Cleaning up the streets : Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s night-time neighbourhood services team.

摘要

The streets of Britain’s city centres are busy at night: taxi drivers, ‘revellers’, fast foodudsellers, bouncers, policemen, street pastors, leafleteers and more take to the streets toudpromote, produce or consume the night-time economy. ‘Night-time economy studies’ hasudcatalogued this vast range of activities associated with consumption in city centres at night,udparticularly within a British context. Roberts and Eldridge’s comprehensive overview ofudresearch across social science on the night-time economy provides examples of researchudinto many of these groups, and more. In revealing such a wide and mature academic field,udhowever, research relating to infrastructural maintenance at night is conspicuous in itsudabsence, despite an awareness of the importance of the night as a time for maintenanceud(Roberts and Eldridge, 2009:26). Separately from this research into the night-time economy,uda growing literature has begun to emphasise the need for social scientists to look at repairudand maintenance of cities (Graham and Marvin, 2001, Herod and Aguiar, 2006, Graham andudThrift, 2007). In urban geography, as this edited collection shows, this increase in attentionudpaid to repair and maintenance has begun to reveal that, far from a ‘back stage’ of the cityud(Goffman, 1959), infrastructure takes on a central role in everyday, and everynight, urbanudexperience. Furthermore, rather than just a tool, resource, opportunity or hindrance,udinfrastructure presents itself as constitutive of urban life (Pieteerse, 2008) and, byudextension, the urban subjectivities which emerge from this. Once again, however, the nightudas a specific site of repair and maintenance is often overlooked as unproblematically a timeudof ‘out-of-the-way’ repair, which has little direct impact on the urban other than in hidingudsome of the dirtiest jobs which constitute a city (Herod and Aguiar, 2006).