What Urban Nightlife Feels Like: Atmospheric Narratives and Public Spaces

Introduction

September 2020, Moscow Music Week, the atmosphere of the festival explodes outwards the club, merging with the rhythms of the night city. One can experience it through the felt-bodily space of sensory (not necessarily conscious) impressions and corporeal (leiblich) communication, barely approaching the club located in the historic center area surrounded by the Museum of Russian Icons, Institute of Philosophy, and Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building.¹ This specific feeling reminds me of a two-year ago experience when I was living in Vesterbro — one of the busiest areas of Copenhagen, which is significantly different from any of the Central Moscow districts with its rhythms and cultural components, but also incredibly similar in its desire for boundless development and technological urban environment with the historical monuments of cultural heritage sprawled in the background.

With a special focus on the multi-layered atmospheric experience of urban nightlife, this chapter reveals the mutual correlation between a place and its atmosphere: it is aimed to describe the narrative on the controversial issue of the collective perception within the urban culture of nightlife and explore the atmospheric characteristics of different locations, mainly clubs and public spaces. By expanding the theoretical part of this chapter, we also aim to analyse the corporeal experience of the place in the following threefold structure regarding (1) physical body as a focal point of all acts and events opened to the world full of sensations, (2) the felt body with its contraction, expansion and the emotional capacity, (3) the lived-body with the ability to grasp the atmosphere. At the final stage, the investigation draws to the analysis of music nostalgia as an interaffective phenomenon to demonstrate how technological progress affected bodily experience of nightlife dwellers.

Thinking about how the development of information technologies affects contemporary urbanism, its methods, and practical solutions, and, as a result, our everyday life, one may wonder what changes and transformations in urban nightlife atmosphere could be revealed (see Anderson & Holden, 2008; van Liempt et al., 2015). Although scholars developed a broader methodological palette, there are still limitations of the fragmentary nature of observation methods, which is aimed to be expanded in this chapter through neo-phenomenological approach, reframing theoretical framework borrowed from sociological and philosophical contexts (Simmel, 1903; Park, 1925). With methodological perspectives of social science and phenomenology, the emotional texture of social life has also been explored under the significant works of such authors as Alfred Schutz and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Influential phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty reveals multiple dimensions of perception opened in the horizon of things and landscapes through the concept of the body—a physical representation of a subject in the world—that exists in time and space and guarantees all the sensory functions (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 383). Environmental psychologists and cultural geographers use various theories to understand the affective meaning of environments for people, for example, Erving Goffman's frame analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” in combination with a range of methods, including different psychoanalytic techniques and narratives (Anderson & Ash, 2015). This is how the multiplicity of meanings and perceptions of urban places, parks, playgrounds, and city neighborhoods that guide the use of different elements spatially situated in the physical environment was described. As mentioned earlier, chaotic technological development in the urban context is transforming people's life and leisure. Far from excluding the ability to reflect and act in situations, emotions are settled at the heart of human practical attitudes: they guide the way people perceive environmental aspects by regulating their adaptability and organizing the experiences. As the dwellers inhabit the public spaces and places of a big city, for instance, sensitivity and affects guide their most basic perceptions and categorizations of space framing the situations they find themselves in. As most of them are concentrated both in spatial and temporal dimensions, the resulting characteristics are something between a brief sketch and explicit analysis that can support the presentation of the phenomenological experience.