The work of Michael Fichman (center, with microphone) with cities and nightlife advocates includes public workshops and panel discussions hosted by 24HrPHL, a civic engagement project within Philadelphia’s arts and culture community that Fichman helped found in 2015.
It’s not just cities like New York which never really sleep. Most urban environments around the world have ecosystems that come alive when the sun goes down—and they offer crucial economic, social, and political benefits to their communities. Michael Fichman, an associate professor of practice in the Department of City and Regional Planning who teaches in the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics program, helps policy makers understand how best to harness this power, both around the Penn campus and around the world.
This week, he’s traveling to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual conference and festival for creatives, where he’ll participate in the panel “The Business of the Night: Culture, Capital, & Cities After Dark,” at the GermanHaus. “We’re going to introduce to that general audience the idea that there’s critical thinking and innovation going on in government, urban planning, and community development related to how cities work at night,” he says. And he has the data to back this up.
Fichman came up through nightlife in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, nurturing a global DJ practice and releasing records on esteemed labels including Razor-n-Tape and Soul Clap. “I came to Penn to do my degree in urban planning,” he says, “and started to have an awakening about the intersection between creative people and economies in the city. Going from place to place for so many years, you see the variety of forms of life at night that can exist.”
Fichman's study of cities like Rotterdam (here, compared to six other cities known for their nighttime cultures and economies) captures their "location ladder" since a mix of entertainment venues is vital to supporting musicians at various stages of their career.
Bars and nightclubs are important drivers of economic and social power in cities. In 2015, Fichman started a community organization called 24HrPHL to help harness that power, empowering people to engage with nightlife issues. By 2021, he’d proposed and designed Philadelphia’s Nighttime Economy Office; authored the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan, an effort to assist the communities during and after the COVID-19 lockdowns, as a research associate with PennPraxis, the applied research and community engagement arm of the Weitzman School; and joined the consultancy VibeLab to work on the Creative Footprint Project, a census and analysis of urban creative spaces around the world. “I’d come to see how my specialization in data analysis would be of value,” he says with typical understatement.
In 2023, Nashville tapped into that value by commissioning Fichman, PennPraxis, and VibeLab to look at ways to study the city’s legendary, but fragile, network of independent music venues. He enlisted Katie Hanford and two other Master of City Planning students as research assistants to help him, and they visited the city.
“We worked with Metro Nashville and Davidson County,” he says, “even doing observational research in honky-tonks.” For Hanford, it was an invaluable opportunity. “A lot of the smaller venues were closing, and the smaller-to-medium sized venues were being bought out,” she says. “I interviewed venue owners and wrote a history of Nashville’s music scene, talking about how things had changed, some with gentrification, some with corporatization. We worked over the span of a year for a final report.”
Vibelab took a similar approach in its latest report, Amsterdammers Over Nachtcultuur (Amsterdammers on Night Culture), a kind of on-the-ground oral history of the city’s current relationships to its economy after dark. The report finds that participation in night culture is on the rise, but faced with significant challenges around rising entrance fees and nighttime transportation costs and availability. In these ways, Amsterdam is similar to Philadelphia, where Fichman is now the co-chair of the Policy Permanence and Funding Committee, part of the Philadelphia City Council’s Original Music City Task Force.
“We’re going to produce recommendations to the City Council as to how to use legislation and funding to improve outcomes for the music community and music industries here,” he says. “We’re thinking about the way zoning and licensing codes of the city affect people’s ability to create new music venues and keep them in business, and about how music is marketed and promoted to both people in the city and elsewhere.” Fichman invited Hanford, who became executive director of the East Passyunk BID since graduating, to serve on the Task Force.
Fichman will participate in this year's South by Southwest festival as both a researcher and a performer. “I came to Penn to do my degree in urban planning,” he says, “and started to have an awakening about the intersection between creative people and economies in the city.”
Engaging the community is essential to this work, because what happens in cities after dark encompasses far more than drinking and dancing to music. For Fichman, there is a crucial distinction between nightlife and life at night. When developing Philadelphia’s nighttime office, he notes, “the brief takes special consideration of nighttime entertainment-related commerce. Restaurants, hospitality, that kind of thing. But when our consultants did an economic impact study, they saw transportation, logistics, health care, education, public transportation operators, warehousing, airports—these are all 24/7. There are people who need to be understood as a unique group of stakeholders with specific issues and needs. It’s difficult to do because they are not necessarily easy to reach.”
Fichman’s work on nighttime culture extends to the classroom. In CPLN 6890, The City at Night, students “look at this history and social meaning of light and darkness, and the way the Industrial Revolution transformed human relationships with different times of day,” Fichman says. “And then we’re talking about land use regulations and licensing, including alcohol, entertainment, and assembly. We’re talking about public safety and policing strategies that are used in entertainment districts and transportation. And then the way night is portrayed as a cultural concept.” The course also requires students to do site studies of commercial corridors throughout Philadelphia. “They visit them at different times of day to schematically understand how the public spaces work,” he says. “They’re also doing analysis of data on licensing, crime, lighting, land use and zoning.”
As with his work with VibeLab, the point of this is to establish the value of urban life at night, and to foster it. “We want harmonious districts that have vibrancy,” Fichman says, “and that vibrancy is related to the street. It’s not just music and clubs. It’s food trucks, seating, parks and plazas.” Much like his own history with the subject, he says, “it extends beyond the starting point of the scene. It starts to spider crack into all these different paths you can go down.” And sometimes it circles back to your roots: under his alias Michael the Lion, he’ll return to the decks at SXSW, spinning disco all night at the city’s Neon Grotto nightclub in the heart of downtown Austin.
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