ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the cultural adaptations and social organisation of homeless 'sub citizens', those who are socially marginal, economically disadvantaged and politically disenfranchised. The homeless are the inhabitants of sub city, living in subterranean ways beneath the gloss and the affluence of post-modern cities. Street homeless lives are conducted in basement day-centres and in back alley-ways, while hostel-dwellers lead anonymous existences in towns and cities throughout the country. The phenomenon of homelessness has fascinated successive generations of qualitative researchers, many of whom have engaged in extensive debates concerning the ethics, politics and morality of their enterprise. Social scientific exploration of homelessness has a long history, dating back in Britain as far as the Elizabethan rogue pamphleteers who established what some commentators have interpreted as a proto-sociological perspective, and who certainly pioneered qualitative and ethnographic approaches to the study of vagrancy.
