Purity, Danger and Displacement.
The Control and Contestation of Public Space in an Urban Environment.

This photo-essay is concerned with the control and contestation of sites in an urban environment used by, mainly homeless, people for the purposes of intravenous drug use. Such locations are termed ‘public injecting sites’ and they would be expected to be found in both marginal and central areas of most major cities in Britain. Such sites include public toilets and car parks as well as doorways and stairwells of buildings. Other such sites can also be found within ‘green’ areas of the city, including public parks, derelict or abandoned land or within other non-specific green areas.

Public injectors use such locations as a result of “situated necessities” (Rhodes et al 2007) that relate to a lack of secure accommodation, a need to prevent physical withdrawals from drug dependence and/or the result of opportunistic drug use in the urban environment. However, such motivations are usually related to structural constraints and are not necessarily sites of choice for injecting drug users. Due to these constraints, homeless drug users have to negotiate their drug use in environments that are considered unhygienic and unsuitable for injecting purposes and thus further heighten the risks of viral transmission as they do so. As such, public injectors are forced to construct and reshape environments within the urban landscape in a manner that is both functional and clandestine.

As part of attempts to regenerate and gentrify a redundant area of the city this series of digital photographs documents some of the environments that are used by the homeless for the purposes of injecting drug use. Implicit within the photographs are the ways and means in which these sites are both controlled and contested by local authorities and drug users respectively. As such, this is a visual representation of the meaning and relationship of public space to structural forces and the dispossessed; whereby the former attempt to re-appropriate (i.e. control and purify) the spaces occupied by the latter, as they, in turn, attempt to negotiate and construct ‘safe’ places for the purposes of an illicit activity. A consequence of such reciprocal symbolic violence is that the homeless become further marginalised and are forced to seek alternative injecting sites in the city – thus perpetuating a cycle of ‘purity, danger and displacement’ in the pursuit of a community wide public health.