Professor Nick Dunn (Executive Director of ImaginationLancaster, & Chair of Urban Design, Lancaster University)
Fear, concern, miscreants, foreboding.
The night-time city might remain a frontier.
An alternative to daytime, city life.
Our identities slip, our intensions slacken, architecture becomes less self-assured.
The urban night as spectacle.
There’s no night version of street view.
People believed darkness rose, not fell, the air thickened.
Don’t let darkness touch you.
Night as a time and space of transgressions.
The night has been increasingly under surveillance.
The UK is safer than ever before, it we are more afraid.
The night-time enabled clandestine histories.
Ancestral memories of two sleeps.
The night as freedom.
The night-time as somewhere we shouldn’t be.
Senses heightened as visuality diminished.
Representation of private and slightly shady worlds.
Dense, charged atmosphere of a New York night.
Condensation between dusk and dawn.
Night as the complete opposite to the order of the day.
To be lost, is to be fully present.
Opportunities to be lost almost immediately extinguished.
Where now for the secrets?
There’s a masculinity to night walking which prevails.
Sodium glow of street lights.
Neon refraction of cityscapes.
Social peripheries in the half-light of dawn.
Fragmented interface of CCTV control room.
No longer a world of criminals.
It’s a world of the other.
Empty, an extension of the self.
It’s an intentional act.
Walking surmounts suspicion.
Cant capture it; its fleeting and elusive.
Signifiers of control and coordination.
We conform when we move around cities because we interact with others.
Inter-dependency.
At night, this is not so clear.
Do we need a new conception for a nocturnal city?
A respite from the reproduction of the day.
The Big Night. The dark matter of the city. Virilio.
We’re awake at night in an artificial way.
The disappearance of the nocturnal city.
We don’t engage with the real.
Sleep is the last frontier.
People are more dispersed and individualised than ever before.
Money as fundamental tenant of desire to extend the day.
Night mayors not nightmares.
Manifesto for the Night Time Economy.
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During the night, light doesn’t move, shadows don’t move.
The city appears static.
It becomes a creative space because of the stillness.
You access a more primitive state of being.
During the day the bank’s high-rises are a reflective surface.
At night, you see in, the workers and the system becomes humanised.