Selective conviviality: Platforms, gentrification, and nightlife governance in Paris

Source abstract

This article examines the digital governance of the nocturnal city in Paris by analyzing how digital platforms simultaneously promote and police life after dark. Drawing on scholarship on platform urbanism, platform gentrification, and nighttime governance, it argues that lifestyle promotion platforms and citizen complaint systems operate as interdependent infrastructures that mediate conviviality in gentrifying neighborhoods. Promotional platforms make selected venues and districts visible, desirable, and investable, while complaint-based platforms make noise, crowding, and other sensory frictions reportable and enforceable. The study maps resident complaints from Dans Ma Rue, police enforcement records, and nightlife venues promoted on city-sponsored and commercial platforms, complemented by qualitative analysis of digital media and policy documents. It finds that platform-promoted nightlife venues cluster in gentrifying and gentrified areas, while noise complaints and enforcement intensify as neighborhoods become more socially exclusive. Digital tools translate moralized “quality of life” concerns into governance, enabling a form of platform revanchism that produces selective conviviality: nightlife is supported when it aligns with upper-middle-class tastes and neighborhood valorization, but disciplined when its sensory and social excesses disrupt gentrification and capital accumulation.