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(Editor’s Note: The following article is in part a response to comments made by German Chancellor Merz about the image of the city in October, 2025, during a visit to Potsdam. He depicted German cities as dangerous places, often due to the presence of irregular migrants in them, where ordinary citizens were afraid to move about. He added that critics who doubted the truth of his observations should ask their »daughters« about it, implying that women, especially, were afraid to go out at night in German cities, and/or to frequent certain places such as train and subway stations. He added that the dangers emerge »at the latest by nightfall.«
The individual images are less crucial here than the interpretive pattern latent in them: the city as a space in which order can’t be taken for granted, but remains fragile and in need of securing. Hence, it is hardly surprising that, even in earlier times, modern metropolises like London or Paris were described as ambivalent places where freedom, density, and social mobility went hand in hand with moral decay, disorder, and loss of control. Even today, the ambivalent interpretive figure of the city still makes sense to us when it is described both as a locus of freedom and as an endangered space in which order is perceived as fragile and needs to be backed up by police powers.
Our supposedly certain knowledge about cities does not come from unbiased sources; rather, it flows from certain political interpretations that define what and who should be considered dangerous, whose insecurity merits public attention, and what forms of presence seem contrary to public order. That doesn’t mean that violence or transgressions should be relativized, but it does remind us that responses to them frequently invoke ideas of order that regulate visibility and structure one’s sense of belonging. In this context, controls do not automatically produce order; they generate the ways in which social boundaries are drawn in the public domain. Under neoliberal forms of governance, those boundaries shift even more. That is, security is organized preventively under the auspices of risk management, while responsibility is delegated to individuals.
»Migration becomes a code for disruption, while feminine fear serves as a moral justification legitimizing measures to maintain order.«
Against this backdrop it is no accident that political statements about the so-called »image of the city« have packed such a political punch. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz asserts that »we still have this problem in the city’s image,« his rhetoric should not be taken lightly. He links that statement to demands involving migration policies, which he justifies by reference to the alleged experiences of »daughters.« He has more in mind here than just matters of aesthetics and architecture; rather, he is alluding to the fact that certain people are found in the public space whose presence there is part of the fabric of the urban social world. Migration has become a code word for disruption, while feminine fear serves as a moral justification legitimizing measures to maintain order. In other words, the »image of the city« looks like a neutral concept, but it conceals the rearrangement of social boundaries and sets limits on who can be considered part of the public sphere.
Statements like Merz’s epitomize a broader political discourse in which the city is understood less as a social living space and more as a backdrop that has to be kept »in order.« The effects generated by such interpretations of the cityscape are not uniform: they vary according to the different groups being addressed, each in its own specific way. They reinforce already-existing perceptions of insecurity in portions of the majority society and impart an apparently legitimate language to anti-migration attitudes. At the same time, utterances like those of the Chancellor stir doubts among those flagged as disruptors about whether they do, in fact, have an unquestioned role in the public space. This logic becomes especially powerful whenever the city is described as fragile: »at the latest by nightfall« (Friedrich Merz)
In this political discourse, the urban night functions as a sphere of resonance for such interpretations. It is regarded as a time of heightened insecurity, as a phase in the loss of control, and as an alternative world to the well-ordered daytime. When urban problems are discussed, imagined nocturnal scenes often hover in the background of the discourse: dark squares, railroad stations, parks, groups of young people, noise, alcohol. The night becomes a space of suspicion in which the diurnal order must be restored. Accordingly, it is negotiated primarily as a matter for public safety policy. The dominant framework features criminality, frightening spaces, the presence of the police, streetlights, and surveillance. This perspective is so taken for granted that scarcely anyone asks what it omits . After all, the night is not just a risk; it is the urban all-night: a time for work or retreat, and for encounters and conflict. It is not a state of exception, but instead a part of the urban »life-world« or social environment.
»The modern city has become what it is today not despite but because of the night.«
Despite all this, the night is still perceived as an aberration, thus reflecting the ways in which we think about the city as a whole. The daytime serves as the criterion of the city’s rhythms. The city should work; workflows should be predictable; paths should be smooth. According to that logic, the night looks like a disruption, because it produces different rhythms, different uses, and other forms of presence. Yet the night is not a special case that has evolved naturally. Rather, it is the result of historical and technical developments like artificial lighting, public local passenger transport, shift work, industrial and post-industrial modes of production, as well as new styles of life and leisure. All have gradually integrated the night into urban rhythms. The modern city has grown up with the night. It has become what it is today not despite but because of the night.
For that very reason, social inequalities show up with particular clarity in the urban night. For many employees who work in the caregiving, cleaning, logistics, gastronomy, and security sectors, the night is their regular, routine work environment, a functional prerequisite of urban normality that rarely becomes visible in the political arena. At the same time certain other uses of the night come into sharp focus in discussions of public safety policy, especially in cases where people depend on public spaces.
For young people the night is a vital space of experience in which experimentation, visibility, and community-formation become possible, precisely in cases where there are no private spaces to which they can retreat and in which economic opportunities are either completely or partially blocked. Often, it is not until nightfall that queer people have the opportunity of feeling that they belong, because then alternative public spheres open up for which there is no room during the day. For the handicapped, existing exclusions become harsher at night, since mobility options, barrier-freedom, and social infrastructures are then sharply reduced. Finally, for homeless and unsheltered people the night takes on existential significance, because shelter, support, and the presence of social support networks are least available then. This set of synchronicities is a central feature of urban worlds, yet it is seldom understood politically as a quality of night in the city.
Instead, the focus is on curtailing social intermixing and diversity. Urban architecture, lighting, a bias favoring the »big event« (e.g. in sports), and regulatory policies all combine to privilege certain kinds of presence and marginalize others. The problematic part of all this consists in the fact that social diversity in the city comes to be regarded as conflict-generating and disruptive--something that must be reduced through the application of police powers. However, instead of resolving conflicts, disciplinary approaches of this type only succeed in displacing them. This is the case because we are seldom confronted by urban problems per se. Rather, the latter reflect societal asymmetries of power and political neglect that grow more intense in the urban night. Consequently, if we wish to recognize and deal with problems in the cityscape, we need a new political perspective and a different kind of discourse about life in the city.
»Anyone who negotiates urban living environments politically, necessarily negotiates their rhythms as well.«
To think about cities differently means taking them seriously not just in a spatial and social sense, but also temporally. Anyone who negotiates urban living environments politically, necessarily negotiates their rhythms as well. As the climate grows progressively warmer, this perspective acquires additional weight. Longer heat waves, warm and even tropical nights, and postponed daily rhythms are already noticeably changing work, dwelling patterns, and leisure. Public spaces that are usable only to a limited degree during the daytime gain new meaning during the evening and night hours. Not only does the city get used more intensively at night; it also approaches more closely the center of the urban negotiation process.
Bearing in mind the realities of nocturnal life
In many southern European cities, the rhythms of the night have long since been integrated into urban life. By bearing in mind the realities of nocturnal life in the city, we discover the key to understanding it not just in functional terms, but also in its social, cultural, and temporal dimensions. By examining the public space at night, we soon realize that the dominant ideas about the city encounter limits if the city is planned, regulated, and energized primarily from a daytime standpoint. Once night falls, questions concerning presence, belonging, and use emerge with special clarity: Who stays, who leaves, whose presence can be taken for granted and whose counts as disruptive? Who will be checked and who won’t be? Those questions do indeed precede nightfall, but they intensify once the city gets dark.
For that very reason the discourse about public spaces at night is well suited to helping us rethink and reshape the city as a whole. Its image should not be homogeneous, as if it were a place that must be kept stable. Rather, it should be viewed as a social space that thrives on synchronicity. Different ways of life, needs and temporal rhythms collide, without any one of them completely absorbing the others. In this context, negotiating the city differently means no longer treating the night as an exception, but instead taking it seriously as a self-evident part of urban rhythms.
It means taking a look at the conditions under which nightly events happen: which infrastructures are available at night, what forms of hanging out are made possible or made more difficult, and who becomes visible or is pushed out to the fringes. Those questions concern not only the night, but the core of urban coexistence as such. From this perspective, safety no longer appears to be exclusively a matter of control, but a question of accessibility, reliability, social embedding, and inclusion. The city in its nocturnal phase thus becomes a touchstone for whether it should be understood as a vital living space or as a setting that must be administered.