VEUS RAVAL 

In 2021, I launched VEUS RAVAL, a five-year ethnographic project on El Raval's narcotics market in Barcelona. With Rafael Clua Garcia, we study the narcotics market in its relationship with health, law enforcement, urban, and social policies. Specifically, we analyze the narcopisos phenomenon, namely the illegitimate occupation of public or private properties by criminal organisations to sell drugs to clients using them on-site. We problematise narcopisos as a dynamic and open-ended illegal organisational response to drug law enforcement, pressure from local communities, key limitations of harm reduction policies, and structural vulnerability.

VEUS RAVAL provides theoretical and methodological developments from an interdisciplinary perspective (Anthropology, Organization Studies, Epidemiology, Criminology). It sheds new light on the organisation of drug use and trafficking as the product of collective action. We analyze the networks of collaboration among the actors involved and the conventions structuring their interactions. Participants include PWUD, cocaine, crack-cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine dealers, police forces, harm reduction professionals, residents, drug activists, community leaders, and politicians. 

VEUS RAVAL develops new knowledge on the following social problems: (1) Gentrification and urban transformation; (2) Drug law enforcement; (3) Harm reduction policies; (4) Intersectional structural vulnerability; (5) Workplace violence.