Social space, night-time and youths: Considerations for an interrelational analysis

Abstract

Starting from a configurational conception of social space as a dynamic, subjective, and sensitive experience framed by situated cultural, class, and structural contexts, prioritizing the interrelation with youth (in plural) who live, resist, enjoy, dispute and appropriate the night (in its sense of nocturnality-noctem) in contexts of diverse sociability, inequality, violence in intra and intergenerational articulation, we will reflect on how these elements can contribute to studies that delve into the relationship between young people and the nocturnal space. This is characterized by access and experience differentiated by class, identity, and representation in terms of entertainment, security, criminalization, and violence.

To do this, after marking some considerations about youth as specific chronotopes, a review of three spatial aspects will be given (lived-conceived space, space as a container of the social and relative space). Finally, we reflect on the possibilities that these spatial aspects open for ethnographic research and practice of studies on night space and youth around the subjective experience lived in nodes, circuits/districts of consumption of the night-time economy, and representative places within of the nocturnal mental image of the city. This is not a market study or consumer practices but the analysis of asymmetrical power relations and subjective experiences based on accesses differentiated by class, gender, and sociability.