Pedestrian circulations

Urban Ethnography, the Mobilities Paradigm and Outreach Work

Bibliographic Data

ID5717407
AuthorsRobin Smith (0000-0001-7457-9690), Robin James Smith, Tom Hall (0000-0002-9001-6684)
Year2016
Volume11
Issue4
Pages498-508
Publication date2016-08-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMobilities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1745-0101 • E-ISSN: 1745-011X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17450101.2016.1211819
OpenAlexW2543303515
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited43

This article considers the intersection of urban ethnography, Interactionism and the mobilities paradigm. In its course, we develop a discussion of mobilities as a social order, replete with constraints, conditions and contradictions, in dialogue with Goffman’s understanding of interaction order and, more specifically, his remarks on territories and social relations. We draw on ethnographic work undertaken with a team of ‘outreach’ professionals tasked to care for the street homeless in the UK city of Cardiff. The team enact their duty of care through a repeated patrolling of the city centre, in the course of which they aim to encounter clients and engage them in the provision of immediate services and in planning for support that might meet their needs in the longer term. Outreach workers are street-level bureaucrats then, in a literal sense; they work out of doors and on the move, and lack the sureties of office space – their clients, for their part, lack the sureties of fixed abode. In this context, outreach workers must move through and make use of everyday city space, as they find it; they must also find their clients – searching them out repeatedly, wherever they might turn out to be. The article describes searching and patrol as distinctive mobility practices, and combines this description with reflections on ways to move beyond the sedentary tendency in Goffman’s (and others’) work. We close by recommending the everyday as locus of inquiry for considerations of the future city and, indeed, for directions of future travel for a mobilities-oriented street-level ethnographic inquiry

Context (archaeology · Ethnography · Interactionism · Media studies · Mobilities · Outreach · Patrolling · Political science · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Homelessness and Social Issues · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Law

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