ABSTRACT
It is difficult to exaggerate the centrality of the urban for thinking about a wide array of issues. As Bell and Haddour put it, “‘the city’ has come to be a symbol—maybe even a symptom—of almost every social and cultural process”. As the city of the day becomes the city of the night, the familiar spaces of work and leisure take on very different forms and functions. Spaces that may be vibrant and safe by day become abandoned and forbidding as the light moves from the “natural” to the “artificial” and street lighting demarcates the spaces of fear and desire from spaces of withdrawal and safety. From the very local and the urban space of infrastructure, the book then moves to the global, but it does this not via a traditional examination of global cities and their role as infrastructural hubs for global networks of information, financial capital and elites.
