Weaving drug users’ spaces of care and sociality in Vancouver and Paris

Abstract

If cities are constant reminders of what could be but isn’t (Simone 2008), the following woven (counter‑)maps of drug users’ inhabitations of public space are cartographies of fragments (McFarlane 2021). We mean this in the sense that marginalized drug users’ lives in the city are always fragmentary: piecemeal, shattered, and under threat because of a “continuum of carcerality” that governs us/them (After Echo Park Lake Research Collective 2022). In other words, we/they are treated as less than human, less than citizens. Encampments are provisional installations where unhoused drug users (and others) live in tents and other ad-hoc shelters in parks, on sidewalks, and in other urban places. Decampments or “street sweeps”—processes by which authorities remove and destroy encampments—reproduce inhabitants’ displaceability and further marginalize people who depend on public space by repeatedly confiscating and destroying inhabitants’ structures and possessions. By tracing the ongoing histories of encampment and decampment in two specific neighborhoods, one in Vancouver (see Figure 59), and one in Paris (see Figure 60), these maps depict fragmentary stories of care and sociality that are always in progress and never complete.

Drug users are often among the most reviled urbanites, but are also often extremely courageous and inventive in the ways we/they manage to inhabit public spaces by creating social infrastructures in order to protect ourselves/themselves and one another. As scholars, professionals, movement-based activists and sometimes people who use drugs (hence our use of the pronouns we/they to signify our multiple identities and positionalities), we know that drug users know best how to care for our/themselves; however, we are often denied the resources and support to build anything more than spaces of care and sociality, which are so often autonomous and provisional.

These woven maps illustrate the entwined processes of encampment and decampment in certain neighbourhoods (Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the northeast of Paris) where, on the one hand, community building takes place in marginal urban encampments, and on the other, it is destroyed through isolated and ongoing forms of violence. In so doing, the maps ask: what are drug users’ existing spaces of care and sociality in these cities, and what could they be? How do street sweeps, decampments and other forms of displacement threaten drug users’ capacities to create spaces of care and sociality to secure their own survival amidst constant illegalization and the threat of death?