Lauren Dixon

Bio

Through an exploration of the relationship between illegal drugs and spatial planning, this thesis brings together major issues in political science and urban studies. It focuses on the territoriality, governance, and planning of the contemporary city by unravelling and problematizing the drugs-planning nexus (Boland et al. 2020). Using the city of Paris as a case study, this research explores how public space is managed in the context of street-level drug use. In particular, how City services (sanitation, green spaces, etc.) plan, manage, and maintain public streets, parks, gardens and squares that are also places of drug consumption.

This thesis establishes the link between drugs and urban planning by highlighting the role of municipal workers responsible for maintenance, sanitation and landscaping, who are also on the front line when it comes to drug use in public spaces. Since the early 2000s, people who use drugs, although concentrated in the Northeast of Paris, are regularly displaced as a result of evictions and police interventions. Given the French legal framework prohibiting both the sale and consumption of illicit substances, drug use remains highly stigmatised and politicised.

As a result, when agents working in public space are confronted with contested practices, they enter a complex and fragmented network. New protocols are created, and the various services cooperate with new players from outside the field of public space maintenance (private companies, police, health professionals, researchers or harm reduction workers). City maintenance workers thus enter a governance web where types of drugs, forms of use, locations of consumption, and perceived deviance related to drug use are debated. Now, public space maintenance becomes an act that moves within the drug policy nexus, encountering conflicts and eventually altering the day-to-day operations of urban management.

2021 – present

PhD student at LATTS; Assistant Professor at the Paris School of Urban Planning

2019–2020

École d’Urbanisme de Paris, Master’s in Urban Planning and Development

2015–2016

Sciences Po Paris, Bachelor of Arts in Political Science

2012–2016

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Bachelor of Arts in Political Science & Creative Writing