The Nighttime Economy (NTE) Model Space: Examining the Shape and Adoption of NTE Policy Discourse

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14. Urban Governance I: The Organization of Power

Abstract

The nighttime economy (NTE) has been popularized as a centerpiece of culture-led urban development agendas in post-industrial cities. The rapid expansion of nighttime leisure activities comprehensively pushes urban operations into the night, where interests of residents, night dwellers, and public safety meet and collide. These salient dynamics prompted the recent and extensive global diffusion of distinctive NTE governance initiatives: over 40 cities have created “night mayors” to convene NTE actors and identify working solutions; many have issued dedicated strategies to create a vibrant nightlife as a key competitive edge. While a small urban research literature examines the international variation of NTE governance institutions, we need a larger, more comprehensive exploration of the adoption of specific components of NTE initiatives, especially the substantive content of strategies and policies across cities. Mobilizing the framework of Urban Model Space (Keidar and Silver 2022), this paper employs Structural Topic Modeling and multiple regression to examine the discursive space of the NTE model using a corpus of 62 policy documents across 13 Anglophone cities. It is guided by the following two-part research question: First, using topic modelling, I ask, what are the key discursive topics of the emerging NTE urban model space (the NTE Space)? Second, using regression analysis on the topics identified, I ask, what plausible causes predict the adoption of these topics? The analysis identifies eight key NTE policy discourses clustering around three domains within a discursive matrix: “Socio-economic”, “Temporal” and “Spatial”, and finds various factors along the dimensions of temporality, scale and position that significantly affect the adoption of discourses. This study advances a sociological understanding of the urban night not just as independent and locally distinctive dynamics, but as increasingly and explicitly interconnected through the learning, diffusion and adoption of NTE policy ideas across wide-ranging urban contexts.

Author

• Tong Wang, University of Toronto