Paper short abstract:

Turning away from the narratives of poverty, violence, and criminality that haunt both Johannesburg and Lagos, this paper interrogates the way a relationship to the city is mediated through nocturnal experiences, and how the night itself is instrumentalized to put the city into order.

Paper long abstract:

Cities have long entertained a specific relationship to the night. As places where lighting and nocturnal leisure were experienced early, it is in cities that night time has been placed at the center of ideologies of modernity and corruption. Cities are thus a crucial setting to observe the formation of nocturnal identities, that is to say, identities that are produced and reproduced through nocturnal outgoings, experiences and consumption. In Johannesburg and Lagos, I reflect upon the relationship between the city, as a material but also symbolic landscape, and the night, as a time space that radically alters it. Turning away from the narratives of poverty, violence, and criminality that haunt both Johannesburg and Lagos, this paper interrogates the way a relationship to the city is mediated through nocturnal experiences, and how the night itself is instrumentalized to put the city into order. In contrasting ways, the nocturnal geographies of Johannesburg and Lagos reveal the politics of the night. In Johannesburg where night is a time space both feared and desired, public spaces undergo a process of reconquest that is challenged by the night. Under the pretense of the right to the city, middle and upper classes have made of the night a frontier to be conquered in order to feel not only in the city but also of the city. In Lagos however, nocturnal places are withdrawn from public space. Instead of a reconquest, the politics of the night there lead to dynamics of avoidance and deterritorialisation from the city.