fizzled. Scholarly attention saw the launch of the first Night Time Studies Conference in 2020, whilst several cities rushed night-time reforms recognizing the NTE as key to their recovery. Academia and practical advocacy even coordinated a common international COVID-19 response initiative in the form of the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan (GNRP) and Global Nighttime Manifesto spurred by night-time consultants VibeLab, to provide advice on how to respond to the crisis after dark. All of this tells us that, despite COVID-19’s sizable disruption to the NTE, it is still very much time to put the urban night-time in the spotlight, further propelling a tradition of research now well established in geography (Shaw, 2022).

Central to us for this essay, then, is a call to engage in these gestures by looking more systematically explicitly to the form (which we define through an institutional typology) and function (which we start outlining as a set of actions) that institutionalized night-time governance structures take. Whilst there is much out there now about “night mayors”, whose role we endorse ourselves, little is currently available as to the varied mix of institutions in which night-time governance has been formalized in cities (Acuto et al., 2021; Gwiazdzinski, 2015). To be certain, we would like to underscore from the get-go that there is a well-developed and to some degree growing geographical literature on the night-time economy (see Shaw, 2018 for a summary) and the geographies of the night (e.g. Dunn & Edensor, 2020). This tradition of geographical work “after dark” has already uncovered central questions not only of urban life at night (Edensor, 2015), or how overshadowed these urban dynamics are versus daytime investigations (Van Liempt et al., 2015), but has also begun to dive deeper into how we represent and engage with the voices of those who draw their livelihoods from the night-time (e.g. Shaw, 2022). We aim to stress this is a very fertile ground to build on, and our essay predominantly seeks to take these approaches further into the realm of urban governance not only as an area of study but also as a space for action research by practice-engaged scholars. Here we want to put an emphasis on a particular genus of collective forms this institutionalization of urban governance of the night-time has taken. These have often been uncritically referred to as “night committees” with little attention given to their diversity of form, function and purpose. We disentangle this genus in our paper with a four-fold typology of commissions, councils, boards and panels.

This does not mean that these are the only forms of night-time governance. Rather, we do so to both stress the importance of attending to the value of the discussions the NTE is based on and its role in urban governance more generally, as well as to surface more clearly the politics of voice of those partaking in the NTE. Practically, we ask here how have cities around the world been formalizing the convening of night-time advocacy and interests within the broader edifice of their urban governance. This builds on recent calls to better attend to the “right to the city at night” (Yeo, 2020) and the fundamental challenges of inclusivity (Campkin & Marshall, 2018; Smeds et al., 2020) often implied but still needing greater attention in the ways we construct COVID-19 recovery after dark. It also speaks to a widening scholarship of the night-time in geography, and especially one that is increasingly concerned with the inequalities, dynamics of voice and participation, and governance challenges embedded in its management (Hadfield, 2015; Shaw, 2022; Yun, 2022). Yet, as we argue here, this needs to be done more systematically, with a clear eye on the possibilities that more “cosmopolitan comparisons” (Robinson, 2011) could engender in this academic and practitioner movement. Much of the sprawling night-time initiatives around the world have been clearly characterized by inter-referencing and policy mobility (Bunnell, 2015; Robinson, 2015) and not least circuits of solidarity like the GNRP, which have emerged between night-time activists, stressing the importance of comparative gestures and cosmopolitan entanglements when it comes to this domain of urban governance.

Methods and methodological purpose

From a methodological perspective, our paper proceeds in a series of successive steps. We first tackle key questions of institutionalization of the NTE in urban governance, calling for greater attention to these councils, commissions, and committees, through a comparative analysis of eighteen cities. This empirical information was gathered between 2020 and 2021 through a series of desk reviews of the eighteen cases, which included policy and media reports analysis, to develop the initial typology of institutions and their predominant characteristics. We initially divided these narratively as to whether they are part of formal NTE governance structures of local government, or whether they represent consultative systems emerged outside the remit of City Halls, in line with a similar in/out structuring of discussions we have applied elsewhere (Acuto et al., 2021; Seijas & Gelders, 2021). However, methodologically, we only took this in–out approach to then replace it thereafter via a more nuanced taxonomy. This was done to present a snapshot of experiences emerging from the field, several of which we have engaged with directly ourselves or have had input from colleagues closely involved in their operations, offering an analytical style that has “feet on the ground” in these diverse realities. This taxonomic and comparative approach was complemented by reflection on direct experience by us in many of the case studies referred to in the paper and participant observation in the development, discussions and set up of several of these institutions. This is an empirical approach that strides to many respects “action research” in so far as several of us have been accomplice to shaping night-time economy conversations and consultative institutions whilst conducting reflective research on it, and to that end we argue here the opportunity for urban geographers to partake in the production of the urban governance of the night is both open, viable and a potentially impactful venue for progressive and cosmopolitan-minded urban scholarship.

Further, we note this is an intentionally light-touch comparative approach centered on illustrating the variety of conformations through which night-time discussions have been formalized in urban governance – geared toward balancing a search for common traits, through the drawing up of a typology, but contextual variations, avoiding rigid type boundaries and accounting for local (hi)stories. To do so we start first inductively drawing our typology with a brief excursus in the eighteen cases on the insider (to local government) or outsider (civil society and/or business) nature of common types of institutionalization – as summarized in Table 1. This assessment is then used to build a typology of institutionalized night-time conversations. We use here the term “consultative systems” as a portmanteau for the variety of these institutionalized convenings focused explicitly in the NTE to avoid the jungle of possible terminologies existing out there. Specifically, we simplify this through a proposed four-fold typology centered on night councils, commissions, boards and panels, outlining seven typical “functions” these forms do in urban governance. We then test this typology-based approach through an exploration of the resilience of these institutions following the COVID-19 crisis. Whilst we would stress the main emphasis of our paper is an empirical and a methodological one, aimed to encourage more comparative urbanism of night-time economies around the world, we also stress in our conclusion a call to pay greater attention to the urban governance of the NTE, and its institutions. We do so specifically to advance the work that urban geographers have already done on the NTE towards an even more explicit engagement with questions of, and practitioners in, urban governance. We build on calls for greater experimentation with “comparative urbanism” (Robinson, 2016) to encourage a more nuanced and internationalized vocabulary of night-time urban governance that is built on wider inquiries than single case studies (e.g. Lucas, 2017). We argue this approach will encourage, as Robinson (2011) suggested, “comparative gestures” that are “cosmopolitan” rather than colonial or competitive in their ethos, cognizant of the interconnectivity, inter-referencing and indeed often inherent solidarity of night-time movements in cities around the world. In fact, it is worth underlining from the get-go how many of the experiences presented here have been formally connected with each other. This has been the case because of the broader trend in urban governance that has seen the sprawling of inter-referencing and “policy mobility” between cities as a dominant mode of urban entrepreneurialism (Acuto, 2019; Phelps & Miao, 2020) emphasizing “the people, places, and moments” (Prince, 2010), which has upheld in many cases in the setup of these models. This mobility in urban policy is fuelled by “transitory assemblages” of elements like, for example, local advocates, experts, institutions (our focus here), and conferences (Cook & Ward, 2012). The central appeal, not least to NTE advocates, for policy transfer lies in the ability to implement successful solutions without the time-consuming and costly processes involved in rolling out “untested” policies (Cook, 2008). However, as these solutions are rolled out in a different setting, they are dis-embedded from and re-embedded into new political, economic and social contexts and relations (Peck & Theodore, 2001). It is our goal to further advance a more cosmopolitan and collaborative form of NTE policy mobility between these cities, and others. Overall, we posit, the stories collected here stress the value of the “consultative systems” as spaces for discussion on urban dwellers’ right to shaping how their cities are managed and operating at night and call upon urban geographers to take a proactive stance toward these spaces.

Table 1. The eighteen comparative cases categorized by our typology of forms and functions.

Case study			Years active	Form				Functions^a
City	Country	Name		Commission	Council	Board	Panel
Aberdeen	UK	Night-Time Commission	2019-present		✓		✓	Advice and Bridge
Amsterdam	Netherlands	Night Council	2018-present		✓	✓		Represent and Incubate
Barcelona	Spain	Comissió Nocturna de Barcelona	2018-present			✓		Advice (possibly represent)
Barcelona	Spain	Taula ciutadana per una nit cívica i segura	2021-present	✓		✓		Represent, Bridge
Berlin	Germany	Club Commission	2001-present			✓		Represent and Incubate
Geneva	Switzerland	Grand Council of the Night	2011-present			✓		Place
Ghent	Belgium	Nightlife Council Gent	2021-present		✓		✓	Bridge, Advice
London	UK	Night Time Commission	2016–2019	✓				Represent, Evidence, and Advice
Manchester	UK	Night-time Economy Panel	2018-present	✓			✓	Bridge and Advice
Melbourne	Australia	Nighttime Economy Advisory Committee	2021-present	✓	✓		✓	Advice, Evidence and Bridge
Montreal	Canada	Night Council	2020-present		✓	✓		Incubate, Advice and Represent
Nantes	France	Night Council	2014-present		✓			Represent
New York	USA	Nightlife Advisory Board	2018-present	✓				Represent and Bridge
Orlando	USA	Downtown Nightclub Taskforce	2016	✓				Place and Bridge
Paris	France	Nightlife Council	2014-present		✓			Represent
Rennes	France	Nightlife Council	2016-present	✓	✓			Represent and Place
Sydney	Australia	Nightlife & Creative Sector Advisory Panel	2018-present				✓	Advice and Bridge
Vienna	Austria	Vienna Club Commission	2020-present	✓				Represent
Zürich	Switzerland	Nightlife Council	2015-present			✓		Incubate, Evidence, and Represent

^a “Functions” for our 18 case studies are identified on the bases of their official mission statement (or vision) as per publicly available.

Formalizing NTE governance: in and out local government

While “night mayors” have been quite the phenomenon over the past years, the last few decades have also witnessed a broader proliferation of other night-time governance institutions. A recurring institutional type is “consultative systems” which seek to formalize the conversation as to the state, future, and challenges of the night-time in a city. These typically take the form of organized committees. The definition of what these bodies might be are as mixed as the ones for night mayors, “night czars” and “night managers”, if not even broader. If we are to step up the nuance and accuracy of our NTE conversations and do justice to the emergent forms of night-time governance we have been witnessing around the world, night mayors are but a part of wider edifice of night-time governance. Most cities that have actively sought to establish and promote new NTE practices, planning, and communications have also done so by creating in-house or at an arms-length night-time councils tasked with convening the city’s conversation about the NTE. In fact, the proliferation of NTE agendas, advocates and indeed governance structures makes the present time particularly valuable as a point of departure for more systematic reflections as to the nature of institutionalized consultative bodies addressing the NTE globally. This has taken place both within the purview of local government but also externally in the form of independent and non-governmental initiatives. How to make sense of these effectively, advancing current case-based considerations of the NTE in geography and urban studies, whilst also advancing not only scholarship but practical engagement in urban governance? We start first by unpacking the eighteen case studies, summarized in Table 1 above, according to a simplified in–out comparison delineating their official placement inside or outside local government. We highlight variation and institutional innovation, but also develop a preliminary taxonomy of consultative night-time governance systems that can be useful to the field of our inquiry which is simultaneously our own field of practice. This is done not with the aim of pigeonholing case studies, many of which end up falling in-between our “types”, but rather to underscore the variety and possibilities of different forms and functions at play in cities today. We begin with those operating within existing governance models and move afterwards to those predominantly “outside” the domain and authoritative purview of local government.

Meeting “within” local government

The movement to deliver night-time visions, plans and bespoke authorities like the night mayor has taken a solid hold in many local governments around the world. As we noted above, committees and councils might be less chronicled than the mayors and the flagship programs like London’s Night Tube or Amsterdam’s night square ambassadors, but they are still important pieces of the NTE governance puzzle. Centrally for our considerations, the formalized convening of night-time conversations by local government has been quite common internationally – painting a relatively balanced picture of both governmental and private sector representatives that have a financial stake in the night time economy. Looking through our sample of eighteen cities, we argue a few emerging themes stand out to us comparatively which we summarize briefly here. First, many of these committees and councils have been structured to provide advice, ranging from official inquiries to advisory boards, to the city’s leadership of the night-time – be that of a night mayor or other manager-type roles. Second, and especially in some of the French cases scoped here, some of these government-backed consultative systems have been deployed explicitly to engage the citizenry, or in some cases a subset of it as with night-time industries, into principle- and vision-setting for the NTE.

Examples of how consultative systems are aligned to provide direct input into local, metropolitan, or regional government are well established. This is the case of Manchester, in the UK, which has set its Night-time Economy Panel alongside the Greater Manchester Authority Night Time Economy Adviser since April 2018. The panel is made up of eighteen NTE experts from across Greater Manchester and has led to the launch by Mayor and Adviser of a 2020 Greater Manchester Night Time Economy Blueprint. London also followed similar format but the experience there speaks to the possibility for these consultative systems to be time-limited and more ad hoc inquiry-based. Towards the end of 2016, the then Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appointed Amy Lamé as the city’s Night Czar, to act as a champion for the city’s nightlife and to act as a liaison between London-wide citizens, stakeholders, businesses, and City Hall. A network was established comprising one representative from each of London’s 33 Local Authorities to act as a Night Time Borough Champion and to support the work of the Night Czar. In October 2017, then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, established London’s first Night Time Commission, an independent six-month advisory board inquiry to help realize the Mayor’s vision for London as a 24-hour city. The Commission provided independent advice to the Greater London Authority regarding opportunities for developing the city’s NTE.

Consultative systems also need not have a specific home in local government and might equally need to balance their role alongside NTE initiatives stemming from other layers of government, speaking to the importance of taking a “city-regional” view on NTE governance. For example, despite not having a specific nightlife office, the City of Sydney, Australia has a dedicated Night Time City Manager role and night-time strategy (“OPEN Sydney”) since 2013. In 2018, the City announced a Nightlife and Creative Sector Advisory Panel to assist with continued efforts to manage the city’s nightlife and cultural industries. The panel of 15 meet four times per year and is co-chaired by a City of Sydney Councillor. The group comprises not only industry and community voices, but also academic expertise, and two under-30 youth voices. Routinely, the city undertakes extensive research and public consultations regarding its NTE. In 2021, the New South Wales Government (the state within which Sydney sits as capital) appointed Michael Rodrigues as 24-Hour Economy Commissioner for Sydney to implement the city’s 24-hour economy strategy, supported by an Office of the 24-Hour Economy Commissioner and an Advisory Group comprising local government and industry representatives.

This scalar dynamic works in a variety of directions. For instance, since 2014, the City of Paris, France, has had a dedicated Night Life Council, led by the Deputy Mayor for Nightlife and Cultural Economy. The Night Life Council consists of representatives from the City of Paris, Prefecture of Paris, the Parisian Police Force, île-de-France, the Tourism Office (regional and national), and various local associations (“Paris Conseil de la Nuit”). The Council supports policymaking, regulation, and other strategic activities for the night-time in Paris, and its approach is stressed in a specific Manifesto for the Nightlife (“Manifeste de la Vie nocturne”). This vision-driven approach is notable and echoed elsewhere. For example, Rennes, in France, has focused its Nightlife Council’s work around an explicit “Nightlife Charter”. In 2016, Rennes established its Nightlife Council, with commitment from the local government. Rennes had already authored a Nightlife Charter in 2009 (“Charte Rennaise de la vie nocturne”), foregrounding the launch of the Council. The Council contains representatives from various municipal authorities, residents and proprietors, the police; health and prevention workers; and prominent nightlife industry figures. It has been engaged with developing a revised Charter reiterating and extending the commitments of 2009, which was adopted by the Mayor of Rennes in 2016. Yet we should underscore how these cases often are superimposed to non-governmental advocacy which still plays an important role in NTE governance, and that this “bottom up” approach at times plays at wider scales than the “local”. In Manchester, for instance, the establishment of the Night-time Economy Panel was the result of lobbying from the local Night Time Industries Association, an independent organization comprising bar, club and restaurant owners from across the UK, spearheaded in Manchester by a prominent board member, nightclub and event manager (Sacha Lord), that originally led to the creation of an informal Night-time Commission in the city in 2017, laying the grounds for the more formal Advisor-Panel dual structure existing today.

Meeting “outside” local government

Whilst closely tied to the regulatory work of many local governments (Shaw, 2010), much of the history of NTE advocacy is centered on the action of non-governmental actors and bodies (Brands & Schwanen, 2014). Perhaps the most famous example of this bottom-up and industry-led organization is the Club Commission in Berlin, Germany, in operation since 2001. The Commission began by acting as a representative body for the city’s nightclubs and its community of patrons. Over the past two decades the Commission has become increasingly involved as a requisite voice in planning discussions and advocacy work across the city, representing numerous working groups. The Club Commission has been directed by Lutz Leichsenring since 2009, who plays a very proactive role in international networking activities around night-time management, as with the recent Global Night Time Recovery Plan initiative launched by VibeLab. Another well-known example is Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and its Night Council. Amsterdam is often cited as a night-time governance innovator, appointing the first Night Mayor. Amsterdam first began night-time governance discussions in 2003, with the appointment of a “Night Watch Conglomerate”, led by subsequent nightlife experts from the city until 2012. The aims of the conglomerate were set out by local government officials, seeking more constructive communication with nightlife representatives. In 2014, the Amsterdam Night Mayor Office was established as a non-profit organization that is independent from the City of Amsterdam but works closely with local government in reconciling issues around planning and licensing with nightlife business owners (Amsterdam 2018). In 2018 Amsterdam’s Night Mayor Office has – like city departments of Paris and London – established a Night Council (nachtraad) comprising local experts and industry stakeholders to help advise the Night Mayor Foundation’s Board.

Whilst one could argue that examples of systems outside government might lack the policy and legislative clout of more formally sanctioned initiatives, it is important for us to stress here the sizeable advancement emerging from non-governmental initiatives too. The case of Zurich in Switzerland stands out as particularly (Cibin, 2018). In Zurich a Nightlife “Roundtable” paved the way for the establishment of a more formalized Nightlife Council which provides a semi-formal mode of NTE organization. Since 2001, Zurich has had a Nightlife Roundtable consisting of business owners, police, local authorities, and night club owners coming together to discuss topics of importance to the city’s NTE. In 2011, a Bar and Club Commission was formed in Zurich by proprietors of bars and clubs as a vehicle to lobby and represent their interests publicly. There is now a membership base of 120 in the Commission. Following the creation of the Commission, an independent Nightlife Council was formed in 2015. This is an association without legislative power aiming to work with the roundtable and commission in representing the needs of nightlife users. All council members work on a voluntary basis. The Nightlife Council has no designated head, but Alexander Bücheli of the Bar and Club Commission acts as a representative on behalf of the Commission and is an independent consultant.

From this perspective the case of Montreal, in Canada, and its recent establishment of a Conseil de Nuit also stands out as a tangible example of the power of NTE advocacy to drive change. In the spring of 2020, MTL 24/24 – a civic organization formed in 2017 to push Montreal towards the development of NTE policies – launched a Conseil de Nuit [Night Council], an independent body bringing together twelve representatives from different sectors of night-time culture. Over the course of 2020-2021, the council launched four committees: Health, Security, Diversity and Inclusion; Nocturnal Lifestyle; Clubs, Cultural Bars and Venues; and Festivals and Events. Each of these developed proposals for the strengthening of Montreal’s night-time cultural activity. MTL 24/24 defines itself as a civic organization, open to all those with an interest in the night, rather than a professional body or lobby speaking solely on behalf of night-time venues or businesses. While typically acting independently of city government, MTL 24/24 has sought and been granted a voice in the elaboration of night-time policy. It has consulted both officially and unofficially with Montreal’s Commissioner of Noise and Night, who was named in 2020 as the first public official responsible for night-time policies in Montreal. In short, the continuum between non-governmental organization of NTE advocacy, the convening of industry and other NTE actors, and the institutionalization of night-time governance remains a critical and timely one.

The work that NTE consultative systems do

Before stepping into a preliminary empirical test of our typology, we believe it is important here to also complement this comparative framework by considering what these bodies do, not just what and where they are. Whilst the landscape of night-time institutional formats goes beyond the eighteen examples above, a few initial common traits emerging from these are important for consideration of the function that forms of institutionalized consultation have in urban governance. We identify seven main functions that night-time committees, panels and councils play in night-time governance. First, these bodies provide strategic governance and policy advice, formulating for instance key reports or conducting (expert and/or independent) inquiries into the NTE. Second, they represent the voice of NTE businesses, communities and/or citizens, convening the city’s conversation on nightlife. Third, they offer expert insight, data and specialist evidence as input or complement to municipal policymaking on the NTE. Fourth, they “place” discussions about the NTE by highlighting dedicated urban areas or themes of value for night-time policymaking and governance, putting a spotlight on the likes of key precincts, governance challenges or socio-economic areas needing specific or urgent attention. Fifth, they can bridge internal night management of a city (e.g. by a deputy mayor, night manager, adviser, office or mayor) and external businesses, communities and/or citizens’ concerns and views. Relatedly, and sixth, they can also do so by acting as general NTE management institutions to tackle major nightlife issues beyond the more technical remit of local administrations. Seventh, and finally, they can incubate more specialist taskforces and working groups targeting specific areas of NTE governance, either via sub-committees or as separate bodies. Overall, the multitude of functions and types depicted here offer much to the empirical eye interested in disentangling the potential of the night-time as a site of urban governance.

A typology of consultative night governance modes

The variety of pathways to the institutionalization, either within, without or in-between local government and the private sector is undoubtedly thriving globally. To us, the above points to great potential in the sprawling modalities of both engagement with NTE voices in urban governance as well as of institutionalization of their presence in local government. Yet how could we structure comparisons, whether of a composing or variation finding form (Robinson, 2016), or of other more experimental persuasions (McFarlane & Robinson, 2012) in this growing mix of NTE stories? A typology of consultative night-time governance systems might come in handy. Overall, the variety of institutional arrangements presented above can be summarized in four main categories which, as we detail below, can appear in a mixed fashion in several cases.¹

1. Commissions, whose role is to be specific purpose bodies for reviewing and reporting into the governance of the NTE in cities, which can be held ad hoc or in a continuing approach, and that tend to result in the formulation of strategic initiatives and reforms (e.g. London, New York)

2. Councils, whose role is predominantly as broad industry and citizenry engagement bodies feeding NTE voices into local government, and whose operate tends to be that of on-going broad membership representing the voice of the NTE in cities (e.g. Paris, Amsterdam)

3. Boards, whose role is mainly to act as “peak” NTE representative structures typically emerging from without the administration of local authorities and as non- governmental initiatives often with large and to a degree open membership (e.g. Berlin, Geneva)

4. Panels, whose key role is to be a source of evidence and additional information for local governance authorities, including night mayors, managers and advisers, to draw on and engage with regularly (e.g. Sydney, Greater Manchester)

These are of course ideal types and, in several cases (as can be seen Table 1), these approaches occur in mixed forms combining two or three of these categories. These are cases like Aberdeen (mixing to some degree a Council and Panel approach) or Rennes (mixing Commission and Council models). Mixes are in fact the most common reality, even with multiple structural overlaps. Amsterdam is a case in point: its Night Mayor Foundation is overseen by both a board and a night council. The board has five members, including the night mayor who acts as chairman and names its members. The night council has 12 members who all have an active role in the local night scene and are organized in four sub-committees: night clubs, festivals, safety and regulation, and night culture and diversity. While the board is an independent and autonomous institution, it receives recommendations from the night council. Hence, perhaps the most effective way to put our typology to work is to understand the “mixes” at play in cities today, and the work that they do through the varied functions depicted above. Of course, this does not preclude some, perhaps less common, cases where examples are single type, presenting interesting insights into the specificity of their approaches. Equally, we stress that for the purpose of preliminary application of this typology of forms and functions we have identified “functions” for our case studies based on their official mission statement (or vision) as per publicly available information, with additional insight from our own professional experiences to refine the potential overlapping types of “form”. We recognize that additional functions might be played by these commissions, councils, boards and panels, and that some of these might also change over time and encourage the reader to use our classification as an initial conversational springboard. Yet, this expanding genus of institutional forms has had in the past two years to confront a fundamental challenge to the continuity and operation of night-time urban governance – that of the COVID-19 pandemic (Acuto et al., 2020; Connolly et al., 2020; Davies et al., 2022). We take this departure point as an apt empirical space to test our typology and call for nuanced comparative considerations.

Meeting in a time of crisis: a night resilience challenge?

COVID-19 pushed the night life industry into crisis.² Government public health regulations shut down or deeply reconfigured the industry’s operations, affecting financial bottom lines and cultural cornerstones in communities. This placed consultative night-time governance systems such as commissions and councils front and center in confronting the socio-economic crisis, prompting us to ask the question: have these governance institutions been resilient in the face of an industry-wide, global crisis? How have they fared and responded? Has the crisis shifted functions outlined above? While definitions of resilience differ, we mainly speak here of “a system’s ability to cope with and adapt to external pressures” (Sjöstedt, 2015), eyeing the institutional systems depicted above in our typology. In these contexts, and in appreciation of how this is a crisis that is still clearly on-going, we suggest a preliminary set of considerations. Far from deeply systematic, our discussion here is an initial investigation into night committees and councils’ responses over 2020 and part of 2021. We examine how a sample of them witnessed any functional changes, if at all. This is distinct to whether NTE business have adapted to the crisis, a broader discussion well beyond the confines of enquiry of this paper. We aim not to be exhaustive, but to test our typology as representative of variation, cognizant that we could have included many more examples. Here we flag four initial considerations.

First, established consultative night-time governance systems have served as an important guide to local policy responses to the crisis, but also acted on broader governance scales – in some cases even as a counterpoint to wider inaction. This is, for instance, the case of Manchester as a mix of commission and panel, with primarily bridging functions. Here, the NTE Panel have been extremely active advisors and advocates during COVID-19. Sacha Lord, the Night Time Economy Advisor, and the NTE Panel have worked closely with the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to both advocate for and support Manchester’s NTE. Their advocacy has operated at both the local and national scale, arguing for not just focus on the NTE’s crisis, but for tangible policy initiatives from all levels of government to provide relief to the industry. In February 2021, for example, Sacha Lord was pressing Boris Johnson’s government to extend business rates relief, keep VAT rates at 5%, and extend furlough. However, the Panel and Mayor have gone far beyond just lobbying. In November 2020 the Panel, in conjunction with the Manchester Mayor, released a blueprint for the recovery of the NTE from COVID-19, pushing the panel’s action from what we have called “advice” and “place” to a closer management role on behalf of Greater Manchester. In it four themes are identified: advocacy (within and to government), campaigning (within and to communities), business and employee support (providing direct aid), and regeneration and recovery (re-opening in a new normal). The initiatives under these themes range everywhere from establishing a new Night Time Economy Office to providing services to NTE employees and businesses to run events. The breadth of this response is significant. Interestingly, in its adaption, the governance institution has expanded from its core competency, advising, to include service provision through the creation of the Night Time Economy Office linking management and bridging functions. The new office is “a signposting service for both employees and employers, allowing them to get the answers and direction they need in response to any concerns they have”, and has “partnered with a number of organizations to provide bespoke support quickly to those who need it”.³ Furthermore, it has doubled-down on a prior initiative, Creative Improvement Districts (CIDs), a spin-off of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) – privately managed but publicly sanctioned urban governance structures extremely prevalent across the UK that are not without their valid critiques (Cook, 2008). CIDs are front and center in its plans for regeneration and recovery, and their implementation would amount to again a further extension of the institutional governance structure of the NTE in Greater Manchester.

The crisis has also been a turning point for the institutionalization and formalization of new consultative night-time governance systems. This is the case of Ghent, in Belgium. In 2021 Ghent launched a new Nightlife Council, its function oscillating between those of council and panel. The Council is formed by nine representatives from the nightlife sector elected for two-year terms. It is aimed at addressing a perceived need for greater consultation between the City of Ghent and its nightlife sector, absent up to that point in the operations of the city. The new nightlife council has been mainly designed for regular quarterly updates and consultations, with an aspiration by the Council to “establish a regular and open dialogue”, with a relatively clear aim of providing voice and bridging into the NTE. This is done through support by a “nightlife coach” and a selection of independent experts on noise, inclusivity, drug use, night economy, ecology, and other themes, as well as a series of more formalized debates on the extent of the COVID-19 crisis. The Night Life Council in Ghent operates within local government, and as such their COVID-19 response has been integrated into the local government’s response. Whilst the Council’s management potential remains untested, its crisis response has illustrated limited advocacy from within government. Thus, there has to date been no public lobbying of the government for agenda attention or specific policy items common in other councils and committees, although this is likely happening behind closed doors. Instead, the Committee and local government have presented a united front in offering support and relief to nightlife businesses. The Council offers grants to those putting on events outdoors through the Council’s policy and programs. Businesses can receive up to 80% of the costs refunded or €40,000. This is a rework of a pre-COVID grant scheme for start-up night-time businesses. A similar set up and story of in-crisis institutionalization was also recently kicked off in Melbourne, Australia with its new Night-time Economy Advisory Committee. In April 2021, the City of Melbourne Council established a Night-time Economy Advisory Committee of eighteen members. The Committee was the result of public debate on the NTE at the height of the 2020 crisis, taking place through the Mayoral elections of 2020 where several candidates pushed explicit NTE agendas such as launching night-time event series, appointing a night mayor or copying directly the New York City Office of the Night Life model. The winning candidate, incumbent Lord Mayor Sally Capp, launched the committee shortly after re-election. The committee was chaired by (originally framed as “Chairman of the Night”) James Young and is now entrusted to Penny Miles, and comprises two City of Melbourne Councillors, two ex-officio academics and a range of nightlife business representatives. The role of the committee is to provide the Council with advice and feedback to support the recovery and growth of the city’s NTE. The City of Melbourne recognizes the importance of the committee’s role in supporting businesses hardest hit by the pandemic and to encourage people to return to the city. The Committee has had important advisory input into key activities of the City, with some whilst limited bridging role (as members take part in their own capacities). A t the same time it has shown growing proximity to management functions with input into initiatives like Melbourne Money (to drive consumption to the NTE) and a AUD$100 m recovery fund set up by state government and the City.

This is not to suggest consultative night-time governance systems have always been in the urban governance spotlight. Aberdeen, for instance, only just instated its Night Time Commission in late 2019, a mere few months before COVID-19 struck. The Commission was added to complement the existing role of Night Time Manager. However, since retaining its Purple Flag⁴ status in February 2020 the Commission has been publicly very quiet. They could very well be working behind the scenes with Council, however, there is no mention of them on the Council’s website or in publicly available documents, so it is difficult to know. Additionally, the Night Time Manager has also become publicly silent since late-2020. Prior to this the Manager was very active in criticizing the government’s lockdowns and the impacts on the night industry. When reviewing the Council’s policies, the Council doesn’t appear to have provided much specifically for the night industry. It is administering some relief and support packages on behalf of the Scottish Government, however, it does not appear to have any plans, responses, support or grants beyond this. The relative silence from the Commission and Manager could be one of the reasons why the Night-Time Industries Association, has become a leading voice in advocating for the re-opening of businesses. This, in our view, signals the continuing importance of board-like institutions and of the advocacy functions that have propelled many NTE governance reforms, especially following the deep impacts of COVID-19 on these industries.

Yet it is also important to underscore the variable positioning these boards can assume as further NTE reforms come into play. A notable case is Barcelona’s Comissió Nocturna. In late 2021, the city government created a “Taula ciutadana per una nit cívica i segura”, a new body that convenes more than thirty organizations ranging from restaurant industry associations, youth groups, tourism and environmental groups, neighbour associations and the local police. The Comissió is only one among many actors involved in this new Taula (“Table” in Catalan) which is meant to meet periodically to discuss pressing issues related to Barcelona’s nightlife. It was convened by the city's department of Safety and Prevention as a new way to promote dialogue among different sectors, motivated by the rise of illegal street parties (known as “botellones”) that were fuelled by almost 500 days of restrictions on nightlife establishments due to the pandemic. Given these new developments, Barcelona now has both a council (the Taula, created in 2021) and a board (the Comissió, created in 2018). While the city is still defining how these institutions would interact with an official night office that potentially sits within the local administration, the Comissió might not be considered a fully-fledged board as it is neither very active nor involves what we could call “peak” NTE representatives.

Lastly, we should not conflate NTE institutionalization with local government only. For example, the Club Commission in Berlin has been an active advocate and policy advisor throughout COVID-19, stressing the value of boards but also of the need to hybridize types beyond single-purpose institutions. In early 2021, the Commission published a six-point plan on how Berlin could reopen venues safely. In addition, going further than just planning, it ran pilot events using rapid COVID-19 testing, and created centralized information for clubs on the current regulations and hygiene recommendations. The Commission has also not been shy in criticizing the government. They actively and publicly lobbied the government for the reopening of venues and outdoor events – clearly signalling the power of advocacy functions but also showing us a case peppered with policy advice efforts. The regulations, however, remained strict, prompting the Committee to shift tactics and lobby for clubs to be defined as facilities for cultural purposes not entertainment venues. In May 2021, they won this fight, with Berlin officially declaring night clubs’ cultural institutions, a significant win for the Committee. Overall, then, the picture of how consultative night-time governance systems have acted and reacted is mixed and varied across countries and continents, begging for more in-depth engagements, stepping away from one-size-fits-all narratives. We instead believe a closer look at form and function of these institutions helps scholars and practitioners with structuring analysis, comparative gestures and even the practical operation of these realities. Yet, we think, the stories here also speak to one importantly underlying theme: much if not all of what we accounted for here has been about giving NTE conversations a permanent place in city leadership.

Giving night conversations an institutional voice

Our excursus into consultative night governance modes, and insights into the confrontation between these institutions and the COVID-19 crisis, have sought primarily to argue for greater empirical attention to the variety of ways in which NTE voices are convened in cities. The cases we discussed here also gesture toward the importance of taking a whole-of-governance view of the management of the NTE, going beyond (but not dismissing the value of) the individual leadership role such as night mayors to holistically tackle the urban politics of the afterhours. Of course, this is but a preliminary start of what we hope is much wider discussion and one that, we feel, COVID-19 calls us to set closer to the heart of local policymaking. A key variable is the capacity of these institutions to respond to change, both expected and unexpected. Many of these institutions are perhaps still too young to be able to draw clear impact assessments. Yet, in the wake of the deep disruptions prompted by COVID-19, the issue of institutional resilience, but also that of purpose in the broader architecture of urban governance, has sprung to the fore and, as we have argued above, driven further lines of differentiation in the structure and operation of differing consultative night-time governance systems. These, in reverse, are issues applicable to longer-lived questions as to the placing of governance structures within the ongoing life of urban politics in cities. For instance, a relevant question is that of political cycles: what will happen after a particular pro-NTE mayor or local executive changes? These resilience challenges are true even for prominent examples such as London and New York and have critical reverberations in most of the cases presented here. Of course, unlike political cycles, other changes are less predictable. An example is the current COVID-19 crisis, which created a shock for night-time ecosystems around the world. However, we have underlined how this crisis has also presented a tangible opportunity not just to evaluate how resilient these institutions are but in fact to set some of them up in the first place or indeed reform them in specific directions. Cities like Ghent, Montreal or Melbourne have all created new consultative bodies and are not alone in doing so. Hence, with an eye on also guiding the practice and establishment of these institutions, our primary purpose is advocating for more work in this space and for greater efforts at comparison and cosmopolitan engagement between these realities, with some degree of empirical stability as provided by our straw-man typology. Notably, as we have underscored, these are not just theoretical comparative gestures we have been making. In practice, there is a lively field of “actually existing” inter-referencing and comparison between these cases that underpins much of their evolution and relationships across borders. Many recent cases have often been based on (and some in explicit dialogue with) prior experiences, as in the examples of Manchester, Melbourne or Paris. Many of the Committee/Council chairs and night mayors/managers involved in these programs have been actively in communication and exchange with others, taking part in forums and summits like Sydney’s Global Cities After Dark or London’s recent NITE Conference at University College London, but also informal networks of practitioners and researchers such as those underpinning the GNRP. The key issue here then is that of the value of not just seeing these case studies as separate occurrences but as part of a growing and often internationally networked community of practice which can be tapped into for exchange and insights. In short, policy mobility and transnationally connected mutual support are a more and more common feature of night-time governance in cities the world over. Not least through the pandemic, and via a variety of international networks, we have seen many of these different realities engaging with each other in circuits of comparative imagination, policy mobility and more-than-local urban governance that again we would stress are critical both as spaces for academic-policy engagement as well as to better nuance the stories of urban governance we tell from a geographical point of view. Fundamentally, many of the examples above have provided some degree of common ground to open attention to, and express the positions of, voices of those who uphold the NTE. This is essential in our view to underscore how these institutions play a critical role in advocating for and articulating not just NTE businesses’ but also citizens’ and night-time workers’ viewpoints when it comes to urban policymaking. They are, as other author and practitioners have stressed more broadly, a critical conduit to discussing and tackling the “right to the city at night” (Gwiazdzinski et al., 2018; Yeo, 2020). Cases such as Nantes, Rennes, Berlin, London or Montreal have already articulated this effectively but some of these questions of participation in urban governance are ripe for many of the other cases and indeed contexts where the NTE is on the agenda but perhaps not quite institutionalized yet.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the engagement on this conversation on night time governance by the graduates of the Studio N program at the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. A particular thanks to Will Straw for the kind input on this paper specifically, and Enora Robin and Jenny McArthur more for input in the framing of night commissions. An early version of this approach was published with them in Managing Cities at Night (Acuto et al., 2021), and in open access in the report Night Time Economy Commissions: a review of international case studies (https://doi.org/10.26188/22067012).

Disclosure statement

Michele Acuto is a current member of the City of Melbourne Night-time Economy Advisory Committee. Anna Edwards is Director at Ingenium Research Pty Ltd, providing advice to the Australian case studies presented here.

Additional information

Funding

Research behind the essay was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Night Shift” [DP220101078], as well as by the Studio N program at the Melbourne Centre for Cities, University of Melbourne.

Notes

1 It should be noted that the nomenclature for these four categories does not always align with the naming conventions of the committees themselves. For example, Aberdeen’s Night-Time Commission is classified as both a Council and a Panel under our typology, rather than a Commission.

2 A digest of the deep impact of COVID-19 on the NTE is available through the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan collaborative project convened by a mix of practitioners, scholars, and policymakers to discuss this very issue. See https://www.nighttime.org/recoveryplan/.

3 Greater Manchester Combined Authority, “New service to help provide support to Greater Manchester’s night time economy”, 24 February 2021, at: https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/news/new-service-to-help-provide-support-to-greater-manchester-s-night-time-economy/.

4 An NTE destination accreditation scheme, https://www.atcm.org/purple-flag.