Roundtable with Gemma Blok (Open University, Netherlands), Samuel K. Roberts (Columbia University, New York), Matthew Vaz (CUNY, New York), Frederieke Westerheide (Halle University Halle). Moderated by Stefan Höhne (KWI Essen).
On both sides of the Atlantic, drug use is a highly contested issue in urban public space. During this roundtable, participants discussed and analyze the medical, political, and spatial aspects of governing intoxicating substances in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, and beyond. How have conflicts around public drug use impacted the social and cultural fabric of cities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? How are urban policies intertwined with addiction treatment and police interventions of contested sites?
For this roundtable, we brought together experts from the US and Europe, to explore the ways in which particular user groups (such as ethnic minorities) have been targeted or treated differently, and assess the impact of drug policy strategies on the wellbeing of users. Are there noticeable differences or similarities between US and European strategies and approaches? Furthermore, what kind of opposition and activism have they generated? How does the governance of drug use play into forms of urban exclusion, marginalization, and integration – particularly in relation to issues of gender, class, race, and disability?
Samuel Kelton Roberts is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. He is currently researching and writing on the policy and political history of heroin addiction treatment from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Matthew Vaz teaches United States History with a focus on political economy. He specializes in comparative urban history and the history of crime and policing in urban areas.
Gemma Blok is a cultural historian and professor of Mental Health Humanities at the Open University of the Netherlands, specializing in the history of psychiatry, addiction treatment, and drug and alcohol use in the twentieth century. She is currently working on the history of heroin use in Europe after 1970, with a special focus on user experiences and user activism. As principal investigator in the Governing the Narcotic City project, she conducted and coordinated research on the open drug scenes in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Zürich.
Frederieke Westerheide is a cultural and urban geographer specializing in processes of exclusion and inclusion in contemporary and historical city settings. Her research interests include critical approaches to the production of space, urban governance, as well as contestations and negotiations of social conflicts and power relations within the city.
Stefan Höhne is a cultural studies scholar from The Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany, focusing on histories of urban everyday life in Europe and North America. Currently, he co-leads the international research project Governing the Narcotic City.
This event was part of the Narcotic City Event Series at 1014 which explored the discourses, imaginaries, practices, and consequences of public drug use from the 1970s until the present with a focus on American and European cities. Across three evening roundtables, we addressed how cultures of drug consumption are interwoven into public spaces, everyday lives, and public memories of cities, bringing together expert activists, scholars, and workers on public health, narcotic cultures, and archival politics from the US, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
During the evening events, 1014 also presented part of the Narcotic City Archive – the first interactive archive to collect and preserve the material and immaterial heritage of narcotic use and governance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its launch in 2021, this innovative resource fosters knowledge, visibility, and engagement between researchers, activists, users, and a wider public. More information.
The Narcotic City Event Series was organized by the international research project “Governing the Narcotic City” ( www.narcotic.city) together with 1014 and KWI - Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen and with generous support from The Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) program.
