Night-time policies have circulated widely from one country to another over the last decades, be it lighting policies (Hernández González, 2010) or 24-hour city policies that seek to boost the night-time economy (van liempt et al., 2015). However, there are national specific features in the uses made of night-time spaces. In order to better take these distinctive features into account when developing or evaluating night-time policies, this paper proposes to point them out in four European countries : France, Spain, Italy and the UK. It will show that the types of spaces frequented at night differ from one country to another, as do the times at which they are frequented and the profile of those who go out. While the French, for example, have a strong tendency to spend evenings at each other's homes for social purposes, the Spanish and Italians are characterized by a relatively high use of public spaces at night.
This work relies on the exploitation – carried out as part of a PhD thesis – of data from the Time Use Surveys conducted in the four chosen countries, as this survey was specifically designed to allow international comparisons (Szalai, 1972). The contributions of this paper will therefore be both methodological and empirical. Methodologically, it will show that quantitative methods can provide relevant results for the night studies, provided that they are designed to take into account the specificities of nightlife. It will thus deconstruct the often stated idea that statistical methods are unsuitable for night studies (Deleuil, 1993; Landrieu, 2005). Empirically, it will provide new elements of knowledge about the nocturnal appropriation of spaces in Europe and will open up guidelines for further comparative research. Finally, this paper intends to initiate an exchange with researchers working on night-time spaces in the studied countries in order to identify avenues for understanding the causes and consequences of the specificities identified quantitatively.
Mots clés : night-time|Europe|socio-spatial disparities|quantitative methods|time use survey
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