ABSTRACT
But a closer look at homeless people’s reality shows that their lives are deeply immersed in the world of the city. They are involved in a magnitude of interactions with non-homeless people, particularly with the urban poor and with employers in the informal economy. Having no homes, they construct their relations with ‘housed’ people through the use of specific locations in the urban space. From these hubs of social life they attempt to spin their webs of contacts and use their available capital
to build links based on utilitarian interest, obligation and commitment. Homeless people emerge as resourceful and deeply social agents
In this chapter I analyse homeless people’s use of the key urban sites and their transactions with the marginally situated poor and with members of criminal society, as well as their street-level economic activities, in order to expose the complex dynamics of exclusion and inclusion of homeless people in the city space.
