The heroin scenes in Paris and Amsterdam in the 1980s: Instinctive emotions and sensory geography of the city

In the 1980’s, many Western cities were confronted by the apparition of heroin scenes that is, gatherings of drug addicts in public spaces such as streets or indoors spaces like squats in abandoned buildings, used as transactions places or shooting galleries. It caused directly crime issues (illegal economy of drugs dealing, violence around the place) and health issues (hygiene problems, overdoses, spread of contagious diseases such as AIDS), in the frame of virulent public debates. Drug places were exposed in the media as true “spreading urban cancers” in downtowns in Amsterdam (the Zeedijk street) or in Paris (the famous Ilot Châlon squat).

Urban heroin scenes bring to light several historical and sociological issues. First, designated as “areas of vice” by citizens or local authorities, they contributed to create stigmatized spaces of social exclusion. These feelings of disgust or fear, coupled with the vision of degradation (slums, used needles), highlight the role of instinctive emotions in a sensory approach of the contemporary urban crisis. Secondly, the urban sensitive geography is also redefined from the junkies point of view, experiencing the city as an area of suffering in his search for drugs and heroin scenes as sorts of refuges separated from the ordinary urban life. Finally, heroin scenes were also the sources of new underground subcultures and memories which sometimes survived in the collective memory after the closure of drug scenes.

 In both French and Dutch study cases, the paper is based on archival data extracted from newspapers, associative grass-root movements of care and help, municipal or national health policies agencies as these heroin scenes were targeted by a series of local policies, to restore public order by police task forces interventions and to provide with health care at a street corner level through methadone programs for example.