Provincializzare gli studi sulla notte: l’in/formalità del divertimento notturno torinese

Night studies is an interdisciplinary field of research that has gained increasing international recognition over the last decade. This article aims to provincialize night studies, taking up the call of southern criminology and southern urban critique to legitimize theoretical contributions from the Global South and to promote epistemic dialogue between different centers and peripheries of the global knowledge system. The first part of the article critically examines the dominant gaze of this field, highlighting its lack of critical engagement with the Eurocentric connotations that underpin it and its endorsement of a notion of nightlife that is functional to post-industrial urban regeneration processes. The resulting lack of attention in spatially, socially, and culturally marginal nocturnal phenomena is challenged by adopting in/formality as a theoretical lens that broadens the visual field of night studies. The second part of the essay analyses Turin’s nightlife through the in/formality frame, moving beyond the conventional binary categories that structure Western understanding of nightlife (underground vs mainstream; free parties vs clubbing, etc.). The reconstruction of more than thirty years of nocturnal in/formality – across both informal gatherings (late-20th-century squats and raves to contemporary gatherings of immigrant groups and unauthorized parties in public parks) and commercial venues (from the nightlife districts of the 1990s to the multifunctional venues of the 2020s) – demonstrates that informality constitutes a valuable resource for Turin’s nightlife, despite being systematically undermined by urban security policies and excluded from the city’s official narratives.