Policy Mobilities, Temporality, and the Politics of Managing the City at Night
Urban researchers and policymakers are increasingly taking the night seriously as a distinct domain of governance.
Positioned at the intersection of night studies and urban policy mobilities, this lunch seminar examines Atlanta’s recent attempts to manage the city after dark. By tracing how Atlanta has assembled its nighttime governance apparatus and the regulatory spaces through which it operates, Jean-Paul Addie contends that the city’s political regime has myopically reproduced the night as an object of regulation, reinforcing a nocturnal pathology that supersedes collective claims to the night as a space‑time for inclusive planning and alternative urbanisms.
Deploying a conjunctural analysis, the lunch talk advances our understanding of the temporalities of mobile urban policymaking and the potential to govern the urban night’s expansive possibilities in more equitable and imaginative ways.
About the speaker
Jean-Paul Addie is a visiting scholar at the Urban Studies Institute from May to June 2026. He is a critical urban geographer at Georgia State University's Urban Studies Institute, concerned with understanding the production, governance, and experience of regional urbanisation.
Drawing on a dialectical approach to the urban process under capitalism, his research focuses on the politics of urban infrastructure – the material elements and social relations that facilitate urbaniqation and foster distinct modes of urbanism – to address questions of access, mobility, and social justice.
Practical info
Tuesday 2 June 2026, 12.30 - 2 p.m.
UAntwerpen Stadscampus, Room TBA