This transdisciplinary CRP will study the social and cultural life of migrants in public spaces in selected European cities at night. It aims to contribute to understanding and resolving urgent social and political tensions, supporting communities’ wellbeing and better integration at local, national and transnational levels.
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space ([1974] 1992), a key reference in urban scholarship, drew attention to the existence of ‘nighttime spaces’, where different social and cultural dynamics emerge, as daytime prohibitions ‘give way to profitable pseudotransgressions’. Building on Lefebvre, social historian Chazkel (2017) has noted how the impact of temporal thresholds onpeople ’s everyday lives has been largely neglected in academic scholarship.
This CRP addresses this blind spot by focusing on nocturnal public spaces (nightscapes), in their social and imaginative constructions, acknowledging that more attention must be paid to the social life of displaced peoples after dark (Jolliffe, 2016). Mindful of the increasing attention to cities’ nighttime economies, it aims towards a fuller understanding of migrant communities’ nocturnal experiences and cultural contributions in Europe and of the potential for better use of nighttime public spaces towards inclusivity.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration and the Sixth Framework Programme for research and technological development.