Is geography still afraid of the dark ? Darkness, an unthought of the production of the city.

Résumé En

My paper is part of my thesis research that deals with cities’ dark interstices and the emotions they generate : darkness is the gateway to the city. Day has long established itself as the norm of geography, which has long regarded the objects of night and darkness as interchangeable. Night is becoming a central field for human and social sciences: light urbanism, nocturnal urbanism, geography of the night or night studies make their entry into a diurnal geography, but often leave the dark night out of the field. This contributes to the production of knowledge made up of reassuring representations but which disregards the fact that from a certain threshold of darkness a metamorphosis of the city takes place. In fact, obscurity constitutes an epistemological added value: it opens onto the anti-city, the confines, the margins, the dreams and the alternatives, it is indulgent with the interlope, the imprecise. Darkness also challenges the reason and practice of the geographer. If the fear of the dark in the city is a social construct, thinking of the city through the darkness involves initiating a deconstruction on several scales. Working on and in the dark is to rummage through a wasteland of space and time that can bring a lot to geography.