From the late eighteenth century to the present day alcohol, drinking and drunkenness have been a central feature of political and policy concern, popular debate and everyday life in urban areas. Fears over the ‘evil of drink’ and attempts to regulate and police alcohol consumption and drunken behaviour that were central to the bourgeois modernist project and vision of urban life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are shown to be mirrored in contemporary depictions of urban areas blighted by alcohol related violence and disorder. A significant amount or research has sought to describe how people’s drinking practices and associated legislative, policy and policing strategies are associated with structural urban change. While this research has produced valuable understanding of how alcohol, drinking and drunkenness is bound up with political, economic, social and spatial changes in our cities, studies have overwhelmingly focused on alcohol as a social or medial problem. In contrast other theorists have sought to show how alcohol, drinking and drunkenness are social and cultural practices bound up with sociability, conviviality, the mixing of social groups and engagements with strangers. This chapter considers these competing conceptualizations.