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).