Abstract Within the burgeoning attention being paid to the night‐time economy (NTE) in and by cities, the demands and impacts of night work have gathered increasingly scholarly attention. Research has centred on the darker side of these, pointing to workers' precarity and vulnerability. What if we attend also to a ‘brighter side’ of the night and night shifts? Can we enhance night studies characterizations and advance urban studies debates on the NTE, if not beyond, by linking them more directly to urban scholarship on care and community? In this article, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the street cleaning and horticulture teams working within the City of Adelaide, in South Australia, to investigate some positive framings of night work from a worker's perspective. While undertaking jobs often associated with ‘dirty’ work and undoubtedly still challenging, they also recounted experiences of care and community, characterized by themes of ‘mentality’, cooperation, dignity and conviviality. We argue this brighter side further strengthens emerging scholarship on night work, and urban economies more generally, as both an advocacy tool as much as a conceptual anchor.
Mentha et al. (Tue,) studied this question.