Regulating and Consuming Youthful Nightlife City Spaces

Summary. This article develops a theoretical understanding of the relationship between young people and city space. More speci cally, our focus concerns what we have termed ‘urban playscapes’—young people’s activities in bars, pubs, night-clubs and music venues within the night-time entertainment economy. The paper theoretically and empirically explores three interrelated aspects of these playscapes: production and the increasing role of a small number of large-scale corporate leisure and entertainment operators providing sanitised, ‘branded ’ experi-ences; regulation in which the development of urban playscapes can be understood through a night-time entertainment regime based around a modi ed relationship between state, developers and consumers, including enhanced forms of surveillance and control; and consumption which is characterised by segmentation and differentiation and based around more ‘exclusive ’ and ‘up-market ’ identities. We argue that these three aspects combine to create a dominant mode of ‘mainstream ’ urban nightlife, with ‘alternative ’ and ‘residual ’ nightlife increasingly under threat or squeezed out. In conclusion, we discuss some of the interrelationships between production, regulation and consumption and suggest a number of potential future scenarios for nightlife development