Informace o publikaci
Beyond the daytime city: urban night as a temporal landscape
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2026 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Urban geography has traditionally interpreted cities through predominantly daytime perspectives, while the night has often remained conceptually and empirically underrepresented. Yet urban life does not simply stop after sunset; rather, it transforms into a distinct temporal landscape characterised by different rhythms, actors, practices, mobilities, and spatial inequalities. The persistence of daytime assumptions in both research and planning produces a temporal bias that obscures important dimensions of everyday urban life. This paper contributes to the emerging geography of the night by conceptualising urban night as a specific chronotope embedded within the broader temporal landscape of the city. Building on time-geographical thinking and rhythmanalysis, we argue that daytime and nighttime should not be understood as opposite states but as overlapping temporal regimes that continuously reorganise urban functions, accessibility, and social practices. We further suggest that conventional planning datasets unintentionally reinforce daytime perspectives because they frequently rely on residential population statistics collected during the night while simultaneously interpreting them as representations of daytime urban reality. The paper draws on empirical material from the city of Brno (Czech Republic), combining nighttime aerial imagery with information on residential population, workplaces, retail activities, pedestrian movement, service temporality, and a public-lighting experiment. Rather than treating these datasets as static spatial layers, we analyse how they reveal changing temporal configurations of the city and identify dominant nighttime chronotopes. Comparisons with conventional daytime interpretations demonstrate how different temporal perspectives fundamentally alter the understanding of functional urban areas, centres of activity, peripheral spaces, and patterns of everyday life. Our findings show that the urban night constitutes a distinctive temporal landscape with its own spatial logic, extending far beyond leisure-oriented interpretations that dominate existing research. The paper therefore argues for a stronger integration of temporal perspectives into urban geography and planning, recognising that cities are continuously reconfigured through daily and nightly rhythms. By foregrounding urban night as a legitimate geographical object of inquiry, we seek to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of temporal landscapes and to encourage planning approaches that are sensitive not only to where urban processes occur, but also to when they unfold. |
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