Displaced: The denial of public space and everyday resistance in Milan

Abstract

In contemporary Western cities, the treatment of drug users has seen a change from forms of corporal punishment and restrictions to more fluid and widespread forms of monitoring and regulation (Rabinowitz, 2014). The drug user itself has become an appropriate enemy for governmental and consensus-building purposes (Saitta, 2015). Here, control typically takes the form of processes such as gentrification, in keeping with contemporary drug policy discourses that often aim to segregate and make drug use invisible. In line with this representation, the (fear) maps commonly suggested by the press or official documents usually outline the unacceptable open spaces of drug dealing and use.

The context illustrated is an Italian case study and the two (counter‑)maps proposed are based on the results of an ethnographic study conducted in 2017-21 in Milan Rogoredo, a suburb on Milan’s far southeast margins and traditionally a point of contact between city and countryside. What happened here was on one hand a socio-spatial segregation which shifted undesirables into an invisible place on the margins of the city, and on the other the establishment of a community of about 600-700 drug users (1) per day from all over the Lombardy region and beyond. Even prior to the pandemic, urban regeneration and massive law enforcement action had fragmented this open drug scene and pushed it out of the city. The open drug scene is now virtually invisible, and thus more difficult for harm reduction services to tackle, but it persists.

The first of the two (counter‑)maps proposed shows how marginalized drug users are excluded from the contemporary urban public landscape. Based on public data, we drew up a first (counter‑)map which makes visible the structural violence that produces the displacement of the open drug scene. We represented this shift in two stages: the first started at city level before Expo 2015 with the purification strategies that displaced almost all the urban open drug scenes from the historical city center to outer suburbs like Rogoredo. In the second stage, before and during the pandemic, the big open drug scene that existed in Rogoredo was relocated outside the urban context, specifically in San Donato Milanese. In the second (counter‑)map, the city is depicted as a critical place and a resistance space through drug users’ everyday practices. This (counter‑)map shows all the everyday drug users’ activities that took place within the open drug scene and in other spaces in the city. For this purpose, we visualized fieldnotes and interview extracts from the ethnography in a space marked by non-human actors like trees, trains, city monuments, police cars and other buildings.

(1) This open drug scene is particularly characterized by—and well-known for—intravenous (but also inhaled) heroin use. Besides this, its frequenters use cocaine (both intravenous and snorted), crack, cannabis, alcohol, methadone, and benzodiazepine.

References

Rabinowitz, Dan

2014«Resistence and the City», in History and Anthropology, 25, 4, pp. 472-487.

Saitta, Pietro

2015 Resistenze: pratiche e margini del conflitto del quotidiano, Verona, Ombrecorte.