Swept-Up Lives?: Re-Envisioning the Homeless City [Kietas viršelis]

`A compelling narrative, moving from "the street" to structure and back again, to argue that more attention needs to be paid to the neoliberalist welfare state. The authors highlight expamples of hope and caring, providing a critical but optimistic view of what can be done by individuals, institutions, and governing bodies. A must read for researchers and students interested in understanding not only homelessness, but also the complexities of governance.' Lois M. Takahashi, University of California, Los Angeles

`Challenging theories of urban revanchism that deny homeless people agency and neglect the complexities of today's welfare state, Swept Up Lives? provides a sharp conceptual corrective and rich portrayal of geographies of homelessness in Britain. Detailed ethnographies and institutional analysis offer a window on homeless subjectivities and voluntary organizations as spaces of caring and active citizenship. I highly recommend this book.' Jennifer Wolch, University of California, Berkeley

Swept Up Lives? challenges conventional accounts of urban homelessness. Moving beyond more familiar narratives concerning the recent `purification' of public space and attempts to sweep homeless people from the streets, it focuses instead upon the many and complex attempts to care for homeless people in the contemporary city. Drawing upon in-depth ethnographic research with organizations providing homeless night shelters, hostels, day centres and soup runs - and with the users of these services---the authors emphasize the relationships of care embodied and performed within homeless service spaces. Positioning these attempts to care for homeless people within a broader rapprochement between secular and faith-based ethical motivations, it draws attention to the emergence of a postsecular ethics that runs counter to, and sometimes actively resists, the vicissitudes of neoliberal welfare restructuring and a `revanchist' (or vengeful) urban politics. The book thus argues for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which homelessness is governed, paving the way for a characterization of homelessness that pays greater attention to the agency of homeless people themselves and the complexity of homeless geographies - geographies within which homeless people experience a range of relationships that include compassion and care as well as regulation, containment and control.

Swept Up Lives? Re-envisioning the Homeless City offers innovative research and a visionary new approach to shape our understanding of the complexities of urban homelessness.

Utilizing innovative ethnographic research, Swept Up Lives? challenges conventional accounts of urban homelessness to trace the complex and varied attempts to care for homeless people

• Presents innovative ethnographic research which suggests an important shift in perspective in the analysis and understanding of urban homelessness
• Emphasizes the ethical and emotional geographies of care embodied and performed within homeless services spaces
• Suggests that different homelessness ‘scenes’ develop in different places due to varied historical, political, and cultural responses to the problems faced