broke down. More and more we live along desynchronized, broken, rhythms. This is why the ‘object’ today is the mobile phone. The great social temporalities are no longer defined by work: it is the mobile phone that allows us to resynchronize. Insofar as the city is a place of encounter, this places a real challenge to the contemporary city. The question today is how, where and when we can meet. The way I see it, there is a particular time for encounters which is the night. And if I was saying that politicians, technicians, urbanists, geographers, have forgotten about time, they have also forgotten about urban nightlife. That is the role played by the Seminar on the Night: to be an astounding place where we may work together and produce hybrid realities among technicians, researchers, politicians, artists. The artists, poets, writers, know the night very well, and they need to accept the existence of geographers who also make ways into the night, urbanists who also do it, so that together we may think a reinvention of society. C: How can this new way of approaching the night improve the urban development of the city, including during the day? LG: The wager I’ll make with you here at the Seminar is that thinking on the basis of the night we can transform what happens during the day. And this because the night is a sort of caricature of the day. When the night is present in the way a city is lived, it is especially present. For this reason, when we try to understand a city, we understand it better from the viewpoint of its night. A little example: if we work on the notion of a right to urban nightlife, so that, for instance, women may circulate through the
The night must be populated and open, it should be a place for the reinvention of society and the city.
city at night, we shall endeavor to improve the quality of bus stops, to implement public transport networks, proper lighting, well lit streets; of course, in so doing we shall improve women’s access to urban nightlife, but we will also
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NIGHT MANIFESTO