Lauren Dixon – The Day-to-Day Management of the City in the Context of Psychoactive Substance Use in Parisian Public Spaces

This dissertation explores the relationship between drug policy and urban planning, bringing together key questions in political science and urban studies around territoriality, governance, and the management of the contemporary city. Using Paris as a case study, it examines how public space is planned, managed, and maintained in the context of open-air substance use, focusing in particular on how City services (sanitation, green spaces, parks and gardens) navigate streets and squares that are simultaneously sites of everyday urban life and places where people use substances. The dissertation establishes a direct link between drug policy and urban planning through the figure of municipal workers responsible for maintenance, sanitation, and landscaping, who are routinely confronted with substance use in public space. Since the early 2000s, people who use substances have been concentrated in the northeast of Paris, yet regularly displaced through evictions and police interventions. Within a French legal framework that prohibits both the sale and consumption of illicit drugs, substance use remains highly stigmatised and politically charged. When municipal agents encounter substance use in the course of their work, they are drawn into a complex and fragmented governance network. New protocols emerge, and maintenance services are brought into contact with actors outside their traditional field (private companies, police, health professionals, harm reduction workers, researchers…). Drug policy thus becomes an unexpected terrain for public space workers, reshaping day-to-day urban management and entangling street-level maintenance in broader political conflicts over how drugs and public space are governed.