Pharmaceuticalisation in the city

Abstract

Cityscapes comprise intense repositories for socio-economic interactions, including those surrounding medicinal products. This raises issues of pharmaceuticalisation, involving the construction of a range of human conditions as targets for pharmaceutical interventions. Employing the metaphoric figure of the flâneur, we traverse the New Zealand cityscape, interrogating the mediation and emplacement of various medicinal products within thoroughfares, commercial sites and domestic dwellings. We demonstrate the pharmaceuticalised commodification of the city and interpolation of urbanites as citizen-consumers.

Homelessness, Mimesis, and the Flânerie

“…Briefly, when homeless people traverse various spaces of involvement every day, they take form as urban inhabitants on the margins of society. These urbanites reproduce and become re-embroiled within broad societal relationships that constitute urban life (cf., Hodgetts et al, 2017). As such, our analytic task is not to simply code and describe individual photographs as if the meaning of these artefacts was set within the frame.…”

“…Briefly, when homeless people traverse various spaces of involvement every day, they take form as urban inhabitants on the margins of society. These urbanites reproduce and become re-embroiled within broad societal relationships that constitute urban life (cf., Hodgetts et al, 2017). To analyze these issues, we worked iteratively, starting with participant photographs and clumping these by location, particular practices such as eating and sleeping, the time of day, and so forth.…”

“…Instead, we sort to theorize with these memetic snippets, wrenched from homeless lifeworlds, to develop a richer picture of street life from the vantage point of homeless people. Correspondingly, our analysis is structured from the perspective of the mobile analytic gaze of flânerie (Hodgetts et al, 2017). Drawing on concepts, including mobilities, social practices, the dialectics of place, and mimesis, we retain aspects of the humanity of our participants while theorizing how they picture and make sense of their situations and efforts to navigate the cityscape.…”

“…This figure acts as a conceptual anchor point for our consideration of how homeless people move through the cityscape and observe and ponder street life. We will show how in adopting the mobile gaze of flâneur, homeless people become more than detached strollers gaining voyeuristic pleasure from beholding urban scenes (Hodgetts et al, 2017). With “penetrating eyes,” these urbanites stroll to know, document, botanize, and interpret the rhythms of city life (Benjamin, 1969).…”

“…Of central interest to us is how homeless people become embroiled both within and across particular locales (Spinney, Aldred, & Brown, 2015; Stolte & Hodgetts, 2015) through their engagements in particular social practices that enable them to render the cityscape more habitable. Here, the cityscape (Hodgetts et al, 2017) denotes the perceived functional, material, ornamental, and relational features of the expansive urban milieu comprising a patchwork of spaces for human activity that is traversed by homeless people. Exploring the social practices of homeless people in and across the cityscape, we can extend existing knowledge of the complexities and dilemmas of street life.…”