Daniel Briggs & Rubén Monge Gamero 
Dead-End Lives 
Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows

“Julia” nervously emerges from her shabby tent in the suburban wastelands on the outskirts of Madrid to face another day of survival in one of Europe’s most problematic ghettos: she is homeless, wanted by the police, and addicted to heroin and cocaine. She is also five months pregnant and rarely makes contact with support services. Welcome to the city shadows in Valdemingómez: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Briggs and Monge entered this area with only their patience, some cigarettes and a mobile phone and collected vivid testimonies and images of Julia and others like her who live there. This important book documents what they found, locating these people’s stories and situations in a political, economic and social context of spatial inequality and oppressive mechanisms of social control.

O autorze

Dr Daniel Briggs is a Consultant to the British Foreign Office who works part time at the Universidad Europea in Madrid, Spain. As a researcher, writer and inter-disciplinary academic who studies social problems, he has undertaken ethnographic research into social issues from street drug users to terminally ill patients; from refugees to prostitutes; and from gypsies to gangs and deviant youth behaviours. He also lectures across the social sciences and has published widely. Rubén Monge Gamero has a first-class undergraduate degree in Criminology from Universidad Europea and his final year project was based on participant observation of Valdemingómez. He recently concluded a Masters in Intelligence Analysis and hopes to be a police officer.