Dunn, N., 2025.

Dark Practices: Sensing the City After Dusk

Different claims are made on the city after dusk as individuals and groups occupy, demarcate, and appropriate urban spaces. Presences are not necessarily visually apparent but are detectable in other ways such as sound and smell. What methods are available to sense how the city after dusk is constituted and reshaped because of the people who move and work through it? This chapter presents a mixed methods approach to help navigate and document the temporal micro-geographies of the urban night. Specifically, the chapter examines the work done within the inner-city area of Cheetham Hill in Manchester, UK. It sets out a methodology for how we might redesign the city after dusk to be a more convivial and inclusive place.