The Sanitization of the Night: Gentrification and the Everyday Temporal Politics in Belgrade

Abstract

Urban scholarship increasingly recognizes that processes such as gentrification unfold not only through spatial transformations, but through shifts in sensory environments and everyday rhythms. In this paper, drawing on twenty-three months of fieldwork in Belgrade, I examine how urban redevelopment (re)organizes time for middle-class people aged 25–45 through the regulation of nightlife, whereby noise ordinances prioritize quiet nights for newly affluent residents. To describe the displacement of nocturnal social life from the city center, I develop the concept of the sanitization of the night. Using sonic methods, interviews, and focus groups, I trace how gentrification reshapes Belgrade's soundscape as nightlife moves toward the suburbs. For urbanites who anchored their social lives in central districts, this shift produces a temporal disorientation embodied in insomnia. Finally, I argue that gentrification in Belgrade operates through a temporal displacement, where the governance of sound reorganizes when and how the city can be inhabited.