ancient cities

and its instrumental rationality. The danger for
society is potentially acute: Under the cover of
darkness, transgressive behaviors (e.g., criminal
acts, unconventional lifestyles of marginalized
groups, social movement organizing) can occur
with an impunity that usually does not happen in
the light of day.
At night, societies implement various strategies
and techniques to bring darkness under control in
an effort to reterritorialize the night, so to speak.
Examples include the illumination and surveillance
of areas for protection of life and property, as well
as the lighting of places of consumption during the
hours of darkness. Three typically interrelated
modalities of reterritorialization can be set forth:
channeling, marginalization, and exclusion.
The channeling modality orients our activities
and desires into places deemed socially acceptable
and thus helps to reconstitute order on a darkened
landscape. Channeling typically entails discourses
conveying the right places to be at night as well as
the use of technologies like illumination and advertising.
It also involves the implementation of official
zoning policies. The social codes of night
emphasize home and/or leisure activities, thereby
establishing norms of behavior that discursively
constitute night spaces via channeling our intentions
and desires toward particular locales.
Technologies such as street lamps assist by lighting
the paths to home, restaurants, shopping malls,
and late shifts at work. Floodlights enable surveillance
for purposes of individual safety and property
protection. Advertising technologies, such as
illuminated billboards or uniquely lit architecture,
point the way for consumers of goods and services
in the darkness of the night: the brighter the lights,
the better to attract customers and to out-compete
rivals. In addition, zoning ordinances serve to channel
people and desire by attracting the types of
businesses considered to be economically valuable.
The reterritorializing modality of marginalization
serves to categorize people in terms of their
perceived social inferiority or potential for dangerous
behavior; it spatially segregates such persons
from others and from certain parts of the city. In
its consequences, marginalization establishes and
maintains subordinate places for so-called undesirables.
Historically, curfews and patrols have been
used to keep people in their places in the darkness.
Other techniques of marginalization include zoning
Night Spaces
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ordinances and informal social codes of conduct.
Zoning can be used to prohibit or otherwise restrain
businesses deemed less appropriate to an area.
Informal codes of conduct will include prejudicial
designations of people by class, race, gender, sexuality,
and so forth, all intended to isolate some
people or groups into particular places at night.
The reterritorializing modality of exclusion constitutes
night spaces by establishing superordinate
places of security or consumption, even within marginalized
areas. Similar to marginalization, the
modality of exclusion entails spatial segregation,
but it is a segregation that erects barriers to construct
a protected enclave for the people inside.
Examples include physical walls, human or canine
patrols, key-card access control, and alarm systems,
all designed to create spaces of exclusivity via defensive
technologies and techniques. With gates open
during the daylight hours, housing complexes are
welcoming, but with the coming of dusk, the gates
can be closed, thereby constituting night spaces via
exclusion. However, walls and alarms are not the
only ways that exclusion is created. Exclusionary
techniques, such as the employment of bouncers at
nightclubs or cover charges at bars, reinforce a particular
atmosphere and attract a particular clientele
for some businesses during the nighttime.
The three modalities of reterritorialization can
involve both formal governmental or business
policies as well as the informal codes of conduct
accepted and practiced by individuals and communities.
The modalities can reinforce each other
and hence can enhance the probability of effective
social control. However, the modalities can also be
contradictory: marginalization can reduce the
number of customers in stores that are nevertheless
safe within their zones of exclusion. The modalities
also can create unintended situations because
the administered night spaces may be challenged.
Night spaces result from the temporal–spatial
articulation of social conflicts between and within
class, cultural, gender, racial, and sexuality groups,
among others. In their dialectical turn, the spaces
influence those conflicts via structuring the context
and resources available for action and reaction. The
night spaces created by reterritorializing government
policies or business strategies attempt to exercise
a power of physical control over personal
actions and also a power over human desires and
perceptions.