Street Talk

The urbanite and the urban night. Exploring gender dynamics on the streets of nocturnal Antwerp through data-driven methods (Antwerp, 1876-1940)
Historians have characterised the modern night as a 'heterotopia’ (Nye, 2018). This concept captures the transformative effects of modern changes – such as the invention and adoption of street lighting – on nocturnal experiences in Western cities during the long nineteenth century. While these changes expanded public life at night, they did not simply result in an extension of daytime into the night. The daily urban space differs from the nocturnal urban space, with its own rhythm, behavioural codes, and audience. Moreover, the night was (and still is) not equally accessible to everyone, leading to varying experiences among different groups of people (Baldwin, 2012). Until now, qualitative and sample-based methodological approaches have significantly shaped research in this area (e.g. for the Low Countries: De Koster, 2020; Pluskota e.a., 2022; Van den Heuvel e.a., 2020). Building on these studies, this research project adopts a data-driven approach that explores how the night shaped the experience of gender (in intersection with age, class, and ethnicity) on the streets of Antwerp during its modernisation period. We have digitised approximately 80,000 pages of local police reports, more specifically, the so-called incident books (‘gebeurtenisboeken’) of Antwerp. These books not only document prosecuted crimes but also capture non-prosecuted misdemeanours. They offer a very rare window on the broader context of nightly events and the social backgrounds of the individuals involved. In this talk I will present my research project and some preliminary results. First, I will show how I am systematically mapping the individuals who ventured out at night. By taking gender, age, class, and ethnicity into account, I try to identify the social stratification of certain urban areas and places. Next, I scrutinise the activities and practices of these nightly strollers (de Certeau, 1980), seeking to understand the (gendered) nature of their behaviours and interactions on the streets, ultimately shedding light on the social dynamics and inequalities that shaped the nocturnal landscape.