REVIEWS of StreetCities: Rehousing the Homeless
Gerald Daly. (2006). Book Review. StreetCities: Rehousing the Homeless. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15(2). Read full review.
Anthony Marcus. (2008). Book Review. StreetCities: Rehousing the Homeless. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(1). Read full review.
- StreetCities is a valuable addition to the literature of homelessness and will be useful for researchers, students, service-providers, activists, and policy-makers.
Anthony Marcus. (2008). Book Review. StreetCities: Rehousing the Homeless. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(1). Read full review.
- StreetCities: Rehousing the Homeless is Rae Bridgman's study of 'StreetCity' and 'Strachan House', a Canadian government supported alternative communal housing experiment for chronically homeless men and women in downtown Toronto in the 1990s. In looking at everyday life in the two converted warehouses that made up this program, Bridgman makes an impassioned plea for an approach to housing the homeless that involves autonomy, self-organisation, and emotional healing through the creation of community. Posing her arguments in the intentionally modest form of interlocking questions like 'why not recognize homeless people cooperating together as part of a collective?' and 'how can homeless people themselves challenge their own homelessness and the homelessness of others?' (p. IOI), Bridgman defines two key themes that echo throughout this book: 'an appreciation of utopian impulses in work for social change and an interest in different forms of ethnographic writing' (p.26).