Mirik Milan's title says it all: Night mayor.
Milan, 35, minds his metropolis — Amsterdam, the Netherlands — while the daytime politicians are fast asleep.
"The night is treated differently than the day," Milan says.
"When there is a problem, the first reaction of city officials or police is to say, 'We can't do this anymore, we have to stop, and with it, killing an industry," he says, like what happened in London, where 35% of smaller music venues shut down between 2007 and 2015.
His job, and that of his nonprofit Nacht Burgemeester Amsterdam, is to act as a bridge between city hall and Amsterdam nighttime businesses (namely, dance clubs) and the neighborhoods they operate in.
It's a "multi-stakeholder" approach, says Milan; the idea is to get everybody into a dialogue that benefits all.
First founded in 2014, the nonprofit has helped make some major successes happen, like with clarifying drug use policies with a "Party in the Netherlands" public service campaign, helping organize the Amsterdam Dance Event mega-conference, and the introduction of "square hosts," a "soft enforcement" force created by City Hall to deescalate potential rowdiness in bar-filled squares like Rembrandtplein in central Amsterdam.
Most notably, the city is now seeing the start of 24-hour permits for dance clubs. Soon, 10 clubs around town will be able to be open through the night and day.
This creates obvious benefits for the party scene: Amsterdam will be able to better compete with London (where parties go until 8 a.m.) and Berlin (where parties go all night, and then another night), leading to bigger lineups of performers and bigger profits for clubowners. Milan has said liberal policies helped Amsterdam attract 5.3 million tourists in 2014, up more than 50% since 2000.
The 24-hour permits actually make things less rowdy, Milan says. Research from the UK has shown that 24-hour permits actually reduce binge drinking — plus the fact that when a thousand people are pushed onto the street at 4 a.m. after spending hours dancing to loud music, they don't exactly know how to be quiet. Now they'll be streaming out over the course of hours rather than all at once.
Better yet, the venues can open themselves to more than just dance music.
"A modern day nightclub should also be doing stuff for the neighborhood," Milan says. "Art spaces, creative workspaces, so the whole area benefits from the space being there."
The "night mayor" position came to Amsterdam in 2003 when policymakers realized they needed a way to communicate with the nightlife community.
Milan, who had been in the party promotions game since age 20, saw that there was a lot of improvements to be done regarding licensing and organizing for festivals, so he set up the nonprofit in 2014.
For Milan, the full realization of the night mayor movement would be to set up a "24-hour zone" in the city: an area what would have restaurants for people to eat in, libraries for students to study in, and clubs for revelers to party in around the clock.
The model is spreading: A full 15 other Dutch cities have some sort of night mayor position. Paris, Zurich, and Toulouse all have night mayors, and Milan just met with London mayor Boris Johnson to talk about setting up a night mayor there as he makes a bid to save the city's music venues. Berlin, too, is on the lookout for one.
In April, Amsterdam will host the first-ever Night Mayor Summit, with an anticipated 200 attendees from cities the Dutch capital has a relationship with, including Tokyo, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires. We can only imagine how epic the after-party will be.
