‘Hyped up’: Assemblages of alcohol, excitement and violence for outer-suburban young adults in the inner-city at night

Abstract

Background

Young adults from across greater Melbourne are drawn to the city centre night time economy (NTE). There is some evidence that young adults who live in outer-suburbs are involved in higher rates of weekend night time assaults than their inner-urban peers, both as perpetrators and as victims. Using the notion of ‘assemblages’, this article explores outer-suburban people's participation in the affectively charged spaces of inner-city entertainment precincts to show that trouble in the NTE cannot be attributed to alcohol and other drugs alone.

Methods

We provide a narrative analysis of interviews conducted in 2012 with 60 young adult drinkers aged 18–24, half of whom lived in an inner-city area and half in outer-suburbs.

Results

More so for young adults from outer-suburbs than those who live closer to the city, going to the city is an event marked out as different from everyday life. Their sense of being ‘hyped up’ in the inner-city made different sets of practices possible, particularly in relation to drinking and being open to new engagements with friends and sexual partners. Participants also spoke, however, of discomfort, danger and fear. Violence was most likely to occur at points where people felt a dissonance between their heightened affective states and the spaces where they found themselves.

Conclusion

In this analysis, outer-suburban young adults’ positioning within the assemblages of the city centre NTE makes conflict and violence more likely for them. Efforts to improve NTE safety should maintain a focus on managing alcohol availability. Nonetheless additional strategies to decentralise the NTE, ensure better late night public transport to outer-suburbs or to support people to manage sudden affective shifts in NTE might also play a greater part in the overall effort.

Introduction

In developed countries around the world, drunkenness, public disorder and violence in inner-city entertainment precincts are an issue of concern for police, health practitioners, policy makers and researchers alike (Szmigin et al., 2008). This article is an attempt to understand a social statistic concerning assault during the high alcohol use hour of 8 pm to 6 am on Friday and Saturday nights in Melbourne, the capital city of the Australian state of Victoria. Victorian police data for 2012, which we have analysed elsewhere, suggest that 18–24 year olds from Melbourne's outer urban suburbs were more likely to be involved in assaults which occurred during these times than were young adults who lived closer to the city centre (MacLean, Wilkinson, Room, Moore, & Matthews, 2014). Young adults from outer-suburbs were involved in these assaults as perpetrators at more than twice the rate of those who lived in inner suburbs (61 per 10,000 people as against 27 per 10,000 people) and as victims at just under twice the rate (43 as against 25 per 10,000 people). The local government area of City of Melbourne which includes the city centre was strongly over-represented as the location where assaults occurred during weekend nights (MacLean et al., 2014).

Rather than concluding that young adults who live further from the city centre are inherently more egregious or more vulnerable than their inner-urban peers, we draw here on insights from cultural geography to understand how outer-suburban young adults’ relationship to, and engagements within, the city centre at night are part of assemblages that result in a particular range of harms. The inner-city at night is a place of great excitement. It offers different possibilities for being in the world and, at times, produces fear and trouble. We argue here that this is particularly the case for young adults from the outer-suburbs, who travel long distances into the inner-city and engage with its night time economy (NTE) in particular ways. To make this argument, we draw on interviews conducted with 60 young adults living in inner and outer Melbourne. We explore what attracts young outer-suburban adults to the inner-city rather than local entertainment precincts, and consider the affectual experiences that are possible within the inner-city and what is unsettling or frightening about these environments. We also explore participants’ views on points where assaults and other forms of conflict are most likely to occur. We conclude that efforts to improve safety in the inner-city at night should broaden the focus from alcohol, or indeed alcohol in conjunction with other drug use, to incorporate an understanding of the social geography of people's engagements with it. Some general implications of this analysis are explored in the article's conclusion.

Debates focussed on the NTE have become dominated by epidemiological research in which problems are attributed largely to quantifiable measures – for example, in the United Kingdom ‘units’ and in Australia ‘standard drinks’ – of alcohol (Jayne, Valentine, & Holloway, 2011). In this regard, much research effort has been given to identifying how forms of alcohol-related harm such as violence rise according to two measurable variables – alcohol consumption by individuals and the overall availability of alcohol in specific localities. Researchers have argued, for example, that rates of alcohol-related problems rise in relation to the number of units of alcohol consumed by individuals within drinking sessions or as blood alcohol content increases (Cherpitel, 2007, Taylor et al., 2010). In terms of measuring the alcohol saturations of localities, increasing the numbers of liquor licenses granted in an area has been linked with higher prevalence of adverse health outcomes including assault, domestic violence and drinking at levels harmful to health (Kavanagh et al., 2011, Livingston, 2008, Livingston, 2011, Livingston et al., 2007). Conversely, reducing alcohol availability through mandating earlier closing hours for licensed venues has been associated with reductions in these outcomes (Kypri, Jones, McElduff, & Barker, 2011). However, such ‘unit’ approaches have several limitations: ‘in informing everyday drinking practices’; as being a flawed method of medical diagnosis for ‘health problems’; and as offering an unsatisfactory measure of ‘drunkenness’ (Jayne et al., 2011, p. 829).

In several literature reviews and research articles, cultural geographers Jayne et al., 2008, Jayne et al., 2010, Jayne et al., 2011 have offered an alternative framework for understanding alcohol consumption that encompasses but goes beyond quantitative approaches. Rather than theorising alcohol as the main independent causal factor in harms such as violence, a notion which is implicit in much quantitative work, (Jayne et al., 2011, p. 835) frame drinking and drunkenness as a:

complex interaction of alcohol with embodied identities (age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.), emotional and embodied states (hunger, thirst, sadness, excitement, etc.), varying neurological responses to alcohol, social mixing, personal interaction, atmosphere (sounds, smells, moods, feelings), non-human materialities such as the taste and viscosity of different drinks and drinks containers (glasses, bottles, etc.) as well as the physical layout of commercial venues or public spaces (opportunities to sit, stand, move, dance, availability of toilet facilities, the proximity of other bodies).

They argue that drunkenness is a ‘psychoactive sociality’ that emerges from an ‘assemblage of embodied, emotional, affective and material human and non-human interactions’ (Jayne et al., 2010, p. 549). As Duff (2012) explains, the assemblage framework suggests that ‘harm should be regarded as a property of the assemblage and not of any one discrete body therein [e.g. the drug or drug user]’.

To understand the city at night we rely also on a well-established geographical literature on emotions, affect and place, where affect is understood to be co-produced by, and flow between, people and the places they inhabit. Affect is unevenly distributed across urban landscapes. In Melbourne, mid-to outer-suburbs affected by deindustrialisation are amongst the most socioeconomically disadvantaged. The loss of industry and employment brings a sense of degradation to these areas. In contrast, wealth is now concentrated closest to the city centre where connections to the global economy are strongest (Baum & Gleeson, 2010). This establishes a dynamic where outer-suburbs are generally poorer places than the inner-city in terms of overall wealth, opportunity, infrastructure, entertainment and also, less tangibly, excitement and intensity.

We use the notion of ‘affective space’ (Reckwitz, 2012) to describe how feelings, sensations and emotions cohere in locations. Cities, and particularly city centres, are places of intense activity and consumption. They are ‘roiling maelstroms of affect’ (Thrift, 2004, p. 57). Cities are spatially zoned, with particular areas devoted to entertainment and designed to promote affective intensity to attract people. Within these zones, venues are styled to appeal to different cultural groups. Reckwtiz writes that affective spaces are ‘always already connected to a specific cultural sensitivity and attentiveness on the part of the carriers of practices, a specific sensitivity for perceptions, impressions and affections’ (2012, p. 255). Our article draws on an ‘assemblage’ formulation to explore alcohol, embodiment, emotion, affect and place in the accounts of young drinkers from outer-suburbs, and how this might suggest new or adapted policy responses to problems in the city centre at night.