Paper short abstract:

Our analysis of opioid drug users' city navigation trajectories and strategies to appropriate urban space is based on visual and narrative data gathered during walking interviews. Observing drug users’ wandering from one meeting spot to another, we explore the spots' dual role in their social life.

Paper long abstract:

Everyday city navigation trajectories of opioid drug users are structured by meeting spots, so-called “пятаки” (pyataki), various in purposes while similar in form, where their interactions with other drug users take place. Such spots are represented through often but not always abandoned, “transit places”, where no one stays for a long time and which can hardly be identified and discovered by outsiders (Radley, Hodgetts, & Cullen, 2005). Drug users’ lives are almost entirely concentrated in the street decorations. They spend their time wandering from one pyatak to another while carrying out various operations of material and information exchange which can contribute to the reproduction of their resources.

This type of social life was built during active drug use periods. However, even after a person stops using street drugs or enters an opioid maintenance treatment, it continues to structure his/her daily routine. Appropriating a territory of pyatak indicates their belonging and status in the group (Shammas & Sandberg, 2016). It allows them to participate in social networks which provide them an access to significant street resources (Ilan, 2013).

Under great pressure from the dominant power fields, marginalized groups are building strategies to resist pressure and create alternative ways of structuring urban space based on their collective agency. They use specific techniques to merge with public space, or to become invisible in transit or abandoned places. At the same time, this way of resistance reproduces the marginalization and obedience expressed through these people exclusion into abandoned, uncomfortable places (Park, 1928; Sullivan, 2018).

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how homeless people who live in or use public urban spaces (in absence of their own private spaces) break its rules and convert it into their (private) spheres for different activities related to work, leisure and/or personal needs such as rest and hygiene.

Paper long abstract:

Although public space is an essential component of the daily life of people experiencing homelessness, numerous studies have confirmed increasing surveillance/policing, regulation/criminalization, and control (e.g., defensive architecture) in public spaces. Spatial exclusion is of particular concern since public and third spaces are often seen as increasingly divided and exclusionary with regard to homeless people. Based on collaborative team fieldwork in Croatia, this comparative research (CSRP) aims to understand homeless people’s everyday lives from their perspectives exploring their experiences of homelessness, vulnerability, and identities, especially in relation to urban spaces. This paper is based on ethnographic accounts that focus on how those affected by homelessness respond against or adapt to processes of social and spatial exclusion. While recognizing the multiple factors that lead to individuals becoming excluded, this paper draws on structuration theory that conceptualizes these as resulting from broader structures as well as individuals’ interaction within these (Giddens, 1984). Namely, we are interested in how homeless people who live in or use public urban spaces (in absence of their own private spaces) break its rules and convert it into their (private) spheres for different activities related to work, leisure and/or personal needs such as rest and hygiene. Specifically, it analyses how some homeless people challenge the rules associated with occupying public and third spaces that either directly or tacitly exclude them. It is hoped that these discussions will lead to contextually more effective interventions, improved social policy, and social change that addresses the roots of homelessness and social suffering.

Paper short abstract:

Calcio Storico is the violent, athletic reenactment of a Florentine Renaissance game. For most participants, it currently constitutes a performative frame where breaking the spatial normativity instituted by the processes of heritagization and commodification of Florence’s historic center.

Paper long abstract:

Calcio Storico is the reenactment of a Florentine Renaissance game, “calcio”. Current celebrations comprise a Renaissance-costumes parade and a calcio tournament in the city center. In the tournament, four teams representing the “historic districts” of Florence confront in a radically violent ball game consisting of a composite set of contact and combat sports. From its “reinvention” in 1930, Calcio Storico has been representing a contested field for the expression of masculinity and “imagined” Florentine identities. In recent decades, the commodification of Florence’s iconic Historic Center has changed the social conformation of the city and forced residents to move to peripheral areas. In a bivalent way, many residents feel therefore proud of the popularity of the(ir) city center, and at the same time dispossessed of it – for it is mainly managed by the tourist industry. In these circumstances, Calcio Storico offers the people involved a bottom-up performative frame where contesting the dominant forms of territoriality that have both resulted in, and arose from, these processes of “heritagization” and commodification of the Historic Center. Through their extreme athletic gestures and iconoclastic bodies and behaviors, calcio players re-enact (an idealized version of) the Renaissance spirit of Florentine calcio, reclaiming their place in Florence’s history and territory. Concurrently, they break the spatial normativity instituted by the processes of heritagization and commodification of Florence and passionately resist what they feel like an “invasion” by the tourist market, that prevent them from living and enjoying the part of the city they recognize as their territory.

Paper short abstract:

Based on two ethnographic projects on accommodation for illegalized migrants, we discuss how spatial rules are broken, negotiated, or reproduced through the creation of spaces of narrowed potentialities.

Paper long abstract:

“Irregular migration” calls notions of borders and national territoriality into question: by their mere presence, illegalized migrants break national spatial rules. Their precarious administrative position also translates into limited access to resources and notably the formal housing market. Contesting this residential segregation, some social movements challenge European migration and border policies through the creation of alternative dwelling places. Disrupting the nation state’s apparatus, those contested territorialities rely on specific moralities, visions of a better future and call for spatial justice. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the potentialities of these spaces are narrow and that the materialization of such heterotopias are entangled in divergent and contradictory motivations represented by the diversity of the stakeholders. We argue that those spatial struggles oscillate between practices of micro-resistance and (re)production of tropes of the nation state.

In this paper, we compare and contrast two anthropological projects on a squatters’ mobilization in Switzerland and on citizen-organized emergency accommodation in Belgium. On the basis of participant observations and interviews at these two sites, we ask how the legitimacy to break spatial rules is developed, negotiated or contested. Furthermore, we scrutinize the enactment of such social movements and ask if and how dominant forms of territoriality are also reproduced.

Neither victimizing nor romanticizing deviance, this paper offers an ethnographic analysis of the capacities of an impoverished population and civil society initiatives to challenge European migration and border policies by creating spaces of narrowed potentialities.