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Intoxicating Spaces

Intoxicating Spaces

The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600–1850

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Category: Public Engagement

Posted on 6th January 20226th January 2022

Worlds of Opiates Webinar

The project rounded out 2021 with a ‘big bang’ in Amsterdam, when work on opium by our Utrecht research team was translated into a unique project in public space: Worlds of Opiates, a pop-up exhibition co-created with artist Corne van der Stelt, Het Uitvindersgilde, and Poppi, a start-up drugs museum and social enterprise. Visitors to the show walk through an immersive field of giant 3D poppy flowers, and discover the many attributes of the most powerful flower known to mankind. Interactive elements tell stories about opium, laudanum, heroin, and painkillers, the same substance in different guises eliciting different societal responses. 

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Posted on 23rd December 202123rd December 2021

Swings and Syringes: Intoxication and Public Space

Intoxicating substances are part of everyday life, especially during social interactions. At the same time, pressure on space in urban regions and cities is great; not only today, but also in the past. How do cities and urban populations past and present accommodate drug consumption and negotiate public space use? Whose voices are heard when it comes to policymaking about public space and substance use? Moreover, what happens when you bring historians, criminologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and practitioners from drug work together to discuss these questions? Back in October we gave it a try and invited experts from different backgrounds to join in a horizon-widening discussion based upon the fast-talk method, a focused and time-limited discussion designed to generate policy-relevant information.

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Posted on 20th December 202113th February 2022

New Project Exhibition: Worlds of Opiates

From 3 December 2021–29 March 2022, our Utrecht research team will hold a free pop-up exhibition for the general public at Amsterdam Central Station, one of the city’s major thoroughfares. The interactive show, organised in conjunction with the Poppi Drug Museum and called Worlds of Opiates, invites visitors to explore the history of opium in Amsterdam and its associated public spaces in a global context. Drawing on the findings of the project, and incorporating data from the 1970s and 1980s produced by our HERA partner project Governing the Narcotic City and the Mainline Foundation for harm reduction, the exhibition features both physical and digital objects, as well as historic maps of opium distribution in Amsterdam. Visitors can open and investigate the drawers of an original apothecaries’ counter, watch slideshows, access additional information on their mobile devices via QR codes, or listen to lectures by historians on topics such as opium use among the eighteenth-century Dutch elite, early modern opium use in Scotland, or the drug’s connection with Afghanistan.

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Posted on 1st April 20219th April 2021

Object Lessons: Co-Creating an Exhibition with School Pupils and the German Maritime Museum

One ear-achingly chilly day in February 2020, forty-odd pupils from secondary schools in Oldenburg and Neu Wulmsdorf, three teachers and I descended on the German Maritime Museum (DSM) in Bremerhaven. Our mission? To explore the museum’s extensive collection of intoxicant-related historical treasures and to brainstorm ideas for an exhibition – researched and curated by students with assistance from staff at the DSM – on the history of tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar in port cities of the early modern period.

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Partners & Funding

Intoxicating Spaces is a collaboration between Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Germany), the University of Sheffield (UK), Stockholm University (Sweden), and Utrecht University (Netherlands). We are funded by HERA, as part of its Joint Research Programme Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe, and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF)

Multilingual Overviews

Brief introduction in Dutch Brief introduction in German Brief introduction in Swedish

Image Credits

Unless otherwise credited, all header, column, featured, and decorative images are from the Wellcome Collection, London (Public Domain Mark 1.0)

Recent Posts

  • ‘It Brought Much Slime Out of the Gutts and Made Me Cheerfull’: Defining Intoxicants in the Diary of Robert Hooke 5th March 2022
  • Getting to the Root of It: Saloop in Early Modern London 8th February 2022
  • Narcotic Letters: New Intoxicants in the Correspondence of Isabelle de Charrière 31st January 2022
  • Worlds of Opiates Webinar 6th January 2022
  • Swings and Syringes: Intoxication and Public Space 23rd December 2021
  • New Project Exhibition: Worlds of Opiates 20th December 2021
Opium plant
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