Critique of everyday life of the night: Young people's re-appropriation of Turin's eveningificated nightlife

Urban night has undergone a significant transformation over recent decades, shifting from being a peripheral and liminal space-time to becoming both a new market for implementing processes of urban regeneration, and a problematic contest that needs to be regulated by developing new strategies of surveillance and control. Building on Henri Lefebvre's “critique of everyday life,” we develop a “critique of everyday life of the night,” since a common thread links the flatness and monotony of everyday life to the changes that have affected nightlife. Taking the city of Turin (Italy) as a case study, the impact economicist and securitarian urban policies on its nightlife is analyzed, in what is described as a process of ‘eveningification.’ Nevertheless, Lefebvre's permanent dialectic between flatness and extraordinariness of existence led us to carry out a rhythmanalysis of Turin's most problematic square in order to understand various practices and spatial dynamics in an ‘eveningificated’ neighborhood.