Nighttime as a Unique Territory

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun is an architect and researcher. Since 2010 she has been a researcher at the Cultural Landscape Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and, since 2019, she is a post-doc and Head of Research at ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. At ALICE she continues her interdisciplinary research on the conflict between the spatial forms used by politics and the exception, and the commons created by the rebel body. She does so through a historical, political, and philosophical reading of secrecy as spatial compositions under capitalism; the anesthetic effects of the new attentional regimes on the body’s spatial capabilities; landscape as affective image and its media and infrastructural definition; and architectural ethnography and the map as an instrument of (dis)orientation.

Will Straw is Professor of Urban Media Studies at the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is also Adjunct Research Professor in the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University. Recently, Dr. Straw’s research has come to focus on the ways in which the nighttime culture of cities is governed, promoted, and represented. On the one hand, this takes the form of an interest in new policy instruments adopted by cities so as to acknowledge the role of nighttime culture within them. On the other hand, this interest takes him into the study of narrative forms (in the cinema, journalism, and fiction) that treat the night as a distinct territory of human experience.