Claiming the night: Fear,exclusion,and the right to urban nocturnality

Abstract

In cities of the Global South, the night remains a space unequally inhabited—cast as risky, deviant, or off-limits to those who do not conform to dominant norms of legitimacy and safety. While urban studies have long interrogated spatial injustice, far less attention has been paid to its temporal dimensions (night-time space)—the shifting exclusions and negotiations that unfold after dark. Centring the question—who gets to claim the night, and on what terms?—this paper examines how different urban actors—women, elderly residents, informal workers, and youth—in Siliguri, a rapidly urbanising city in eastern India, navigate and contest the boundaries of urban nocturnality. Drawing on ethnographic narratives, it argues that the right to the city (Lefebvre) is not only spatial but also temporal—shaped by classed, gendered, and embodied power relations across the 24-h cycle. The findings reveal how women self-monitor, elderly residents retreat, night workers labour unseen, and young people quietly reassert presence in overlooked corners. Yet these acts are not merely adaptive; they are expressions of quiet defiance. Through loitering, lingering, and everyday occupation, marginalised groups stake a claim to nocturnal public space. These practices exemplify what feminist geographers describe as a politics of presence—where simply being in space becomes a statement of belonging. In tracing these lived geographies of fear and resistance, the paper calls for a more inclusive urban night—where difference is not policed, and presence after dark is recognised as a legitimate and necessary extension of the right to the city.