Displaced. The Denial of Public Space and Everyday Resistance in Milan.

Drug conflicts in contemporary cities are fought out between the dominant capital forces and the drug users’ worlds. In this struggle, the invaded city is frequently depicted as engaged in resisting illegality and decay by means of limitations and controls (Rabinowitz 2014). The focus of this criminalization process is the drug user him- or herself, who has become an appropriate enemy for governmental and consensus-building purposes (Saitta 2015). The aim of the alternative view proposed here is to restore dignity and power to enemy drug users within the political debate through (counter-)mapping. The first of our two (counter-)maps shows how marginalized drug users are excluded from the contemporary urban public landscape. In the second (counter-)map, the city is depicted as a critical place and a resistance space through drug users’ everyday practices. The context illustrated is an Italian case study and the two (counter-)maps are based on the results of an ethnographic study conducted by Sonia Bergamo in 2017-18 in Milan Rogoredo, the site of what was considered to be the largest Italian open drug scene.