On Wednesday March 18, 2026, the Night-time Design for/with Marginalized Communities project followed up Matthieu Caron’s presentation of his book Montreal After Night: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City with a participatory workshop on counter-mapping the urban night in Montreal. The workshop was a multi-disciplinary affair attended by Cultural Studies Professor Alanna Thain’s class on Urban Night, Urban Planning Professor Anna Kramer’s class on Rethinking Zoning, and several other scholars.
The workshop began with an introduction by Professor Alanna Thain and Matthieu Caron on the historical and technical difficulties of representing night, followed by a period of speed-mingling between the students in each class as they found common ground between their respective areas of study. Participants were then asked to form groups or individually create a map with the following questions in mind: What are methods for nocturnal cartographies? How do the specific challenges to representation that the night creates also provide opportunities to reimagine the city as we live and encounter it? How can such practices of imaginative and time-specific mapping impact our social imaginaries of what a city can do? How do we bring a temporal dimension to a two-dimensional map of Montreal?
In order to achieve this experimental mapping of the Montreal night, participants were asked to come to the workshop equipped with an example of a Montreal night site that was challenging to map, related materials such as archival images, photos, video, and artifacts, tactics or methods for nocturnal cartography, and tools or techniques participants habitually used to navigate the night. The resulting bank of materials consisted of old Montreal car photography magazines, personal photographs taken at night, architectural drawings, and all sorts of textured, tactile crafting materials. Drawing inspiration from the materials themselves and from cross-discipline conversations, the groups produced maps that emphasized night transit trends and sensory memory and experience.
"Nighttime democratizes the senses and makes us rely more on hearing and touch rather than sight. Texture becomes a way of representing the physical feeling of night."
"Radio frequencies are invisible but publicly accessible vehicles for transmitting spatial knowledge. Night radio in particular is a means of linking disparate night owls and drivers across space."
