Recently I wrote about the first Night Mayor Summit being held in Amsterdam. As part of this, I spoke about Amsterdam’s first night mayor – Mirik Milan.
Since then (but obviously not because of my post), the idea has seemingly taken off. Below are a couple of excerpts from a recent Guardian article.
This pragmatic and classically Dutch notion is now being copied across Europe: Toulouse, Zurich, Paris as well as several other Dutch cities have night mayors too.
This week the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced plans for a “Night-Time Commission”, a six-month assessment of how to protect and manage the city’s £66bn night-time economy which is likely to recommend the creation of a “night-time champion” role.
Berlin is considering it too, and in April, Amsterdam will host the first global Night Mayors’ Summit.
Why is this happening? Simple:
“Late-night people are typically young, educated, creative, entrepreneurial – people you want in your city, and who work in the creative industries and startups you also want. If places like Berlin have flourished, it’s not just because of low rents. It’s because they’re nightlife capitals.”
So if you’re reading this, Mayor John Tory, now is probably your last chance to make Toronto a North American leader in this regard.
It’s great that we are trying to push the Toronto - Waterloo region as a global startup hub, but so is every other major city and region in the world. A focus on startups is so commonplace in today’s economic development strategies, that at this point it almost feels meaningless. What are we going to do to stand out in this competition for the world’s best talent?
If everyone believes something to be true – such as, there’s value in having a robust startup ecosystem – then it’s no longer innovative. It’s just the way things are. To take it to the next level, we’re going to have to do things that will probably feel uncomfortable at first – particularly for old establishment Toronto.
I’m not saying that having a night mayor is going to be the silver bullet for our startup ecosystem. There’s no such thing. But I am saying that it should be one component of our larger strategy.
Because already there’s a growing number of European cities who have come to this one simple realization: people are drawn to kickass places.
If you agree with this post, I would encourage you to leave a comment below and also tweet the Mayor of Toronto.
Image: Berlin nightlife by Tom Stromer
What is a night mayor, you might ask?
Well, just as the name suggests, a night mayor is the chief executive officer of a city’s nighttime activity. And in 2014, Amsterdam became the first city ever to have one.
Why is this important, you might ask?
Well, for most cities the night is a blindspot. It’s viewed as something that needs to be carefully controlled as opposed to something that is celebrated and leveraged. Amsterdam saw this opportunity and, in my opinion, is now at the forefront of rethinking the night.
Here’s an example of the kind of changes that this has meant for the city (via CityLab):
“Until recently, Amsterdam enforced what by continental European standards is a fairly strict curfew: nightclubs had to close by 4 a.m. on weekdays and 5 a.m. on weekends. The city often had problems with noise and disorder at the exact moment when all the clubs closed, filling narrow inner city streets with rowdy people.
To solve this problem, the night mayor suggested not less, but more time for people to go clubbing. He has helped push through the granting of 10 24-hour licenses for nightclubs. Crucially, all of them were located not in the dense city center but in thinly populated districts around Amsterdam’s outer ring road. The result was a marked reduction in street noise.”
Some of you are probably feeling skeptical as you read this. Especially since 4AM and 5AM hardly seem strict when compared to other cities (Toronto’s last call is at 2AM).
But I would not underestimate the importance of what Amsterdam is doing. We are living in an era of the 24-hour global city and it’s about time that governments woke up to that. I’m sorry Toronto, but 2AM is an absolute joke.
The night can be your competitive advantage in attracting human capital. As the CityLab article cited above suggests, a big part of what transformed Berlin into a capital of cool was its nightlife.
I wholeheartedly believe that and I have no doubt that the night will start to become a greater focus in city building.
If you’d like to learn more about the Night Mayor Summit, click here.
I just got my tickets for NXT City Night, happening Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 6:30pm here in downtown Toronto.
If you’re not familiar with NXT City Prize, it’s an annual urban design competition where young Canadians (35 years of age or younger) submit ideas to improve the built environment. The top submissions win a total of $9,000 in prize money and the winning idea gets paired up with the City of Toronto work on actually implementing it. That’s the best part.