The Mobility and Assemblage of Nighttime Economy Policies in China: A Contextualized Urban Model Space

• In Event: Urban-Environmental Futures in the Global South

Abstract

As a new and powerful strategy for stimulating urban vitality, the nighttime economy (NTE) as an urban model is diffusing rapidly and extensively across China, yet the patterns and underlying causes of such diffusion remain under-investigated (Chu et al. 2021, Yu 2021). While there is an emerging international literature on NTE policies and governance, it has predominantly focused on Global Northern and Western contexts, but overlooked equally salient and contextually distinct developments in the Global South, particularly in China (Acuto et al. 2021). Research on Chinese policy diffusion has largely treated policy objects as relatively stable and coherent packages, but overlook how they are adaptively reconfigured across administrative and spatial boundaries within mobility networks and how local contextual factors shape policy components (Ma 2014; Zhu 2014; Zhang and Zhu 2019; Guo et al. 2024). A small and growing literature on Policy Mobility emphasizes the local mutation and adaptation of Chinese policy models, as well as the underlying material, institutional, and social networks, but is largely limited to qualitative case studies (Chang 2017, Sheng and Han 2022, Romano 2024).

This study combines the theoretical perspective of Urban Policy Mobility (McCann and Ward 2012) and Urban Model Space (Keidar and Silver 2022) to conceptualize NTE policies as entities that flow, mutate, and (re-)assemble among urban nodes. It employs Topic Modeling (BerTopic) and multi-level regression to examine the discursive space of the NTE model and uncover patterns around the adoption of policy discourses, using policy documents from 90 Chinese cities. It integrates a comprehensive set of local urban contextual factors to reveal how NTE policies are differentially adopted and reassembled based on each city’s competitive nightlife resources. The findings enrich the empirical foundation of policy mobility from the Chinese context and shed light on how municipal-level decisions intersect with broader socio-spatial forces through robust, data-driven methods.

Authors

• Tong Wang, University of Toronto

• Hao Zheng, Renmin University of China

• Dawei Chen, University of Toronto

• Ding Wang, York University

• Zhihang Yuan, Zhejiang University