Knowing the city: maps,mobility and urban outreach work

Introduction

This article draws on fieldwork research conducted in the city of Cardiff with a group of people whose job it is to know and move about the city centre. The article has three aims. First, we consider our key informants at work: a team of welfare professionals employed by the local authority to make and maintain kindly contact with vulnerable adults on the city streets. We consider the ways in which this work, these points of contact with clients, many of them homeless and sleeping rough, might be mapped. Doing so, we suggest, captures something of the professional knowledge these workers have, both of their client group and of the territory and locations in which clients can be found. Yet, these locations must be got to and arrived at before any work with clients can begin, and so our informants spend much of their working day moving around the city on their way to and from encounters with clients. Thus, a second aim of the article is to address mobility itself as an object of analysis. Accordingly, we consider how our informants’ movements might be mapped, and we argue that doing so might better represent their professional knowledge in practice. A third and final aim is to draw back from this mapping of movement, to (re)consider the ways in which knowing and going actually come together for our respondents. Our argument here is not simply that maps of knowledgeable movement simplify what is always going to be a more involved, elusive process. Maps can hardly be called out for the thing that gives them their utility. Rather our concern is to provide a pedestrian perspective from which to see the ways in which the mapping of mobility practice might not only misrepresent but, more problematically, invert the relationship between knowledge and movement.

In attending to local, knowledgeable mobility practices, the article seeks to contribute not only to discussions of method and methodology in the social sciences but also to wider questions of perception, mobility and knowledge and their relationship to urban space and the city as landscape.

‘You are here’

To get things underway, we ask the following question: How do we know where we are? Knowing where you are is a universal concern, both practical and epistemological (existential too), but there are different ways in which to get this done and different ways in which to then move – if we take it that knowing where you are (for all but the most radically inert) is a basis for then moving on, to wherever you want to be next. ¹ Different answers to the question ‘Where am I?’ index different sorts of relationships with one’s surrounds. Under some circumstances, it is sufficient to know not much more than one’s immediate spatial location. Arriving in an unfamiliar city, for example, we might begin to get our bearings by consulting a public map of the sort still to be found on fixed display in most urban centres. A bright red arrow tells us ‘You Are Here’. Now we know: a pinpoint location amidst a tangle of named yet unrecognised streets. Our next step might be to plot out a line of travel to wherever it is we want to go, tracing this with a finger at first, then setting off with the route committed to memory as a sequence of lefts and rights. Having marched along confidently enough for five or ten minutes, we might begin to wonder whether we are still exactly on track – was it the first or the second turning after the bridge? Just to be sure, and rather than schlep all the way back to where we started, we might stop at a kiosk to buy a map of our own, to carry: now we really know where we are, and can confirm as much whenever we please. We set off again, monitoring our progress, shifting attention between map and surrounds, as we go (see Laurier and Brown, 2008). Both maps – the one in the hand and the one on fixed display – offer considerable utility. Newly arrived in the city, but with maps to help us, we can find our way through to wherever it is we want to go.

Yet, to make use of maps in this way is to know where you are in a very particular fashion only; knowledge of place is narrowed to a pinpoint, or thinned out to a single line of travel running across an otherwise unfamiliar landscape; mislay the line and you are lost. ² Set against knowledge of place as the ability to determine point of location and move along a line of travel, there is a second sense in which anyone might claim to know where they are, not because they have figured it out but because they have never needed to ask themselves the question in the first place, because where they are is where they are from, is home. This is local knowledge, the sorts of understanding that inhabitants hold and share about where they already live. Such knowledge enables a different sort of movement: knowing your patch you might choose to roam around it, unsure at times of your exact location as a cartographic certainty but never really needing to know that either because more generally confident of always being able to muddle your way back to where you began. There are many different ways of walking in the city (see Wunderlich, 2008), but most people can tell, at a glance, the difference between the movements of a local and a greenhorn.

How do we know where we are? We have suggested two ways in which one might answer this question. Of the two, it is the second that most interests us: local knowledge. Most qualitative researchers would agree. People know the places they are from – the lay of the land, its organisation and uses, meanings and history – and such knowledge is the very stuff of ethnographic study, so, too are the everyday movements of those who make a place their own. Increasingly so it would seem, given the growth in popularity of mobile methods such as the walking interview or ‘go-along’ (see, inter alia, Anderson and Moles, 2008; Jones et al., 2008; Kusenbach, 2003; Ross et al., 2009). ³ Our contribution in what follows does not rest on the application of any such technique, however. Interested as we are in an instance of local knowledge and movement, and in the ways in which such movement(s) can be known and shown to be knowledgeable, we are not particularly interested in what it is that our (local) informants know or have to say about where they are from – the sort of thing that might be accessed by a walking interview. Rather, we are interested in how it is, and through which methods – their own, already in play – that our informants arrive at the knowledge they exercise. We are thus interested in knowledge of place as an accomplishment, an understanding acquired, in the case we now want to discuss, in the course of repeated pedestrian patrols through the middle of a busy city. Even so, we will start with a map.

Cardiff: shape, centre, margin

This is Cardiff (Figure 1):

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Figure 1.

Map of Cardiff.

No ‘You Are Here’ arrow but plenty of other information, an ‘artificial model of the physical world’ (Ljunberg, 2004), accurately visualising distances, proximities, boundaries and borders, mapped out, to scale, in space. Reading the map with a view to knowing Cardiff, we can already make something of the city and its spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991). Cardiff was one of the great maritime seaports of Victorian Britain, an industrial settlement, geared to the shipping of coal and steel and related commerce and administration. One can still ‘see’ this in the lines of a present-day map (to the south the docks are still identifiable as a space of industrial operations, then there are the regimented concentrations of working-class housing separate from the grander, public and commercial buildings of the city centre – an architecture of municipal ambition). Or rather, one can see what that spatial practice once was because here we are discussing the enduring traces of an industrial past – the sediment of 19th-century labour still shaping the city. Cardiff today, along with other UK cities with which it shares its shape, is best described as post-industrial. The city has undergone and come some way out the other side of a period of industrial decline (Hooper and Punter, 2006); its 21st-century spatial practice embraces urban regeneration, a consumer economy, city centre living as aspirational lifestyle, café quarters, pedestrianised shopping streets and precincts, international sports stadia and tourist and conference facilities (see Punter, 2006), all of which is beginning to show through in the configuration of the city centre’s streets and buildings. Maps, of course, struggle to keep up with all this – the one above is out of date, as are all maps as soon as they are published. But our key informants and interlocutors have to keep pace, and are paid to do so. We can now introduce them.

Cardiff Council employs a team of welfare professionals whose job it is to look out for and support vulnerable adults in the centre of the city, particularly the rough-sleeping homeless. It does so not only because it recognises a social responsibility towards this group but also because the presence of the homeless in the middle of the city sits somewhat uneasily with wider ambitions to deliver ‘international recognition for the wider region and Wales as a whole’ (Cardiff Council, 2007: 11). Cardiff’s street homeless are only a smallish collection of individuals, variously grouped together, but even so rather too visible sometimes in the middle of the city’s ‘enhanced’ public realm. And sometimes not. For every drinking school temporarily established as a noisy, noisome and unwelcome presence on some new retail concourse, there will be other individuals squirrelled away in various hides and corners not too far away, out of sight but still in need. Either way, they can be difficult people to work with, not least because the word ‘homeless’ is a great simplification, glossing a complex mix of individual circumstances and problems: alcoholism, drug addiction, (physical and mental) health issues, convoluted histories of (dis)engagement with the city’s social services and legal system, all of which and more – other personal, social, familial and financial difficulties, in varied permutations – have resulted in their occupancy of public space as a last resort. The welfare team tasked to work with these individuals is, accordingly, multidisciplinary, comprising social workers, housing officers, National Health Service (NHS) staff and (our key informants) outreach workers.

If the homeless are a difficult client group because their needs are so involved and imbricated, they are also difficult because they are not so very easy to enrol as clients in the first place. Setting up a multidisciplinary team to deal with the many exclusions and vulnerabilities that afflict the street homeless might be a step in the right direction, but it would be no use then installing that team behind a row of desks to wait for clients to dutifully present themselves – during office hours and in presentable enough condition to make it past reception – because that is not going to happen. Put another way, Cardiff’s street homeless are what is sometimes called a ‘hard-to-reach’ client group, unable or unwilling to engage with mainstream health and social services: suspicious of authority and officialdom, wary of offers of help, alienated, sometimes angry, and so very chaotic in their daily lives, many of them, that the chances of them ever making a doctor’s appointment or a housing interview are very slim indeed. Which is why providing welfare and support to this group requires outreach workers, whose job it is to get out of the office and meet with those sleeping rough and in public need on their own terms and turf, out of hours if needs be and wherever they happen to be found, in order to use that encounter as a first, tentative step in establishing a relationship. Outreach work is, thus, primary work, a first and necessary step: it takes an outreach worker to get out there and meet up with a potential client and get to know them and win their trust before other members of the team can be brought into play.

To return to the very first line of this article, these are people – outreach workers – whose job it is to know and move about the city centre. The job is necessary because the (prospective) clients to whom it is directed are not to hand and must be sought out – once found, they may prove hard-to-reach in any number of ways, but they are hard-to-reach to begin with, in the literal sense of no one knowing for sure just where they are. To seek out is to look and also to move but without yet knowing exactly where you are going. Outreach workers must cast about for clients; they do so mostly on foot and on repeated patrols around the city centre and its environs, a square mile or two of dense and intricate urban space. ⁴ What sets outreach workers apart from their colleagues then is that they move about and, in so doing, work up a pretty good idea of where the homeless are or are at least likely to be found, which is to say that they know something about the spatial distribution of homelessness across the city centre. Others in the team might know something about this too, a little, ancillary to their principal duties, but the ones for whom this knowledge is central and who know a lot about it are the outreach workers. They know because it is their job to do so: not to deliver any service so much as to be out there on the streets, moving around the city in order to know where the homeless go and to meet up with them. ⁵

The geography of outreach

We are interested, then, in the professional knowledge of a team of outreach workers looking out for the homeless on the streets of Cardiff. How might we capture this knowledge the better to examine its qualities? We might begin by agreeing that whatever else they know, outreach workers certainly know the city, tasked as they are to cast about its streets. We might also agree that the whole point of their doing so – casting about in this way – is to locate possible clients. Given which, we might attend to location in particular, to where it is that outreach workers come across those they are looking for. This ought to show us something of what it is they know.

There is, of course, any number of such locations. Any one outreach patrol is likely to result in at least half a dozen points of contact and pause, where workers spot a client and stop to spend time with them (introducing themselves, handing out flyers, fishing for information, sharing food or a hot drink and working up a relationship that might, in time, go somewhere). When one considers that the team operates two set patrols each day, with plenty more time spent walking the streets of the city centre in between, the number of contacts made soon adds up. They need to keep adding up too. Creating and then maintaining productive relationships with this client group requires repeated personal contact. There is of course much to be said about the actual content of outreach encounters (for which, see Smith, 2011; also Rowe, 1999). But here we are interested in knowledge of place, in where it is that such encounters occur. So why not map this? Why not plot the points at which outreach encounters with clients take place? This relatively simple procedure gives us the following representation of outreach work as a spatial distribution (see Figure 2, below). The map provides a means by which to visualise the points where outreach work and homelessness intersect, a geography of urban welfare provision and need, a geography of knowledgeable practice. The mapping of the location of outreach encounters has an obvious and immediate value. Paraphrasing Franco Moretti (1998: 13), mapping as an analytic practice proceeds as follows: you select a particular feature of whatever it is you are interested in (here, the outreach encounter), you find the data and then put those data together as a map in the hope that the visual construct will be more than the sum of its parts, that it will show a shape and that the pattern that emerges may add something to the information that went in to making it. This is elementary (both simple and essential) spatial analysis, and it is a very powerful way of putting questions to your data. The map lets us visualise the data set and maybe see something more: a pattern.

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Figure 2.

The geography of outreach encounter, marked as scatter of dots (left); a speculative ‘line of best fit’, or buffer, identifies pattern (right).

Significantly, the mapping of the encounters on the left of the image (Figure 2) tells us two things at once: where the homeless could be and where they actually are. On the one hand all that space, and on the other only these few and clustered locations. We have a connection, made visible: a connection between homelessness and space in the city of Cardiff, a connection that shows what it is that outreach workers know. Marking the spaces of the outreach encounter as dots on a map, then connecting these dots to form a line might be taken to demarcate a moral geography or boundary – a line along which the city meets its responsibilities to its poorest citizens, which perhaps also marks the limit of those responsibilities – and a physical geography too, with the homeless, drawn to the centre of the city but kept away from that prime regenerated space, held at the margins of the middle somehow: excluded. What we find then, in mapping the points of intersection at which outreach workers encounter their homeless clients, is a border, existential and geographic, that outreach workers routinely work along and across and, arguably, reproduce (see Rowe, 1999).

Outreach as geography

Outreach workers work along, and walk, a line, and some sense of that line is given in Figure 2. But this is of course only a line we have traced ourselves, as analysts of outreach practice, connecting the dots: it does little or nothing to show the actual movements of an outreach worker casting about for clients. Although each dot on the map marks an important outreach outcome – a meeting with a client – none of these dots is best understood as a destination, a recognised point of connection to which outreach workers can briskly make their way on leaving the office, certain of finding clients waiting for them. Instead, they must – to repeat – cast about. Doing so, casting about for the street homeless, if done right, will very likely result in outreach encounters, but no outreach patrol can know for sure, in advance, where those encounters will take place, today. Perhaps it would be better to think of the knowledge of place that outreach workers hold and employ as something that has less to do with a catalogue of remembered locations than with a way of moving likely to result in encounters. Yes, outreach workers go where the homeless are or might be found – but how do they get there?

It is not our aim (and not possible) in this article to provide an extended ethnographic account of homeless outreach work in Cardiff. But it will help our argument at this point if we expand a little on the work of outreach and how it gets done. Rather than ‘illustrate’ with chosen examples in the form of purported fieldnote extracts, we use the following section to provide a summary description of outreach work and what makes it distinctive as a spatial practice. We consider, in turn, pace, itinerary and bearing.

Lines of practice

Outreach workers hold and employ a local knowledge of place enacted in their movement around the centre of the city, the aim of which movement is to discover and encounter a client group variously located. But mapping only the outcomes of outreach – those moments of encounter – is to miss the activity through which that local knowledge is best exhibited: the activity of looking and moving, knowledgably, through the city streets, searching for someone – but no one in particular. Mapping the distribution of outreach work encounters across the city centre, as we have earlier in the article (Figure 2), does not show that at all. Instead, we get a scatter of coordinates. True, in making a basic kind of sense of those scattered dots, we can join them together with a line, and connecting the dots in this way might show us something about the shape of outreach work in central Cardiff. But there is also a sense in which the analyst’s pen is not really needed here. Outreach workers themselves are already tracing their own lines of connection, in mobile practice, moving from one encounter to the next or, rather, moving in ways likely to lead to encounters. Moving and looking, searching through the city, is outreach work getting done, just as much as are encounters with clients; the one could not happen without the other. We might argue, then, that mapping this work, the better to see local knowledge practised by a group of professionals who surely know where they are, who know their patch and how to move around it, ought properly to trace the line of that movement and not a scattering of stops.

Here then is a map(ping) of outreach work, not as a collection of locations distributed in space, but, rather, as lines of movement:

Each of the two images shows lines traced by outreach workers on patrol, presented here abstractly, as lines in space rather than as projections onto a base map (of the city streets). The left-hand image records the movement of a team of outreach workers in the course of one morning’s patrol; the right-hand image shows the same patrol repeated over a number of days and weeks, displayed in palimpsest. Each image has been produced using data from a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit carried along with us as we have followed along behind the team. The uses of GPS for qualitative research are only beginning to be explored (e.g. Jones and Evans, 2012), but there is surely potential in a technology that allows such a precise mapping of daily movement with little or no cost in terms of the most precious of fieldwork resources: the fieldworker’s time and attention. Freed up from studiously mapping the spatial progress of any outreach patrol we happened to accompany, we could simply switch on the unit and give that much more of our attention to other matters – not where we were going but how we were moving and what was being done and said along the way (all of this to then be matched to a precise log of movements downloaded back at the office). It is all very appealing. And what does it give us? We have a line, and a collection of lines, rather than a cluster of dots. We have the (true?) shape and distribution of homeless outreach in central Cardiff, as traced by its practitioners. And the dots are still there, only now they are what they were properly all along, which is to say moments of entanglement at which a line loops back on itself, slows up and knots together before moving off again; the darker clots and scribbles on the right-hand image show those moments and settings in which workers have repeatedly paused or circled while the GPS unit has simply marked time. What were previously ‘dots’ on a map marking encounters are joined up, not, this time, by the analyst looking for pattern but by the feet of the outreach worker: again, connections made visible. Not that pattern has been lost either: outreach patrols have a pattern all their own it would seem, a route confirmed in repetition and (surely) known, in advance, a particular, professional knowledge enacted as the tracing of a shape across the city.

Let us be clear about the potential significance of this claim. From the outset of the article, we declared an interest in outreach work as an instance of (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. We have provided a summary description of the practice that served to demonstrate the necessity of capturing movement, rather than encounters, in order to find knowing and going coming together in the work of the outreach team. Having done so, we can now view the lines of movement (Figure 3) as representing an expert, knowledgeable practice. If, then, these are the movements of practitioners with an expert knowledge of the place they are moving through, what we have here, in the lines produced by the GPS unit, is not only movement – the shape of outreach patrol – made visible but a representation of local knowledge itself.

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Figure 3.

A single outreach patrol (left) and palimpsest of outreach work (right).

Movement and knowledge

Mapping outreach work as movement rather than as encounter (and location) might better represent what, and how, it is that outreach workers know about Cardiff, and might even be said to show local knowledge in practice. And we might stop there. If we did, we would want to acknowledge, of course, that maps of movement are still only maps, not movement itself. Maps are tools, representations, with powerful effects, of which readers will be well aware. Maps inflate knowledge – giving us a territory all at once rather than, as we can only ever encounter it bodily, step by step – and at the same time diminish that which they display, reducing the act of movement to a plotted line. The reduction can be just as powerful as the inflation, yielding clarity and precision. And if the line on the page seems a little thin, as data – what could be thinner than a line? – it can always be thickened and rounded out again with everything else that a qualitative researcher might bring to bear by way of fieldnotes, recordings, pictures and more. But we are not satisfied with this as an adequate framing of the problem (and its solution): maps of movement show us something of what it is to move, to which more could and should be added. Instead, we want to suggest that mapping movement, as above, invites a rather powerful analytic inversion of the configuration of movement and knowledge. Here, we take our lead from anthropologist Tim Ingold (2007), whose work on lines and movement, on maps and mapmaking (Ingold, 2000: 219–242) and the relationship between knowing and going (Ingold, 2009) informs much of the above. Ingold (2009, 2011: 68) identifies what he calls a logic of inversion that sees knowledge divorced from environmentally situated experience and practice, then placed in advance of this, such that (knowledgeable) practice – moving, say – appears as the outward expression of a knowledge already held, in advance of going anywhere.

Here is how such an inversion occurs in the mapping of outreach patrol as we have discussed this. Outreach encounters are plotted as dots on a map, and we claim to see a pattern and perhaps then draw a line to make that pattern visible. Not satisfied with joining the dots ourselves, nor with an account of outreach that has workers doing much the same thing in full scale – moving from one encounter to the next like a bus between stops – we (re)direct our attention to outreach patrol as movement, as an activity in itself, a line of practice. We make a different map, and what we get is a tangle of lines, no dots. But still we look for pattern, and find it – already there, already visible, no analyst’s pen required. Outreach patrols arranged in palimpsest seem to share a basic shape, each more or less confirming the other. Why would that be? Surely because each patrol is an enactment of a knowledge that outreach workers hold in common. What we are looking at in Figure 3, is the shape, traced in space, of what outreach workers (already) know about the city’s homeless and where and how to find them. And this is the logic of inversion. Patterned movement is taken to be the proof of an antecedent knowledge, a knowledge of just which lines to move along, just where to look. Head over heels, as Ingold has it (2011: 33).

In closing, we want to turn this arrangement back around and consider outreach as an activity in which (at least some of the time and at some level) movement comes first and knowledge follows after. We have already described outreach patrols as local and recurrent and so they are. They keep to certain spaces in the city, covering the same ground again and again, day after day. You can see a pattern, a shape. But the shape is residual, not a template for future practice. To go out on outreach patrol is always to trace a line of movement through the city that will be different from any other previously traced even as it runs close to those laid down by earlier excursions. The line of any one patrol arises from the particular indications available that day – ‘What’s that, sticking out over there behind the bins?’, ‘Where are those two headed off in such a hurry?’ and ‘Is that Jimmy slumped down by the bus stop?’ – as well as the general investigative urge that all outreach patrols set in motion and indulge: ‘Let’s take a little look over there today, round the back’. ⁶ Accordingly, any one patrol makes its own way even as it braids together with others already undertaken. And this is demonstrably true, even the map says so! Take one last look at Figure 3. Certainly, the analytic instinct is to bring a pattern into focus, to see the shape that outreach patrols might seem to share. But even granting this – yes, there is a pattern – it is just as true to say that not any two of the outreach patrols are the same. That is what Figure 3 shows, just as evidently as it shows a pattern. Really it depends on what you are looking for, nor is this variation an error, each patrol representing a less than perfect attempt to execute a pre-planned route. There are no wrong turns. What the analytic instinct wants to relegate to the status of deviations, diversions and outliers – mistakes, perhaps – is actually the very stuff of outreach getting done.

Conclusion

In this article, we have considered the ways in which a group of welfare practitioners could be said to know about the city in which they work, and the ways in which research might grasp that accomplishment. Just what it means to know about anything at all has been our theme. To say of someone that they know all about a place might be taken to signify that their knowledge is comprehensive, that they have their place covered – mapped, perhaps – and have nothing left to learn. Alternatively, knowing about a place might be taken to refer to a more open and exploratory project, no less expert for that; to know all about is to range through an environment in pursuit of further enquiries. These are two different orders of knowledge, each of which we have considered in our discussion of outreach work with the street homeless in Cardiff. In this context, our contribution has been to argue that resisting the analytic urge to complete spatial practice as pattern and remaining instead with the difficulties of ‘mere description’ (see Wittgenstein, 1980: 257) affords an understanding of the relationship between mobility and knowledge that is resistant to the logic of inversion. Outreach workers do not go where they go because they know (in advance) where they are headed, but, rather, know what they know because they go. Outreach workers’ professional knowledge of the likely whereabouts of their clients is as much the product of their movements around, about and through the city, as it is any sort of a template for such movement. In this sense, and to borrow again from Ingold, outreach workers on patrol are wayfarers. Ingold describes wayfaring as a modality of travel distinct from transport; the latter jumps from stage to stage, arriving at and departing from successive destinations, the former proceeds along lines and is responsive to a traveller’s ‘perceptual monitoring of the environment … revealed along the way’ (2007: 78). For Ingold, wayfaring is both a fundamental mode of existence and at the same time one that struggles to find a foothold in modern metropolitan societies – organised as grids of streets and hubs for transport. Yet, city people continue to ‘thread their own ways through these environments, tracing paths as they go’ (Ingold, 2007: 75). Outreach workers certainly do, as we hope to have shown.