Introduction: The multiple facets of nighttime tourism

Abstract

Cities at night are glowing again after a three-year pandemic period characterized by the application of massive lockdowns, night curfews, social distancing, mandatory home confinements, and a strong punitive criminalization of the institutional-media-civic front against “the night” and the youth (Nofre et al., 2023a, 2023b). A simple glance at the development of the nocturnal city and its growing relationship with the tourism industry offers a picture of the pandemic period as a simple parenthesis in an apparently linear evolution. However, an attentive reading of recent academic literature as well as of media reports allows us to unveil a growing colonization of the nocturnal city by the tourism industry (Rouleau, 2017; Smith & Eldridge, 2021; Nofre et al., 2023c).