The City That Never Sleeps — At What Cost?

The 24-hour city is one of the modern world's most seductive ideas. It promises a metropolis that never dims: trains at 3 a.m., diners glowing on empty avenues, a freedom measured in illuminated streets. Mayors compete to promise it. Young arrivals dream of it. The city that never sleeps sounds like the city that never says no.

The economics are genuine. The night economy — restaurants, logistics, entertainment, health care, the vast machinery of delivery — employs millions and produces real wealth. A city that works around the clock uses its expensive infrastructure twice over, and for the shift worker finishing at dawn, the all-night diner is not a luxury but a lifeline. Vibrant nights are also safer nights, lit and populated, or so the argument runs.

But the ledger has another column, and it is written in other people's bodies. The nurse, the baker, the driver, the cleaner: the city that never sleeps is kept awake by people who must. Night work disorders sleep, strains hearts and families, and shortens lives in ways the statistics record quietly. Light itself has become a pollutant; there are children in bright districts who have never seen a dark sky. Never has a city asked so few of its citizens to carry so much of its night.

None of this requires us to romanticize the curfew or the shuttered town. Sleep is not the opposite of urban life; it is one of its conditions, like water or air. The question is not whether the city should rest, but whether its wakefulness can be made fair: premium pay that actually prices the night, protected dark zones where rest is a right, and schedules designed for human beings rather than for the fiction that the workforce is a machine with replaceable parts.

A mature city, in other words, would stop boasting that it never sleeps. It would ask, instead, who is sleeping, who is not, and who decided. The compromise is available: a city can be vibrant without being sleepless for the few. Its nights can glow — as long as we remember that every light down there is also somebody's working day.