What is nocturnal about night studies? Insights from Turin, Italy

Abstract

The relation between the urban diurnal and the urban nocturnal has been famously conceptualized with the metaphor of the night as frontier. Originally proposed by Murray Melbin in 1978, the phrase suggests that the nocturnal has been gradually colonized by the capitalist logics of the day. This article contributes to provincializing night studies by postulating a nonlinear and non-dichotomous relation between the urban diurnal and nocturnal. Specifically, the article adopts the philosophical perspective of the constitutive outside, as articulated in a recent strand of contemporary urban studies, exploring the paradoxical and even contradictory generative tensions shaping the meanings, materialities and politics of the urban night. This theoretical posture is explored through the case of Turin, Italy, a city that has developed a complex tension between the diurnal and the nocturnal which cannot be interpreted simply from a dichotomistic perspective, as the metaphor of the urban frontier suggests.