Reflections on the TC Symposium

People often ask me what I actually study / interested.

“Urban planning?”
“Drug users?”
“Therapeutic communities?”

Right now, the honest answer is: I’m still figuring it out.

On 12 November 2025, I went to a symposium on Therapeutic Communities (TCs). The keynote was by Dr. George De Leon. He didn’t come in person – he’s 95 now and said he couldn’t travel for health reasons – but he appeared on screen and gave a remote talk. Before this, he was just a surname in my references. Earlier this year I even bought his book, The Therapeutic Community: Theory, Model, and Method. It’s the first hardcover book I’ve ever owned. Sitting in a room in Taiwan watching this very old scholar talk about the model I had only seen in print felt a bit surreal.

Meeting the TC model again

The keynote went through what you would expect: the basic TC theory, community as method, recovery as lifestyle change, the insistence on long-term work rather than quick fixes. I had seen most of these ideas on paper, but hearing them arranged into a story felt different.

One word he highlighted was “fidelity.” From the context, it was clear he didn’t mean “follow the manual at 100% and never change anything.” It sounded more like being faithful to the core logic of the TC. Not just doing a morning meeting because the schedule says so, but being able to answer: why do we have this meeting at all? Why do residents take certain roles in the house? Why do we insist on particular expectations?

His point was that every activity is supposed to have a therapeutic or educational purpose. If the activity is still there but the purpose slowly disappears, you keep the routine but lose the meaning. And at some point, you lose the TC, even if the timetable on the wall looks the same.

ROIS: recovery as a system

The part that really stayed with me, though, was his discussion of something I had never heard before: the Recovery Oriented Integrated System (ROIS).

This was my first time encountering the term. ROIS starts from a very simple question: what happens to people after they leave the TC?

We usually talk about “success” as if it stops at the gate: they completed the program, they were abstinent for some period, they left. But leaving the TC is probably the start of the most fragile stage. People go back into cities and neighbourhoods that may be full of memories; back to families or to the absence of family; back to debts, court cases, old friends, old dealers, and all kinds of familiar triggers. Some people have aftercare or peer groups. Some don’t. Some find housing and work. Some don’t.

ROIS treats recovery as a long-term process that depends on a whole system of supports. A TC is only one part of that system, alongside halfway houses, aftercare groups, recovery communities, social workers, NGOs, churches, clinics, and the policies that connect (or fail to connect) these pieces. Instead of seeing the TC as the place where recovery happens, you start seeing it as one node in a larger recovery ecology.

For me, as someone who studies urban planning, this was a view changer. Given the training in college, I had mostly thought about TCs as sites: where they are located in the city, what the surrounding land use looks like, how neighbours react, whether the facility is “allowed” in that area. ROIS forced me to think about what happens between places: from TC to city, from city to aftercare, from one space of support to another. It also tied directly into the question that has been forming in my mind: how do people reintegrate into urban life after TC?

A theory I didn’t ask for (but maybe need)

The morning after the symposium, my supervisor emailed me.

He told me he had been thinking about research, and suggested that I take a look at Non-Representational Theory (NRT) and the idea of affect (see Cadman 2009). His interprection was that it offers a way to think about how people and places shape each other, not just how space looks on a map or in a zoning plan.

Non-Representational Theory is full of words like affect, performance, practice. It doesn’t hand you a clean set of methods. But when I put it next to what I had just heard from De Leon, it feel less abstract.

TCs, after all, are deeply concerned with how people feel when they enter the community, how the daily routine reshapes their emotions and habits, how being seen, confronted or supported by others shifts their sense of self, how the environment of the house, i.e., the physical layout plus the social atmosphere, can create safety, pressure, hope, or belonging. None of this fits neatly into a site plan.

What NRT is asking us to look at – moods, small gestures, micro-interactions, the overall “feel” of a place – overlaps a lot with what actually matters in a TC. Those things rarely appear in official documents, but they decide whether the place works as a context for recovery.

Now my project is sitting at an intersection I did not fully plan: TC theory, ROIS, affect, and urban space. It sounds ambitious for a student project, and maybe it is. But at the same time, it feels closer to what I actually want to understand.

The question of coming back

When I first started thinking about addiction and space, I used “Right to the City” (see Lefebvre, 1996) as my main lens. I still think that people who use drugs should have the right to exist in the city without being treated as disposable. I still care about public space, exclusion, and the politics of where TCs and other facilities are allowed or pushed away.

Those questions haven’t disappeared. But after the symposium, the problématique feels more concrete. Instead of staying at the level of “who has the right to which parts of the city,” I find myself drawn to a narrower, maybe more genuine question: what happens when someone leaves a TC and tries to come back to the city?

How do they experience the city again, now that they are trying to stay off drugs? What sort of housing do they find, or fail to find? Which streets, parks or stations feel safe, and which feel loaded with risk or memories? What kind of “recovery infrastructure” do they actually rely on, maybe a support group in a church basement, a social worker they trust, a small shop where the owner treats them like a person, a bus route that helps them avoid certain areas? Are there places they avoid now because they link them too strongly to their old life? And how does the experience of living inside the TC, such as the routines, the peer group, the sense of being watched and supported, change the way they move through these urban spaces afterwards?

These questions are still rough around the edges.
I don’t yet have a finished research design, still need to actually read on ROIS instead of just quoting the keynote, survive at least one key text on Non-Representational Theory, and talk to people who work in or have lived in TCs about what kind of fieldwork is realistic. But I do feel like the core of what I want to pay attention to is becoming clearer.

Not just “Does this TC exist in the city?” but “What happens to people when they walk out of the gate, and how do cities meet them, or fail them, at that moment?”

If my project can stay close to that question, I think I’ll be okay with not having “my thing” fully defined yet. It’s being developed as I go.

Reflections on the TC Symposium

Meeting the TC model again

ROIS: recovery as a system

A theory I didn’t ask for (but maybe need)

The question of coming back

Further reading