ABSTRACT
This chapter is about homelessness, and the city; each of these being well-established objects of (urban) anthropological and ethnographic attention. Street homelessness is my particular interest and focus, and in that context I want to consider not only the homeless themselves but also what it might mean to look after people in this circumstance – people who have found themselves down, out and on the street. In doing so I will draw on my own UK fieldwork research and experiences of homelessness and street care in the cities of London and Cardiff.
To write about homelessness and the street is to deal with words in common currency. Like most such words, we know what we mean when we say them and expect to be understood. Even so, the word homeless can denote (and imply) a range of circumstances, some alleged, some apparent and some concealed; similarly to be ‘out’ and on the street is not always to be in evidence. Which is to say that there is something inexact and at times elusive about the homeless and their needs; so too the city spaces in which those needs sometimes come to rest. This can seem curious at first – the hidden character of homelessness – given that the homeless themselves are those gone public with what ails and has been done to them. But the logic is also clear enough, given the fugitive, harried lives a great many homeless people are forced to lead; most of them have good reason not to want to draw attention. What are we to make of this? My interest here is not abstract. Practical interventions directed to the needs of the homeless must face this same question, posed concretely. Thus, street-level carers intending to reach out to and connect with the homeless in situ do not simply stumble across them, not always; they must sometimes work their way through a thicket of urban possibilities to get to where their work begins; they must second guess and investigate – sightings, reports, indications – in order to establish, repeatedly, where they might find those they are hoping to help. I report on findings from an ethnographic study of just this line of work: urban outreach work, directed to the making and maintaining of therapeutic contact and intervention with those ‘on the streets’ and in need. In discussing the significance of my study, I will consider the ways in which outreach workers practically accomplish the job of looking out for the homeless, and the sorts of city in which they do so.
In the twenty-first century, we are told, more than half of us find our homes in cities, one way or another. Given which, the issue of urban homelessness and the work of those tasked to look out for, and after, those in any such extremity of need has an obvious urgency and relevance. The chapter will close with a discussion of public implications and the sorts of city we might (all) want to live in.
