Abstract

Open drug scenes have been considered risk environments since the early ’80. The govern of a concentration of people using drugs in a location within the urban fabric comprise both preventive and regulative strategies. This work provides an account of an Italian open drug scene, Milano Rogoredo, that erupted starting from 2015 and is still enduring, even if in a different form. Drawing from the result of an ethnography conducted between 2017 and 2021, the author highlights problems as well as opportunities of a concentrated scene. The analysis is driven by a harm reduction epistemology and explores the process that displaced the open drug scene as well as everyday practices within this space. Results show that a more regulative approach could have been useful to both the resident’s community and people who use drug.