Policymakers and scholars have recently made a push to prioritize the hours when cities are supposedly asleep. Amsterdam was the first city to formally recognize the night as a space and time that requires special attention from elected officials, citizens and civil servants.

Following more than 10 years of appointing unofficial night mayors, Amsterdam formally institutionalized the position in 2014, which set the stage for a bureaucracy of councils, departments and commissions dedicated to governing the city after dark. Perhaps not surprisingly, New York – the largest city in the U.S. – was at the forefront of this movement in the country.1

Since then, Washington has established an office for nocturnal governance, Boston recently created the position of night czar, and Atlanta formed a Nightlife Division. Night governance is more institutionalized in the higher-income parts of the world, but experiments and studies also exist in lower-income countries. In 2022, Bogotá joined the “24-Hour Cities Network,” following the publication of an extensive report commissioned by the local government in 2019, to help city leaders understand the nocturnal needs of the Colombian capital.

Other cities in Latin America, such as San Luis Potosí in Mexico, have self-appointed night ambassadors. Cali, the third-largest city in Colombia, launched an initiative that mapped the nighttime priorities of its residents. In academia, there’s also been a push to better understand the night. As the authors of a 2022 nighttime manifesto wrote, “Nightlife inspires individuals, forms communities, and ignites cities. Rather than serving as an escape from the present, nightlife provides us with a window into different realities.”2

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• 1. In September 2017, the city established its Office of Nightlife with the appointment of Ariel Palitz as its founding director – the equivalent of a night mayor or night czar. With Palitz stepping down from the role in early 2023, the city is looking for a new “nightlife mayor.” This office is tasked with the routine regulation of after-hours businesses and issuing licenses, as well as confronting abstract challenges like the ways in which gentrification leads to rising rent prices, which threaten cultural and community spaces that operate at night.
• 2. Encompassing disciplines like geography and history, an interdisciplinary field called “night studies” has emerged, bringing together scholars from various backgrounds to better understand the urban night from a range of perspectives. There have been studies on light pollution and its effects on humans and wildlife, how the shuttering of LGBTQ nightclubs has weakened communities and how late-night venues and businesses spur higher rents.