Footwork: Urban Outreach and Hidden Lives

Footwork offers an original street-corner ethnography drawing on the themes of urban regeneration, lost space and the 24-hour city. It shows how urban modernisation, development and politics impact on the hidden lives of people living and working on the streets. From the rough sleeping homeless to street drinkers and sex workers, this book reveals the stories of the vulnerable and isolated - people living in the city we often choose to ignore. Footwork follows the work of a team of outreach workers, tasked to look out for the homeless and others similarly vulnerable, harried and exposed. Tom Hall’s fieldwork study encompasses aspects of urban geography, care work and street-level poverty, violence and isolation, to provide a revealing and important account of lives so rarely acknowledged.