Veus Raval 

What does organized crime tell us about everyday life in the city?

VEUS RAVAL is a five-year ethnographic project examining how crime is deeply entangled in the social, economic, and spatial fabric of urban environments.

Through fieldwork in the most impoverished and most heavily policed neighborhood of Barcelona, we analyze how to create a more sustainable urban environment through advocating policies that address not only the surface-level symptoms of crime but also the underlying issues of inequality, speculation, poverty, and urban marginalization.  

Our forthcoming book —Narcopisos. Drugs, Crime, and Urban Marginalization in Barcelona (2027, Edicions Bellaterra) critically investigates the relationship between organized crime and public policies in the urban space, offering an insider's look at the working lives of drug dealers, people who use drugs, police officers, harm reduction workers, and residents.

Read also: "Under Threats" (Qualitative Research); The legal embeddness of criminal organisations (The Academy of Management Discoveries); "Drugs, Urban Marginalisation, and Law Enforcement in Barcelona (Sociology); "Frightening yet fulfilling: Vulnerability, Precarity, and the Labour of Harm Reduction (Work, Employment, and Society); Violence in harm reduction: Exploring the social, political, and emotional conditions of harm reduction work (Medical Anthropology Quarterly).