idle gaze 062: dawn chorus / dusk chorus

Why we love cities that never sleep.

Welcome to idle gaze: a newsletter exploring the hidden undercurrents shaping the cultural zeitgeist.

---

René Magritte, The Empire of Light II, 1950

Cities, like the residents that call them home, tend to run on distinct circadian rhythms; internal, collective clocks that dictate when the streets and town squares come alive, peaking with movement and activity, and when they eventually begin to quiet down, the bars, cafes and clubs emptying.

Having temporarily relocated from Berlin to Sydney, I’ve been flung between two cities with vastly different circadian rhythms, triggering what can only be described as a mildly disorientating sense of temporary lifestyle jetlag; my internal body clock out of sync with the ebbs and flows of the new environment I find myself in.

When you call Berlin home, you learn to adapt to a city where the night is the centre of gravity - with its 24-hour liquor laws, late evening dinners and around-the-clock clubs, conjuring up the sensation that everything that happens during the day is somehow merely a precursor to the evening or a continuation of the night before. Early mornings in Berlin are not so much fresh starts, but shallow echoes of what has come before, the streets littered with empty beer bottles and dotted with occasional club goers straggling home. Here, everyone and everything is prone to a lie-in, even the coffee shops; most of them only decide to open at 9am.

In contrast to Berlin's nachtgestalten (rough translation: creatures of the night), Sydney is home to a lively dawn chorus of early morning run clubs, beachgoers and surfers. Bondi at sunrise could be mistaken for a beach in Europe during sunset; crowded to the brim, hundreds of people basking in the warm glow of first light.

And while the mornings in Sydney are full of zest and vitality, an early start inevitably leads to an early end; all that energy is rapidly expended as soon as the sun begins to set. By 10pm, a time when many cities only just beginning to stir to life, Sydneysiders are ready for domestic retreat, the pubs ringing out the bells for last orders and the restaurants clearing out.

Some places are morning cities, and some places come alive at night. Every city has it’s own distinct circadian rhythm, and Berlin and Sydney represent the two extremes of that scale.

A few other examples of AM cities: Portland, Stockholm, Boulder, Colorado, Vancouver.

A few other examples of PM cities: Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Madrid, New York City, Tokyo.

Where a city is positioned on this AM <-> PM scale fundamentally influences not only it’s sleep cycle, but informs it’s core identity of the city, and the people who live there. The AM city sees itself as disciplined and regimented, addicted to the dopamine of early morning workouts, fuelled by caffeine and nourished by Açaí breakfast bowls.

PM cities on the other hand are fuelled by a concoction of cocktails, beers and cigarettes, in perpetual, hazy pursuit of the kind of spontaneous excitement that can only be found after midnight, across packed bars, clubs, karaoke booths and bustling night markets.

These two archetypes both embody a sense of superiority for their way of life. Morning cities love bragging about the integrity of early starts, which (in their minds) automatically make them better: more ambitious, virtuous. And maybe there’s some truth to that: scientists talk about the morning morality effect, which posits that people behave better earlier in the day. Meanwhile, a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that we become more passive as the day wears on.

Evening cities on the other hand couldn’t care less about early starts; instead they desire the excitement of their late night, feral escapades, which (in their minds) makes them, without a question, more interesting (there’s no scientific evidence of this, but they’re probably equally correct about that too).

People will generally applaud places that come alive at night. For example, Monocle’s annual Quality of Life Index, which ranks the most liveable cities in the world, looks at late night opening hours as a key KPI. Despite this, the flickers and flames of nightlife, in all it’s forms, are starting to dim, muted by a combination of gentrification, cultural shifts and public policy.

For starters, Sydney wasn’t always the morning-obsessed city it is today. Sydneysiders love to reminisce about how King’s Cross in the 90s and 2000s enjoyed one of the most vibrant nightlife scenes in the world. But eventually, various regulatory changes put an end to that. The infamous lockout laws imposed from 2014 to 2020 in particular stifled and ultimately extinguished what once was. With nothing to do and nowhere to go after midnight, a morning lifestyle was embraced instead.

Meanwhile in London, after-dusk culture has turned into a shallow version of its former self. 3,000 clubs, bars and pubs have shut in London since the pandemic. Dan Hancox at the Guardian recently painted a depressing picture of London at night, reduced to Instagram content fulfilment hubs and corporate dystopias:

“It’s true that walking through central London in 2024 can feel like navigating a bleak, postmodern satire of the thrills of urban spontaneity: ballpit bars and escape rooms for contrived office socials; expensive, ticketed mega-events; and security guards cosplaying as cops, moving civilians on from heavily surveilled POPS, or privately-owned public spaces.”

Even New York, the OG “city that never sleeps”, seems more limited to sunrise-to-sunset than ever. The New York Times recently published a feature documenting the evolution of Williamsburg; how abandoned factory buildings, vacant lots and crumbling warehouses gradually gave way to luxury condos and open plan office spaces. This is not only the classic tale of gentrification, but also a story of how a neighbourhood’s vibrant after-dusk culture was wiped out in order to support daytime profit, as gig venues and dive bars closed down in favour of maintaining the infrastructure required to support and fuel the corporate workforce moving into the neighbourhood: yoga studios, coffee shops and breakfast spots.

When we talk about cities turning into ghost towns at night, we’re not just talking about sleep cycles; we’re talking about a sense of loss: a loss of a certain identity, set of subcultures and collective experiences.

When 90s nightlife icon Chloë Sevigny recently complained about all the Lululemon athleisurewear and public dogwalking taking over New York, what she was on some level protesting against was a certain genre of bourgeois AM wellness culture flooding the streets of her city.

Sevigny’s criticism resonated with a lot of people, because the truth is that in today’s zeitgeist, there’s something deeply uncool with AM culture. That’s why workout sessions are increasingly being rebranded as morning “raves”, while wellness brands are ditching the light, airy and virtuous first light aesthetics for the darker and grittier codes of nightlife and partying (take for example the “anti wellness wellness club” 4am).

However, amid the AM-ification of cities and culture, there is light in the darkness. We are beginning to understand what we lose when we reject the night. Policies to keep cities open round-the-clock have been picking up steam since Amsterdam began issuing 24-hour operating licenses in 2013. The idea of cultivating night time economies has since spread to some 100 cities that now have some form of “night mayor”, including London, New York City and Zurich. Urban planners proclaim that “an official 24-hour policy is just an admission that the city and its economic activities never stop.” But it’s not just good for business, it’s deeper than that. After dusk is where coming of age experiences are formed; where communities are born and nurtured, amidst the privacy and secrecy of darkness.

As Mireille Silcoff noted in a piece exploring how real life subcultures have been reduced to online aesthetic trends: ‘youth culture’ comes alive when the sun goes down, and by stopping young people from hanging out in cities at night, they’re ultimately cutting off the lifeblood of these scenes: “the youth belong at the rave, at the block party, in the mosh pit, loitering in the park at midnight”.

Nothing is more quintessentially modern than the 24 -hour city. When the impressionists at the beginning of the century sought to picture modern Paris, they not only painted all the new daytime activities of the city: from walking the freshly laid promenades to peering through the industrialised glass panes of shops. But they also began to paint the nightlife: the absinthe drinker; the lady of the night; the theatre; the bar girl; the singer. The Impressionists were just as interested in the magical ambience of gaslight and the limelight as the sight of morning sunlight across the water.

Like the impressionists, we see a magical sense of ambiance in cities that never sleep; places where we don’t have to pick between living as morning larks or night owls, a place where dawn-to-dusk and dusk-to-dawn can flourish simultaneously and cross pollinate; where the vice of darkness and virtue of mornings can be experienced in equal amounts.