
Best Practices and Resources
Dallas was designed for the day. It was not planned for the night.
Even if we don’t plan to fully operate as a 24‑hour city, there are strategies we can implement to take advantage of what the nighttime has to offer … and to support those who work at night.
Here are resources and best practices from around the world. They can inform our creation of a safe, vibrant, and inclusive nighttime economy in Dallas.
Why? The night is an important economic driver of tourism, leisure, and business growth within our towns and cities. It consists of a wide range of activity in town and city centers between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., including arts and cultural events, clubs, restaurants, retail, cinemas, theatres or concerts, meeting friends, or attending community events in public spaces.
The nighttime economy also encompasses the nighttime workforce that does not have access to same services daytime workers enjoy.

Nighttime Economy
The seventh and final chapter of the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan is a go-to resource for anybody who wants to understand cities at night. It is a handbook of data methods and concepts for governments, communities, nightlife advocacy groups, and trade organizations – anybody looking to create safe, creative, and prosperous cities and scenes after dark.
A report commissioned by the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) measure the pandemic’s effect on the UK’s night time cultural economy. Approximately 86,000 jobs were lost in the sector since the 2019 high. The report also shows, for the first time, the value of the UK’s nighttime cultural economy, which was 1.6% of GDP – or £36.4 billion – in 2019.
VibeLab Co-Founder Mirik Milan, VibeLab Asia Pacific Director Jane Slingo, and Urban Planner Dayle Bennett have co-authored the paper The Lockdown Effect to catalyze thinking and action in three areas: Education and Talent Development; Real Estate and Repurposing Space; and Localized Night-time Economy.
This 2021 report is a summary of the Office of Nightlife’s activities as well as recommendations for new programs and initiatives to be implemented in the coming years. These ongoing and proposed initiatives are the result of stakeholder engagement; constituent services casework with nightlife businesses, workers, and neighbors; focus groups to solicit detailed feedback regarding the issues and challenges facing New York nightlife; in-depth research of national and global best practices; and extensive partnership with other government agencies.
“Whilst there are clear benefits of a thriving, well-managed night-time economy, licensed premises can create challenges for local communities. These can include crime and anti-social behaviour and alcohol-related hospital admissions all of which put additional pressure on police and emergency services.”
In November 2017, over 120 participants came together for Sydney’s inaugural Global Cities After Dark Forum. The forum bought together Government policy makers, police, urban planners, drug and alcohol experts, city councilors, music promoters and creatives to discuss and share ideas on nighttime culture.
Over the last fifty years, the nation’s top live-work-play cities have proven themselves more than just vibrant urban environments for the elite. They are attracting a cross-section of the population from across the U.S. and are preferred destinations for immigrants of all income strata. This is creating a virtuous circle wherein economic growth enhances property values, stronger real estate markets sustain more reliable tax bases, and solid municipal revenues pay for better services that further attract businesses and talented individuals.

Safety
There is an ongoing internal problem within music, entertainment and leisure industries
that needs addressing with its own dose of respect and recognition – the treatment of women.
In this report from the UK, Night Time Industries Association‘s Savenightlife and Lady Of The House present findings from their Women’s Inclusion and Safety Survey. “Let us educate women to empower themselves to expect only acceptable behaviour and realise that being vulnerable is not the same as being weak.”
Human trafficking is the crime of using force, fraud, or coercion to compel someone to work or to engage in commercial sex. Often, nighttime economy businesses unwittingly serve as stops on the human and sex trafficking highway. In some instances, bar, clubs, hotels, restaurant, or other food industry sectors are complicit in this pervasive form of exploitation. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report from the Human Trafficking Institute provides a snapshot of accomplishments in this arena … and the challenges we face.

Respect and Inclusion

Cultural Innovation
Voices of Creatives is created from research conducted with stakeholders from the Music, Fashion, and Design sectors in the six focus countries. The research lasted from January to April 2021 and involved 23 team members in 12 countries, on 4 continents. The project team researched 7 cities: Beirut, Amman, Sulaymaniyah, Nairobi, Dakar, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, conducting 604 surveys and 42 hours of focus group interviews with 133 participants.
The cultural and creative industries are major drivers of the economies of developed as well as developing countries. Indeed, they are among the most rapidly growing sectors worldwide. It influences income generation, job creation and export earnings. It can forge a better future for many countries around the globe.

Nighttime Placemaking
There are 761 regionally significant, walkable urban places—hereafter referred to as WalkUPs—in the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. These WalkUPs occupy a minute portion of the total land mass of the top 30 U.S. metropolitan areas (less than one percent) but deliver outsized economic performance.

Quality of Life
“In times of ever-increasing population density in cities, today’s problems will become even more pressing for policymakers tomorrow. Clearly, our proposals and the international experience described in this report will not solve every problem of New Zealand’s nightlife. We believe, however, that they are the first steps towards a more balanced way to deal with the nightlife.”
Author Jonathan Crary presents what he believes to be the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. “The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.”
