The shadows of the night

Clandestinization of urban informality in geographies of the pleasure of Southern Europe

Abstract

Public discourse around the night has been plagued by ambiguities, contradictions and double standards for several decades in Southern European cities: either described as a place of pleasure or  dark threats and dangers; a place of economic and tourist growth or a place where ‘informality’, the ‘black market’ and underground activities take place. Alongside this, the emergence of migrant, often racialised, people exercising survival activities at night in these unequal economies of pleasure, has unleashed all the levers of contemporary demonisation against urban subalternity. With a particular focus on Madrid (Spain) and Rome (Italy), and through an exhaustive analysis of secondary sources, interviews with key actors, and participant observation, in this paper I explore the contradictions inherent to the geographies of pleasure in these territories. First, how public narratives of ‘blackness’ - underpinned by historical imaginaries of an alienated and racialised otherness - that appeal to a ‘white morality’ are used to make certain informal actors more clandestine (e.g. sex workers, street vendors) and drive them ‘into the shadows’ of urban space. Secondly, how the clandestinisation - followed by increased precariousness and psychological, physical and labour abuse - of these actors is operative to the neoliberal governance of South European geographies of pleasure (a public space cleansed of dark bodies) and to circuits of neoliberal accumulation.