Not really the conclusion

This is the part of the book where we try and tie things together in an effort to be optimistic about how we can improve the current situation for people who arrive in Valdemingómez. It would normally start with a deep methodological reflection about how we have advanced knowledge before discussing how innovative our methods were. We would then discuss the main findings of the book in relation to the theory outlined before making some comments on policy improvements and recommendations so we can avoid such situations of desperate poverty and fatalistic drug use. Perhaps lots of academics do this so they can feel good about their work, or maybe its more about closure on it. Or maybe its more that they feel obliged to write something which will in fact change nothing; like for example, that we need to make more investment in harm reduction. Aside from being really obvious, given the current political and economic climate this is unlikely to happen. Even a significant budget increase to the harm reduction team would be at best be tokenistic and in any case such gestures would anyway obfuscates the real and meaningful change which needs to take place to the political, economic and social landscape so that Valdemingómez and the people in that space do not end up destroying themselves.

Post dependency: What next?

In this chapter, we examine why these people are unable to escape this form of permanent destitution – living in Valdemingómez, homeless, taking heroin and cocaine and amassing numerous health problems. We relate this to a gradual erosion of their emotional, psychological and physical faculties and how this has been facilitated by the meagre forms of support given to them along the way. Personal markers of the self are instead measured against the physical and visual degeneration of other people around them and regulated by the ideological figure of the “machaca”. Because many, we suggest, have spent many years in denial of their situations, when prompted to face up to this, almost all struggle. We point out here that all this collectively interferes with the commitment required of them by the treatment system, which in itself, is snared with further barriers and challenges such as long waiting lists, poor housing placements and substandard work options. The majority then simply return to drugs and to Valdemingómez passing time before their inevitable death. This process we call the “personal surrender”.

Madrid: History, social processes and the growth in inequality

The evolution of Valdemingómez should not just simply be seen as some organic process whereby working class and immigrant people have somehow ended up congregating there in search of economic security and work in the city but as a consequence of macro processes of economic growth and technological advancement and how rural domestic economies submitted to urban industrialization in Spain. Equally, its configuration as a ghetto, compounded by drug markets should not be viewed as a consequence of poverty saturation but of spatial and structural processes which have rendered people in the urban metropolis increasingly socially redundant resulting in their destitution and political disaffection. Here in this chapter, we look at these processes charting the evolution of the Cañada Real Galiana in which is situated Valdemingómez, and how economic change in Spain, which led to the growth of the suburbs, collided with the economic crisis, increasing zonal inequalities in the capital and expanding drug markets.

Introduction: Welcome to Valdemingómez

The introductory chapter sets the scene for the book and in it context is given to the main participants, Juan and Julia, and how we came to know them. Thus, we reflect on the relatively little research which exists on Valdemingómez, its location with regard to the city, give some clues to its spatial and social aetiology and present our case for a new form of empirical, theoretical and methodological analysis. We reflect honestly and openly about our methodology and offer the reader a concise description of structure of the book’s chapters.

Life in the city shadows: Work, identity and social status

Valdemingómez, however, revolves around its own norms and codes which defy and violate conventional everyday conceptions of normative behaviour. This congregation of crime, violence and victimization in a spatial and legal no-mans land like Valdemingómez means that grave misdemeanours occur without consequences and violence is normalized part of the everyday fabric of social life. For this reason, in Valdemingómez almost anything goes and this produces a series of tensions in the social hierarchies that are attached to cultural interactions in the area which permeate elements of work and labour, the moral economy, daily life and social relations. In this chapter, we take a detailed look at the cultural milieu of Valdemingómez and its operations, and show how people survive there and how the various players attempt to foster some self-respect from these harsh realities.

Journeys to dependence

In this chapter we show how these structural and cultural experiences are important because they all play a part in their foreground subjective decisions and actions to try and return to drugs. The people who we met in Valdemingómez are from seriously deprived zones of urban centres, poor rural areas and/or are immigrants who have struggled with life in Spain. Many of these people had disrupted families, grew up in poverty and where crime and drugs was often all around them, did poorly in schools, and often had temporary stints in various types of precarious work industries such as construction, and other manual labour posts. Further investment in drugs does not necessarily occur because of their ‘addictive propensity’ – although this is not to deny that drugs have compulsive properties - but because of the motivation these people associate with the need to continue to us drugs to deal with changing situations of their lives such as failing to get an education or work. Addiction is further accelerated by the structural processes we pointed out in the previous chapters which produces variations of “dependence displacement” as they are moved from “poblado to poblado”. This culminates in a “dependence acceleration” when they come to stay/live in Valdemingómez.

Epilogue

In the time since our fieldwork completed in November 2016, we are still reminded everyday about the people we met in Valdemingómez because we exposed ourselves to a brazen reality which is far from public consciousness and yet close to political inertia. This is especially the case when we walk around the glory and city-centre paradise in Madrid’ city centre, knowing that only a few kilometres south, in some forgotten corner of the city, there exists an unimaginable poverty which has turned socially septic. We got to know the people there rather than judge them for their disheveled appearance, brutal attitudes towards damaging drug use and absolute destitution. Here we acknowledge for a time that Valdemingómez had us hooked; the peoples’ circumstances, their stories, and the sight of it all. And in doing so, we have unlocked a consciousness about how the world works which we cannot seal for we are able to recognize where else similar destructive processes are taking place which ravage the lives of the most vulnerable in society. For we see the below the opulence and pizzazz of the commercial city centres, we see its oppressive undercurrents in action on a daily basis; in the city’s shadows, where rampant inequality lurks and the conventional fractures.

The council, police and health services: An impasse to solutions

What is precisely contributing to the continued functioning of the drug market in Valdemingómez? How is it so many people arrive here at this point in their dependency yet so few are able to recover? If the council and police know where the problem is, why are they not able to intervene? It is simply not just only because of the ready availability and demand for drugs because there are high levels of police corruption taking place and the harm reduction team, with all good intentions, are only able to ‘maintain’ people in their misery: both of which are directly linked to wider political deficiencies. In this chapter, we discuss the importance of this because a moot point arises from potential meaningful intervention because the “problem” - and its complexity, gravity and cultural genetics – carries the same liability as the “intervention”: so in short intervention merely sustains the problem.

Politics, ‘democracy’ and the ideology of the postmodern city

Here we explore how and why macro ideological and commercial processes produce a place such as Valdemingómez by contextualizing how the political and economic changes over the last 40 years have crippled the urban poor in places like Madrid. We firstly show that these are global processes are linked to structural undercurrents of deindustrualisation which have produced greater inequality, unemployment and poverty before showing how a politics of distraction dilutes our collective consciousness to these issues. Both these elements are reflected in how social planners and politicians have engaged in urban cleansing programmes which relegate problem groups like drug users to the city margins; out of sight, out of mind. We show the consequences of this in the final part of the chapter when we discuss the implications this has for the city and its urban outcasts.

Drugs, cultural change and drug markets

The normalisation of drug use which came in the wake of the transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, was exacerbated by a collective ideological feeling of “freedom” and loose attitudes to drug consumption. However, as the drug markets expanded, principally across urban areas which had started to disintegrate as a consequence of deindustrialisation, addiction and HIV soared. The AIDS epidemic which thereafter followed in the 1980s was eventually curbed with the delayed introduction of drug awareness campaigns and harm reduction initiatives. Even these, however, couldn’t stop the increasing punitive approaches to dealing with high levels of urban crime. Police powers were expanded, the penal code was amended and the prisons started to fill with drug-dependent offenders. This chapter charts these shifts and provides the further foundation to the findings of the study which follow in Chapter 5.