Abstract
This paper is about the twenty-four hour city and analyses this phenomenon with the assistance of a case study dispersed across (temporally and spatially) twenty-four hours spent moving in, around and with the city centre of Cardiff, UK. Reporting from a continuous twenty-four hour period of fieldwork the paper describes the round-the-clock work of a range of urban patrols – street sweepers, Police Community Support Officers and outreach workers – who, in various ways, contribute to the maintenance of the social and physical fabric of the city centre. Describing the seemingly disparate activities of these patrols, we make an argument for an attention to the polychronic mobility practices in and through which the street-level politics of space, movement and time are produced and negotiated. Indeed, the circulations of these patrols throws up a supporting cast of vulnerable street-populations – the homeless, street drinkers and street-based sex workers. Here, then, we juxtapose our description of this quotidian city with the imagery and politics of the ‘24-Hour City’ in pointing to a nuanced (rather than adversarial) and mobile (rather than static) relationship between need and vulnerability and the management of space, time and mobility in the city centre.
Introduction
This paper is about the twenty-four hour city. In it, our aim is to take this subject both seriously and literally. We do so by way of description: an extended account of one full day's fieldwork spent with round-the-clock street-level professionals and practitioners: street sweepers, Police Community Support Officers, a team of housing and homelessness outreach workers and a man called Mike. They appear, initially, an odd grouping, but they share two things. The first: they all spend a good deal of time moving around, and walking especially, in the centre of Cardiff, capital city of Wales. The second: they can all be said to attend and respond to the twenty-four hour demands of the 21st-century city. We begin with something of a contextualization in the form of a brief discussion of the processes currently rescoring city centre rhythms, the 24-Hour City concept and night-time economy in particular, before moving to our account of a rather more pedestrian twenty-four hour city.
Rescoring urban rhythms
The stuttering coda of the industrial rhythms that underscored urban life in the UK for the greater part of the 20th century yielded a period of uncertainty and challenge for urban economies. Globally circulating strategies of regeneration couched in, and promoting, ‘profit driven concerns of the entrepreneurial private sector and the lifestyle aspirations of its consumers’ (Hetherington, 2007: 637) found opportunity in crisis for a reimaging of the city as a space of consumption rather than (only) dwelling and work (Harvey, 1989; Hall and Hubbard, 1998). Certainly in Cardiff, the response to the crises of industrial decline focused on a remaking of the city's docklands where rhythms of manufacture and shipping have been replaced with those of strolling, eating and drinking, and ‘festival’ events (see Smith, 2010). More recently still, as with other post-industrial cities with which Cardiff shares this pattern of decline and reinvention, efforts of regeneration have turned from former industrial sites toward the city centre. And the redevelopment of Cardiff's central spaces has been striking. Broadly circulated recommendations combining contradictory rhetoric and design strategies of inclusivity and segregation, freedom and surveillance, accessibility and restriction have produced a clean, safe and busy retail area. Incredibly detailed protocol for everything from types of paving stones and trees to the positioning and design of benches has seen the ‘lonely walkways’ and ‘dead spaces’ (Thomas and Bromley, 2000) of the city centre, along with places to stop or be in private, ironed out. Such strategies for the reconfiguration of city space also have a good deal to do with its temporality too. Regeneration, then, might well be thought of as the strategic reordering of the conditions of possibility of time and space – which is to say, urban rhythms – aimed at resolving interruptions and threats to the neo-liberal, post-industrial city. In this context, the city centre had long been a problem; a symbol of a failure of the urban economy to fully adapt from a producer to consumer orientated economy (Zukin, 1995). The neglect of the city centre, ‘5pm flight’ (Thomas and Bromley, 2000), the enduring image of the night as dangerous frontierland (see Melbin, 1978 and Hadfield, 2006), combined with the moral fears of (potential) night-time city centre visitors and consumers (Oc and Tiesdell, 1997) was seen to be ‘one of the most important problems facing cities at the end of the 20th century’ (Heath, 1997: 193).
The response to the city centre ‘crisis’ of the mid 1990s came in the form of the ‘24-Hour City concept’ (Bianchini, 1995; Heath and Stickland, 1997), an umbrella term for a series of planning initiatives aimed at changing patterns of city centre use and consumption. Relaxed licensing legislation, late-night retail initiatives, the development of themed leisure ‘Quarters’ (see Gottdiener, 2001), and public realm restructuring and renewal extended the active economic and social, consuming, hours of the city centre beyond the working day, into the early evening and through to the early hours. The imagery of the night-time city centre was shifted toward one of a thrilling yet safe site of consumption; retaining elements of the excitement found in ‘braving’ the night, whilst offering consumption and leisure in a setting of ‘riskless risk’ (Chatterton and Holland, 2003 and see Hannigan, 1998). This nocturnal ‘economy of pleasure’ (Lovatt and O'Connor, 1995) has, for some time now, been recognized as a key element of sustaining a vibrant post-industrial city. Yet, as observed by Jacobs (1961: 245), some time ago now, the cost of the successful attraction of such a high concentration of strangers ‘all in too irresponsible a mood’, is the requirement of ‘unnatural’ measures of control and regulation. Cardiff offers an example of this contradictory nature of the night-time economy. Praised for its realization of the 24-Hour City concept (Heath, 1997), Cardiff also provides something of a folk devil for the UK media – a site and symbol of the excesses of sex, drinking and violence. It has also, in consequence, become a site of innovation in technologies of surveillance, crowd control and governance (see Edwards, 2010). The night-time economy is thus characterized by a ‘complex set of negotiations for a range of groups’ (Chatterton and Holland, 2003: 10) taking place within a highly criminogenic environment framed and perpetuated by market forces and limited state social control (Hobbs et al., 2000; Hadfield, 2006). At stake in these negotiations are the contradictions of simultaneously increasing deregulation and regulation, the politics, meaning and appropriation of the night-time city, the possibilities of diversity and the conditions of segregation. They are held between a number of public and (predominantly and increasingly powerful – see Chatterton and Holland, 2003) private stakeholders, competing social and cultural groups, between vast numbers of strangers; and between these strangers en masse and the city that must balance attraction, integration and regulation. Above all, the 24-Hour City concept and its Golem, the night-time economy, is a negotiation of space and time held in a far from neutral setting.
In a book concerned with urban rhythms there is, then, much to be learnt by attending to the 24-Hour City. Our concern, however, is that a focus on this 24-Hour City and the various issues associated with the spaces of the night-time economy for which it is shorthand, produces an ironically narrow view of the urban. A view which obscures the lived, street-level, politics revealed via a fuller engagement, spatially and temporally, with the quotidian city. We propose that an attention to rhythmicity, as suggested by Lefebvre (2004), offers an opportunity to glimpse, and retain, something of the complexity of the urban everyday. Doing so requires the spatial and temporal to be viewed in relation to each other; and this, we argue, requires an empirical attention to mobility. The paper thus seeks to reveal an urban politics of regulation and responsibility in public space by documenting the paths – as an entanglement of time, space, mobility and practice – along which such politics are realized (Hall and Smith, 2011).
As promised at the outset of the paper we intend to take the notion of a twenty-four hour city seriously and literally. Seriously, in that we are interested in exploring the ways in which negotiations of time and space occur around the clock, across in the city centre, and particularly at the margins of the city centre economy. And literally, in that we do so by documenting a full twenty-four hours spent on patrol in Cardiff. Our point of departure is, then, a curious but pedestrian truth: the very thing the 24-Hour City concept tends to lead away from is the reality that city life is a twenty-four hour operation, accomplished around the clock, and not always so thrilling.
Street-level city
The twenty-four hours we report on is neither composite, nor contrived; it is just one day, as alike and unlike any other as any one day might be. Whatever surprises a city might hold, day follows night follows day there, as reliably as it does anywhere else, supplying a baseline rhythm for urban experience. Taking this as our template, we present an account of a continuous twenty-four hour period of fieldwork observation undertaken in the centre of Cardiff. Our account is not static, but follows the mobile practices of a number of street-level operatives as they move in and with the city centre. These practitioners – street cleaners, Police Community Support Officers, and professional outreach workers and volunteers attending to the needs of the rough-sleeping homeless and sex-based street workers – are all street-level operatives, some of them are street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980), all are engaged in work that contributes to the possibility and ongoing upkeep of the fabric of the city. The work they do, without exception, relies upon, essentially is, pedestrian patrol. Repeated movement around the streets of the city centre, enacted so as to keep an eye on things, to be up to date with the needs and demands of the city and its citizens. Patrol, then, is not only in tune with urban rhythms but is itself rhythmic – a recurrent, repeated activity, with its own tempo and sequenced pauses, underscored by walking, the most mundane and essentially rhythmic of activities (Solnit, 2001).
Twenty-four hours is long enough to be on your feet in the city, but there is also a sense in which this can only be a snapshot. We acknowledge this and would be more cautious in our claims were it not the case that these twenty-four hours stand in front of more than three years of fieldwork as part of a study concerned with (pedestrian) mobility and (local) knowledge. Underpinning the wider project was an interest in the ways in which mobility and knowledge might inform each other and come together in the practices of those whose job it is to move in, and know, the city centre. The centrality of movement to their work – in, through and with the shifting terrain and population(s) of the city centre – saw these practitioners selected as our key informants. Mobility and, in particular, walking, is pivotal for the practitioners we document here in ways over and above that of other professions who might be considered ‘mobile’. 1 It was for these reasons that, for example, Police Community Support Officers interested us, rather than Police Officers. It is the PCSOs who spend their time in regular, ‘high visibility’ foot patrol of the city centre, rather than the Officers who are more often deployed in responsive mode. Other operatives who regulate and manage city space and movement – bouncers, taxi marshals, street pastors – do so statically and are absent for this reason. In referring to these operatives we use mostly their real names with our informants' consent and encouragement. 2
Overall, we intend the paper as an operationalization of Lefebvre's (2004) call for an empirical attention to rhythm as signature and mechanism of an everyday urban politics (Lefebvre, 1990). Our description does not stand as an adjunct to argument but as argument; an argument that explores the way in which a day spent walking in the city might reveal something of a city's social, spatial and moral organization; an argument that invites attention to the ways in which different street-level rhythms of mundane practice variously contribute to, accomplish, rub up against and skirt around the dominant and dominating rhythms of an aspiring 24-Hour City.
Twenty-four hours in the 24-Hour City
04.00
At this hour Cardiff city centre is as quiet as it gets, though not empty. The last of the partygoers from the night just passed traipse along the central pedestrian streets, heading home. So, too, the cleaning crews, though within the hour the morning shift begins. Paul is the first to arrive at the central depot on Millicent Street, climbing the stairs to the office and canteen for a first cup of tea. In the garage below are silent ranks of motorized trucks and sweepers. These operate throughout the day and into the late evening, but not at this hour when engine noise is disruptive to sleeping city-centre residents. Parked alongside these machines are the lowly push-along carts, ‘two-bin trucks’, one of which Paul now steers out into the streets, headed for the city's main plaza and transport hub, Central Square. His will be the first circuit of the day, one of ten repeatedly patrolled, covering the city centre and adjacent streets on foot. He carries a litter-pick grabber, balanced crosswise over the push handles of the truck; mounted on the side are a shovel and broom, also a sharps bin for the collection and disposal of syringe needles.
Paul's circuit takes in the bus station and thus requires an early start, before the first commuters arrive and the passenger aisles get congested. Paul makes his way briskly across the pedestrianized St David's Centre retail (and residential) development, where street cleaning is privately contracted, and turns down Caroline Street. All the shops – fish and chips and kebab houses mostly–are now long since closed, the street relatively clean, thanks to the efforts of the late-night shift. He zig-zags to swoop a few remaining cans and scraps of wrapping. Five minutes later he arrives at Central Square and the bus station. The waiting aisles, shuttered up for the night from somewhere around midnight up until 4.30, are now unlocked. The shutters are new, intended to keep the overnight litter – empty cans, cigarette ends, vomit, fast-food wrappers – down to a minimum, or rather to displace it. They keep the ‘dossers’ out too, as Paul explains. The one aisle that does stay open through the night is the one in twenty-four hour use, from which the National Express coaches run (local bus services suspend at about midnight); at the far end one of Paul's dossers is sleeping on the floor, under blankets. Working his way up and down all the aisles, Paul moves slowly, eyes to the ground, casting about for scraps and remainders. The job is routine, though you never know what you might find: a dead swan, one day last week; some months ago one of the crew got a needle-stick injury and had to send away for tests to see if he'd got AIDS, so the story goes.
The two-bin truck has to be manoeuvred – up and down kerbs, round corners through gaps – and Paul is adept at this; also fluent in his juggling of brush and shovel and grabber, as required. Alongside the bus station, also on Central Square, is the train station forecourt. Paul's circuit takes him past this, but not inside. A line in the pavement marks the limit of his responsibility to clean. Other buildings he passes have small aprons of land outside that are not quite part of the street and so again not his responsibility (sometimes he will help out, if asked nicely; and sometimes not). Past the train station, plywood hoardings mask a proposed residential development (rubble, for now). Some larger items – crates and boxes – have been left here, which Paul cannot lift. He will arrange for collection later, on return to the depot. There is no sign of Ross this morning, a persistent beggar recently ‘banned’ from Central Square through the coordinated efforts of the police and city centre management – though only between 8 am and 8 pm, meaning that he is usually up and about early, putting in a couple of hours of hard work with the early commuter traffic before his curfew begins. The irony is not lost on Paul.
With Central Square finished, Paul turns down Wood Street as far as the river bridge and back and then down the lane behind, running by the Millennium Stadium and another building site, awaiting development. From there to Westgate Street, where he turns left and heads away from the centre. He has another hour to go before reporting back to base and a cup of tea.
Here the tail-end of the 24-Hour City overlaps with the beginnings of (just) another twenty-four hours in the city. The excitement and spectacle of a night out in Cardiff, followed by Paul's ordinary circuit of Central Square and the surrounding area. It is a circuit that captures something of what it is to be out on the street at this hour, the potential of repulsion alongside a certain romance of venturing out into the city in the liminal hours. Only, this kind work is intended to remove traces of the former in easing the prospect of the latter for workers and commuters at the start of the city day. In this sense, Paul's labour is a repeated act of quotidian regeneration. No grand-scale, eye-catching makeover, but, even so, a renewal of the city centre for the users yet to arrive on its streets. A small act of kindness, perhaps, by the city toward its public (Thrift, 2005; Graham and Thrift, 2007). There are, of course, members of the public to whom Paul's contribution is not directed toward and who do not necessarily stand to gain from a cleaner, renewed public realm. Spaces in which one might keep out of the way are being ironed out of the redeveloped centre of Cardiff and, more often than not, the homeless residents of the city centre have to make their arrangements for sleeping in increasingly public spaces. Out of place and in the way. Sleeping (if they actually manage to catch an hour or so) is not so much of a problem – so long as they are up early – but any detritus they leave behind, in a city centre where appearances are paramount, certainly is. Paul's work, in addition to a routine renewal, might be said to be managing the material evidence of an overlapping of rhythms and publics. Those who have slept soundly inside, arisen and are making their way in to work, coffee in hand, those already working and counting down to the end of the shift, and those who haven't been anywhere at all and barely slept. Producing and maintaining clean and safe streets, free from all kinds of rubbish, means work around the clock; the early morning shift ensures a head start.
06:50
Just across the river, to the east of Central Square, a van parks up on the kerb outside of an unremarkable end of terrace house. The only indication the house is the Night Shelter – a temporary accommodation project for Cardiff's homeless – is a security camera above the door. Traffic is sparse on the road in the pre-dawn light as Sue, a professional social worker and member of Cardiff Council's Housing and Neighbourhood Renewal outreach team, rings a buzzer and heads inside, through to the office at the back of the house. She is there to pick up supplies for the Breakfast Run; a daily, year round, patrol of Cardiff, started some fifteen years ago. The Breakfast Run operates before the city centre is in full swing, to check on the welfare of rough sleepers that might be found there on any given morning. With the offering of a hot drink and something warm to eat, it is intended to overcome many of the barriers which might otherwise prevent clients accessing the help they need. It is, essentially, about being out there, meeting clients on their own patch and terms, to build relationships and to try to encourage clients into suitable projects, such as the Night Shelter. Sue asks if they have any vacancies and is told no by the hostel staff, except that a resident didn't show up last night. Sue has another client in mind for the room and says she'll offer it to him, unless she sees the missing resident first and he has a good excuse. As the clock gets round to 07:00, Sue and Rob, the volunteer for that morning, load up the van with flasks of hot water, a bag of bacon and sausage rolls and boiled eggs, and a large box containing tea, coffee, fruit juice, fruit and yoghurts and head out.
First stop is Central Square. The van pulls up in a car park off to the side of the station building. Three men are already waiting. They approach the van, exchanging friendly greetings; Rob gets on with making coffee at the back of the van. Sue is talking to the men, asking if they're all right, if Ian made his appointment with the doctor yesterday, how Ron is managing sleeping on floor space at the city's principal homeless hostel. Sue then leaves to take a walk through the train station and around Central Square to see if anyone else is around, perhaps still asleep in one of the bus shelters. Rob had said he saw someone sleeping in the National Express stand on his way in. Sue returns, saying she didn't find anyone and Ron chips in, saying he saw someone sleeping under the railway bridge on his way to the van. Some speculation follows as to who it might be and whether it could be the same guy Rob saw, moved on from the relative shelter of the bus station.
After the van is packed up they continue making their way across the city, stopping en route to follow up on Ron's lead. Under the railway bridge, just around the corner from the central homeless hostel, Sue spots a pink blanket, the outline of a body huddled underneath it. She approaches, crouches down and says ‘Morning. Are you all right there?’ No response. Sue tries again, this time placing her hand where she figures his arm to be. Still no response. Sue glances at Rob, concerned. She tries again and this time elicits a mumbled response. She asks for a name and receives an answer that sounds like Kevin. ‘Kevin’ doesn't stir. Sue leaves him be and heads to the front of the hostel to see if they know anything about the man sleeping under the bridge. A discussion with the hostel staff follows; the police dropped someone here last night, too drunk to be let in and, besides, there were no spaces.
The patrol continues for the next hour and a half; moving, searching and stopping. In this time they visit the small space that a client, Philip, has claimed for himself, tucked away between the wall of a car park and the bank of a canal. They park the van in the car park and Philip makes his way up and along the bank to the back of the van. He has been there six months now, his appearance telling, hair matted and beard long. Philip is in good spirits today, chatting as his thermos flask is filled with hot water and he takes a vegetarian sausage roll, boiled egg, fruit and yoghurt. Any spares this morning guys?
Sue and Rob leave and spend time searching around and behind the buildings of the civic centre, where Harry Evans has been sleeping. Harry has had some trouble of late, moved on by security guards as a result of other rough sleepers moving into his space, messing things up for him by leaving rubbish, graffiti and shit behind. The team are worried about Harry and his health. He's in his early forties but looks at least fifteen years older. He walks with a stick and often has trouble getting up in the morning from the cold floor on which he has been sleeping. The search yields no trace of anyone having slept in the area and they move on, ending up back where they started, at the Night Shelter, where they record the names and location of the sixteen rough sleepers seen that morning.
Meeting up with regulars and searching out new clients, the Breakfast Run relies upon a particularly close knowledge of the city centre. Keeping up with changes in and amongst their client group, their preferred locations, and shifts in the terrain of the city centre itself, is a job of work. Numbers of rough sleepers seen on the Breakfast Run are resistant to pattern and hard to predict. Something that is consistent, however, is the timing of the Breakfast Run, in the early, liminal, hours, before the city, and the homeless, have got going for the day. And this creates a pressure on the patrol to complete a balanced tempo between searching, stopping and moving to meet those sleeping rough before they are up and away, by their own volition or otherwise. The work of the team is underpinned by a simple dichotomy of ‘in’ and ‘out’; rhythmic in being intrinsically spatial and temporal. Clients out on the street, having, perhaps, arrived there after being in doors – or ‘inside’ – for a while need to be located and identified. The team spend a good deal of time out and about on the street, building trust and confidence in regular interactions such as those produced by the Breakfast Run. The repeated, careful and, at times, frustrating work is directed toward a longer-term aim of helping clients to get in somewhere, if possible. If that is the wider welfare and social care purpose of the team then a more immediate one is to get the rough sleepers up and away before other agents arrive to do so. The offer of breakfast is a tool for opening interactions but also encouraging people to get a move on in the morning. If street cleaning crews are involved in a quotidian regeneration of the material city each early morning, then the Breakfast Run could be said to operate as a social equivalent. They are moral street sweepers. So, whilst welfare is a priority for the team never in doubt, their work might also be seen to contribute to a politics of space and time in the city centre: the city and the outreach team each want the homeless off the streets, for good. Outreach work is, then, Janus faced (Rowe, 1999), playing a role in removing social matter out of place from the streets before the city begins the day proper and its other, less permanent but more welcome, publics arrive.
10:00
At Central Police Station the team of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) are preparing for the day shift. In a small briefing room with maps taped to a table demarcating the boundaries of the team's city centre area and its subdivision into various patrols, they don stab-jackets and high-visibility vests with the giveaway blue badges distinguishing the PCSOs from the Police Officers. Deb is talking to Sarah about their prospective patches for the day. Deb will patrol the central shopping area, including Central Square (‘lucky you'). Sarah has the park (‘that'll be exciting'). Deb talks to another officer, Gerry, about complaints regarding a rough sleeper who has made a spot for himself on the steps of the Cardiff International Arena. They haven't got there before he is up and away yet. Central Square is a well-known problem spot for the small team of PCSOs with various issues constantly arising that require management: taxis parking off rank and blocking access; drinking within and around the alcohol exclusion zone; and beggars targeting the more or less steady stream of people making their way to and from the train station and bus stands. Begging is a key issue for the city of late. It creates a bad image; especially right here on the welcome mat. Of the regular beggars in the city centre, it is spot beggars, like Ross Murphy, who are the biggest problem. The PCSOs and Neighbourhood Police Team know him well. Deb sees a cycle he has got himself trapped in. He has recently served time for breaching conditions of a previous Anti-Social Behaviour Order and is now banned from the city centre between 8 am and 8 pm. He is never inside long enough to really escape the problems he is caught up in on the outside, and so regularly finds himself back in the same loop upon being released. But you just can't have beggars approaching people in the street, especially when they are persistent and aggressive. It is intimidating.
Central Square is relatively quiet today. Deb notices that the gate to a building site abutting the train terminus is unlocked and takes the opportunity to investigate. Behind it is a large but secluded space, the ground strewn with rubble and litter, brick arches of the railway embankment making up one side and plywood hoardings the other three. The first archway contains three lots of bedding, bags and clothing – the occupants nowhere to be seen. Syringes lie on the ground along with ‘those silver cup things they're giving out nowadays’. The next archway is also occupied; although this time the occupant – a man who looks in his forties – is still there, awake, sat up in a sleeping bag under piled blankets. Deb steps through a line of sparse bushes, and talks to him in a friendly manner, taking his details and asking if he knows the outreach team and where the homeless services in Cardiff are. Deb is concerned about the man; vulnerable there on his own, out of sight. Anything could happen to him. As such, Deb decides to visit the outreach team at their office, just across Central Square, to pass on the man's whereabouts and details. The site is visible from the team's office window and Deb and Sue look out whilst Deb explains that the police have been in touch with City Centre Management who have in turn been in touch with the construction firm about getting the entrance and perimeter secured properly. For everyone's sake.
PCSOs are the regular face of the police on the streets and in the public spaces of the city centre. Their patrol is tied to the hours of business and work in the city centre and, spatially, to the flows of pedestrians making their way around the central retail areas. Serving a community when one is working in the city centre is, of course, a distinct proposition from being based in the surrounding suburbs. In the centre, a remit of community support indicates a commitment to the retail and leisure establishments and residents of city centre apartment blocks, and close liaisons are thus maintained. Yet the PCSOs in the high-visibility foot patrol which accounts for 80 per cent of their time, also – and perhaps primarily so – tend to the looser, more transient community of pedestrians that at any one time make up a significant proportion of the city centre's population; walkers that the city centre is increasingly geared to attract, offering pleasurable, welcoming and secure public spaces. An ever-increasing visitor population arriving in the city centre exacerbates the visibility of begging and street drinking. Yet there exists a social ecology between the main stream of retail pedestrians and the homeless (who are the truly pedestrian), which finds these two groups sharing city centre space. Often the response is to enforce segregation by direct policing, bans and curfews. Sometimes it is a duty of care for the public which finds spaces like the building site secured, but removed as an available space for rough sleepers and others who want or need to escape from the public eye.
As one might expect at this time, Central Square is busy with people arriving in or leaving the city. Jeff, a senior outreach worker with the Housing and Neighbourhood Renewal (HANR) team is standing by the entrance to Marland House watching the passersby. The team's office is ideally located, right in the middle of things where a good number of its clients can be found throughout the day and on into the early evening. After a couple of minutes Jeff's colleague Dennis joins him on the steps. A group of young lads and two girls are hanging around in the alley next to the offices and by the public phone box on the street – being loud, squaring up to each other, making half-serious threats centred on debts for cigarettes and small amounts of money. This group are becoming known to the outreach workers. They have been turning up at the ‘evening soup run’, looking for trouble with the team's homeless clients who gather there. Jeff rolls his eyes at Dennis and they set off, walking slowly up St Mary's Street toward the civic centre.
There are still a good number of people on the main shopping streets, Queen Street in particular. On a corner, outside a convenience shop, Dennis stops to speak to a young man sat begging to the left of the doorway, blanket spread over his knees, hood up over his head. Dennis crouches down to talk to Dan; pedestrians have to make their way around the small, but now enhanced, obstruction that Dennis and Dan create together. Dennis asks him how it's going (the begging) and whether he's managed to sort out a place for the night. He tells Dan to get up to ‘the bus’ later, there are a few extra beds being made available and he might have a chance at one.
After walking the length of Queen Street, and back again, Jeff and Dennis arrive at the bus themselves. Parked up in front of the museum in the civic centre, a large purple double-decked bus – equipped with kitchen, washing facilities, and a TV and DVD player – makes for an unusual sight. It acts as a service point for the homeless of the city where they can get hot food, sometimes medical attention and register for a bed for the night in a hostel. The bus is tolerated in this central location because of its temporariness and mobility. It, and the particular crowd that the bus draws, never fails to attract the attention of early evening strollers heading toward Queen Street. There are probably twenty or so people there tonight, predominantly male and predominantly young, hanging around on the pavement and clustered at the hatch at the rear of the bus where the hot food is being served. To the front of the bus, the cab doubles as an office from which Jarek, a burly Polish man, coordinates available hostel bed spaces and emergency accommodation for those who ‘present’. Jeff and Dennis separate, joining small groups and their conversations with ease. Everyone there knows and respects Jeff and Dennis. They spend an hour or so, listening to various complaints, receiving and dispensing light-hearted jibes and banter. Yet whilst the bus offers space and time to catch up with clients, this is outreach patrol; better to be moving, not stuck at the bus for too long, and so they say their goodbyes and walk back to Queen Street and on toward Charles Street where the evening soup run will soon be setting up. On the way over they cut across a small grassed area behind the St David's 2 shopping centre and spot Harry Evans sitting on one of the concrete benches, on his own, staring into space. Jeff and Dennis both notice him and, knowing that he hadn't been seen by the Breakfast Run this morning, briefly glance at each other, making sure the other has seen, but carry on walking. No need to bother him just now, but good to see him all the same.
The soup run is organized by a cooperative of churches, and the team make a habit of arriving early, before the volunteers arrive to set up. This is a quiet time that the team and some of their most needy clients are pleased to share before the numbers swell and the scrum for the food and whatever other goods – clothes, toiletries and dog food – are available that night has formed. The soup run volunteers arrive and within half an hour have set up trestle tables from which to distribute the goods. A large crowd has formed which the volunteers try to organize into some sort of queue. First come first served, but beyond that no discrimination is made. Anyone who turns up can ask for food and will get it. Numbers can easily top forty. And this can complicate the work of outreach: ‘sometimes it's like playing spot the homeless person’. Initially they stand back, observing. Dennis works the crowd from its fringe, leaning on a bin, smoking his pipe. A young man wearing a grey tracksuit comes over and they hold a private conversation out of earshot of the others. Jeff watches intently as the food is given out without incident. There are often times when outreach work at the soup run becomes a job of policing as much as anything else. In close proximity and in open competition for free food and goodies tensions accumulated over what, for some, has been a long day without much sleep the night before can boil over. But not tonight. The church volunteers circulate in the crowd offering the last of a packet of biscuits. Only now is the relative peace threatened as a string of obscenities and threats are directed by a man with long hair, wearing a leather jacket, toward another he is pursuing. Both are known to the outreach team who watch, but do nothing, as on this occasion the dispute rumbles on but without showing signs of escalating, continuing further down Charles Street.
Evening patrol with Cardiff City Council's HANR outreach team takes place in the crepuscular hours. It is no coincidence that these are also the liminal hours for the economy of the city centre. In this way evening outreach mirrors the Breakfast Run in slotting in to the marginal hours of the economy, operating in a small window of two hours or so in which people are busy making their way home after work or preparing to come back to the centre again. In taking place, as it does, at a later point in the day it is distinctive and brings different pressures. The morning patrol must manage the issues associated with the, sometimes daunting, prospect of the day ahead. The evening patrol is dealing with that day's accumulated troubles. Any leads must be followed, loose ends tied up. It presents a final chance for the team to contact and check up on clients before they have tucked themselves away for the night somewhere. The evening patrol – perhaps more so than the Breakfast Run – can thus be said to walk a line, literally and figuratively, which traces the complexities of welfare provision to and the management of their client group as an allocation of time and space.
20:30
Night-time outreach with the Streetlife project starts from the Salvation Army hostel, Ty Gobaith. The project was set up to protect young people and adults from prostitution, abuse and sexual exploitation and ‘to help change the lives of those involved and affected by sex work’. During office hours, Streetlife project workers are available to meet with clients to provide mentoring and advocacy services. But the project also operates out of hours, at night – which is when (as with any other city) street-based sex work is at its busiest and most visible. Outreach is an important part of the project's remit and three times a week a service is delivered by van and on foot through the city's ‘red light’ areas. These areas are fairly well defined but not altogether stable and strung out along quite a swathe of city real estate, most of it running alongside the London to Cardiff railway line (the other side of the tracks from the hotspots of the night-time economy). A project van, stocked with hot drinks and snacks, needle exchange packs, condoms and assorted advice leaflets, is used to cover this area, parking up at regular intervals and whenever ‘hailed’ by any of the women out working. The van, though intentionally nondescript and unmarked, is well known to most of the regular street-based sex workers in Cardiff, many of whom are already in contact with the Streetlife project. But the population does shift and turn over, and one of the roles of night-time outreach is to identify and make contact with any ‘new’ women who may not have heard of the project.
Thursday evenings see staff from the HANR outreach team join Streetlife staff and/or volunteers, meeting up at Ty Gobaith to load up the van and head off for an hour or two driving up and down the same few streets and a familiar collection of industrial estates and business parks, all south of the city centre. It turns out to be a quiet night, as sometimes happens; demand for the service is uneven and can fluctuate considerably, even from one evening to the next, and certainly over longer periods. Tonight the police seem to be having something of a crackdown, and it is probably this more than any other single factor – the weather, the time of year, the shifting coalitions and rivalries of the woman involved – that has cleared the streets. There are police cars circling much the same route as the Streetlife van, and at least two police officers patrolling on foot.
The van stops for Wendy, a woman already in contact with the Streetlife service and well known to HANR outreach too. She is anxiously glancing round for police cars: ‘If they stop me now, I'll say I was only waiting on outreach and then I'm going home. It's true. I'm only doing one more then I'm going home’. Condoms are handed over along with hot chocolate, cigarettes and details of a recently reported attack. Project workers routinely field and redistribute reports of ‘dodgy’ punters best avoided and cars – make, model, licence plate number – to keep away from. Incident reports like this one are also shared with the police, anonymously if requested by the women.
Ten minutes later another woman waves down the van. This is Heather, who starts up an urgent conversation about her Drug Rehabilitation Requirement (DRR). 3 ‘I'm in such trouble’, she begins, then launches into a confused account of why she has missed her latest supervision meeting. She is worried she will have triggered ‘breach’ proceedings and will soon be back in court. The outreach team take scribbled notes and Heather's mobile phone number; a Streetlife project worker will call her tomorrow in office hours to try and sort this out for her – if it can be sorted.
Then another, stood under the flyover. The van slows down on approach but then speeds up and drives by, warned off by a last-minute, covert flap of the hand: a punter has pulled over and the outreach team have learned to keep their distance on these occasions (the project van can be mistaken for an unmarked police vehicle). Then one more, who wants only condoms and doesn't have time to stop and chat (but notes the incident report). And then back to base. All agree it has been a quiet patrol – uneventful. A good thing?
These are core hours for the night-time economy and the vision of the 24-Hour City with which we began. Here, however, away from the crowds, music and neon we find an alternative night-time economy. Same times maybe, but found in the peripheral spaces of the city centre; industrial estates, distributor roads, outlying residential areas. To map the Streetlife patrol is to connect points of contact with Cardiff's street-based sex workers and their relationship to these outlying spaces. The patrol follows a fairly regular pattern; a pattern performed in part because both the outreach team and the clients with which it works must be locatable and visible. In this way the Streetlife patrol is less reliant on searching as mode of operation than patrols tending to the homeless. Like those other patrols with a social work remit, a locatable client group means the Streetlife project can build relationships in and through regular, and repeatable, interactions. If the women need to be visible to potential custom and are therefore visible to the Streetlife patrol, they are, of course, also visible to police patrol. And a crackdown by the police can have two outcomes. It can either keep the women out on the street for longer, as the presence of the police scares off what potential business there is – increasing the time it takes to make the money they came out to earn – or it drives the women off the street, making it harder still for the outreach team to locate them and keep in touch.
00:00
Mike Watkins has been helping Cardiff's homeless for twenty years, once a week every Thursday night. His operation is private and unfunded – his own car, time and donated goods from his church congregation. He is very well known, respected and relied upon by Cardiff's street population, but otherwise unsung and mostly unseen – he goes out at midnight, typically through to three or four in the morning.
Mike climbs into his car which is tightly packed with thermos flasks and hot food, neatly folded piles of second-hand clothes, several pairs of new shoes, a dozen blankets and a couple of rucksacks. The first port of call is the civic centre, where Mike parks his car and steps out to organize the twenty or so assorted individuals waiting for him on the steps of the National Museum – not a few drunk, one or two of them known to be ‘trouble’. This has become a regular stop over recent months and will remain so unless and until Mike feels it is getting too busy and difficult to manage, at which time he will start out again somewhere else. Those meeting up with Mike outnumber those sleeping out on any given night, and although Mike is pleased to spend time and share food and drink with anyone, he has his priorities. Those he is really here to help are those sleeping out – like Dave, stood apart from the more boisterous element, in his stained and greasily stiffened puffa jacket and full beard, muttering to himself.
Mike works the crowd, keeping order and making time for individual conversations. Stood at the rear of the car with the boot open he distributes hot drinks and snacks (holding back the hot food till later) and fields a steady stream of requests: a blanket, a jacket, socks, a rucksack, shoes, a sleeping bag. Some of these will have been logged last week, since when Mike has managed to secure whatever it was – size 9 boots, a sleeping bag. Some can't be met tonight: ‘Next week. I'll see what I can do.’ The gathering is mostly congenial. The weather is mild and there is no more than the usual irritation and difficulty. No one ‘kicks off’. Slowly the crowd thins out, leaving only those who have nowhere else to go, at which point Mike breaks out the hot food he has kept out of sight behind a bin bag full of jumpers: baked potatoes, beans and cheese. Asked to do so, Mike says a short prayer.
After a good hour spent on the Museum steps, Mike begins to move around, beginning by circling the rest of the civic centre, where he finds several sleepers – asleep – under the portico of the Crown Courts. He tiptoes over, leaving food and drink and a scatter of cigarettes beside the lumpy bags and blankets. Next the back lanes running towards the city centre, looking in particular for a group who were at the Museum steps earlier but skipped out. Mike had arranged to meet up with this lot later, only now they are not where they said they would be; whatever plans they had have changed or been forgotten. Twenty minutes later Mike spots a young man he recognizes, stepping down from a police van with two large bags of what look to be hastily assembled belongings. It turns out he has been evicted, or at any rate removed – the details are unclear and no doubt contested – from the hostel he was staying at, and is now ‘out’ for what remains of the night. Mike fetches hot food and drinks and stays to talk for half an hour, mostly listening to the young man's grievances and regrets, delivered in a slurred monotone. He wants a job, more than anything. He repeats this like a mantra: if he only had a job, that would put things right.
Next is a visit to Philip's camp by the canal. Mike has wind of this location thanks to the HANR team, who first found Philip and passed the news along. A thin muddy path leads through bushes to Philip's remarkable abode. There is nothing as simple as a tent, rather the place has the look of a nest, woven together out of various scraps of available material, chief among which is a large sail of plastic sheeting that he has got from somewhere and somehow fixed to the wall against which he is lying. The sheeting hangs down at 45 degrees from about head height to the ground where it is presumably pinned. This makes for a triangular space: dirt floor, dank wall and overhead sloping plastic roof. Philip is inside, perfectly at ease it seems, and happy. He stays lying down, raised on one arm as he chats with Mike and gobbles down a baked potato.
After Philip, one last trip back into the centre, driving up Charles Street to park near the Ebenezer Church. Mike walks along Queen Street heading towards the Cardiff Castle, carrying flasks and bags of food. Halfway along he turns left to find two sleepers in a doorway close to Starbucks, and having left them with food and cigarettes he calls it a night and heads back to the car. It is close to three o'clock and the clubs on Queen Street are closed now or closing. Small pockets and throngs of partygoers are still about, though with the look of heading home.
Conclusion
A day and a night and the hours in between spent patrolling the city centre allows one to (begin to) appreciate the twenty-four hour city. A city quite distinct from the contradictory but popular imagery of bright lights, music and good times set against a backdrop of corporatization, violence and social control which the 24-Hour City concept conjures. The reader will have recognized the distinction in a series of connections strung throughout the day. The connections are not solely conceptual, but spatial and temporal too, made in the distribution, overlapping and intermeshing of the mobile practices described. The connections and distribution of practice are, then, rhythmic. And they are so in two senses. The first sense finds a given patrol operating within – constrained by – dominating rhythms, either circadian or those of capital and consumption. If the outreach team wants to locate, meet up with, and work with their homeless clients the times and spaces for this are (increasingly) peripheral. If the patrols of the PCSOs are to provide a reassuring presence and offer assistance to the public, then the inverse holds. The second sense finds the practice of urban patrol, in (at)tending to the physical and social fabric of the city centre, not only shaped by external rhythms of the city but also, and perhaps equally, shaping and (re)producing such rhythms in the management of space, time and mobility in the city centre.
The work undertaken in the course of these patrols is, despite our insistence upon its significance, modest, unremarkable; piecemeal, even. In much the same way that construction workers in high-visibility jackets blend into the background, the various practices of care and repair we document here are overlooked and under-observed (Graham and Thrift, 2007). This tinkering quality of patrol makes it a minority practice in the urban order (Hall, 2010), yet essential to the reproduction of that order from one day to the next. The contribution of the paper is, in part, to provide an empirical case as a basis from which to recognize the centrality of this work to the maintenance of the twenty-four hour city. Whilst this is contribution enough in its own right, we also intend this description as an argument for an attention to street-level, pedestrian practice (of street sweepers, PCSOs, welfare workers and independent volunteers in this case), as a means of tracing the lines along which a moral geography and timescape of the city is produced in everyday life. That our description is concerned not simply with the distribution of practice but with mobility practices proper finds the spatial and the temporal interwoven. And it is the centrality of mobility to our informants and, indeed, to our argument that leads us to our concluding commentary on the twenty-four hour city which we make by way of contrast with the 24-Hour City and its night-time economy.
Ranging across the city with the various patrols for an entire day was, of course, an immediate and obvious (if tiring) way of exploring the contrast between the two notions of what a twenty-four hour city might be. Having done so, a focus on mobile practices allows us – and now the reader – to see a contrast to the entrepreneurial, corporatized 24-Hour City which, we argue, offers an alternative understanding of the politics and management urban public space.
The first contrast is quantitative. At the outset of the paper we noted a concern with the ways in which the 24-Hour City, really, refers to a rather narrow segment of time and space, cut from a continuous urban rhythmicity. This view, of course, relates to an equally narrow segment of the population of the city centre, if not numerically then certainly in terms of diversity, which in turn comes to stand as symbol for the entire nocturnal urban population. As also noted at the outset of the paper, a directly proportionate relation exists between attraction and regulation in this condensed version of urban life; the more people an area is successful in attracting the more the area will require the ‘unnatural’ forms of regulation and intervention which provoked the scepticism of Jane Jacobs. As a consequence of the ‘honey-pot effect’ (Hadfield, 2006), the publics of the night-time economy are condensed, rather than dispersed. It follows, then, that the forms and strategies of control are essentially static in nature. CCTV, bouncers and a range of new additions (taxi marshals, street pastors and city ambassadors, for example) found in Cardiff and elsewhere operate from fixed positions, known trouble spots and high crime areas. Such static technologies point to a governance of flows and clots of publics in and out of a fixed site. The regulation of access, arrivals and departures, thresholds and comings together in public space is the stuff of night-time economy social control. There is, of course, much to be critical of regarding the proliferation of the technologies developed and deployed in these spaces; yet one might also consider the way in which the crowds of the night-time economy, once out of sight and site, are out of mind, bused out or put into taxis. A further critique lies in recognizing that over and above the issues within the spaces of the night-time economy, the ‘conquering’ of the night-time frontier by city planners and corporations has produced additional spaces and times in and during which the city is segregated and exclusory to a range of marginal social groups (Thomas and Bromley, 2000; Chatterton and Holland, 2003 inter alia); not least, the city centre homeless.
Moving out beyond the time and space of the night-time economy, and avoiding lazy juxtapositions between the nine-to-five city and the ‘excitement’ of nocturnal leisure, marginal yet essentially urban groups are made visible. Furthermore, one might consider how spending time moving, walking, in the city centre, rather than staying put, staring at space, has led us, perhaps inevitably, to the vulnerable, and most frequent, occupants of city centre streets. We note, again, that ours was not a study of need or vulnerability per se but, rather, of mobility and local knowledge in practice. What we find is that an attention to practitioners for whom moving and knowing come together in significant ways at street level, produces a supporting cast of rough sleepers, beggars, street drinkers and sex workers. 4 One might dismiss this as trivial happenstance. We think, however, that our description points to, and reveals, a relationship between (urban) vulnerability and mobility. In a city centre geared up for smooth and easy pedestrian circulation the problem for the street homeless is not so much that they have nowhere to go, but, rather, they have nowhere to stop, at least not for long (Hall and Smith, 2013). The real residents of the twenty-four hour city, those who variously inhabit rather than simply pass through the streets, experience mobility as a burden. They create an inconvenience for the image of a city going places in that they share public space with visitors, workers, tourists. They also inevitably come into contact or, better put, cross paths with patrols intended to maintain the city centre. Street sweepers and PCSOs fulfil a duty of care; a care sometimes directed to ‘the city’, sometimes to its public, sometimes to those at the margins, sometimes for their own good. The outreach teams and Mike are out in public space for different reasons; they operate with a more readily recognized care, for the vulnerable and those in need. Yet there is, as will have been recognized, an ambivalence in their practice too. The outreach team are also employees of the city. Their presence in the city centre is tolerated, for now, as they also perform a role of soft policing and monitoring, so long as they do not make too much of a scene in taking care of the homeless. 5 One might say that Mike, making his rounds in the hours after midnight, is a different case. But whilst the city might have anxieties about people heading out to feed and counsel the homeless in a wholly voluntary and ‘unofficial’ capacity, it still benefits from Mike's work. The intervention, no matter how small, contributes a mitigating effect upon urban inequalities which might otherwise become unmanageable.
In moving toward a conclusion it is possible to contrast the mundane twenty-four hour city with that of the 24-hour night-time economy in terms of the practices of care and welfare we have described here. There is, here, evidence of the exercise of a duty of care – of small acts of kindness within a wider infrastructure of support – by the city and its street-level practitioners for its most publically vulnerable citizens. Yet we do not offer this description as a simple counterpoint to the imagery of the night-time battlefield (Hadfield, 2006) where lines are drawn between the state, the private sector and various social groups excluded, made vulnerable or overly and overtly controlled in the nocturnal spaces of the city, by drawing another line of our own. We are not interested in reproducing an adversarial politics of the street but, rather, in pointing to a politics of urban public space which recognizes, in our description of urban patrol, a politics of negotiation running throughout practices of care, repair and maintenance, physical and social, in the city centre. And it is in urban patrol, that we find these negotiations traced in space in practices which combine in managing – through overlapping, polychronic modes of welfare and regulation – those that both threaten and pollute the vision of a sanitized, ‘safe’, and profitable city centre, whose presence in public space is directly linked to need and vulnerability. That is to say, in attending to the rhythmic and rhythmed practices of street sweepers, PCSOs, and welfare workers we hope to have captured something of the moral order of urban rhythmicity and perhaps offered a view of patrol as a process through which Lefebvre's dialectic of time and space and energy can be seen as negotiated, not statically in space, but on the move. In doing so, and perhaps above all, this description traces out across a single day, a relation between movement and need and care as found in an entanglement, a coming together of time, space, mobility and persons framed by, and producing, the rhythms of the twenty-four hour city, around the clock, with no time out.
Footnotes
Take paramedics, for example. For paramedics, movement is adjunct. Stuck with the difficulties of movement to a known destination in the urban environment, they must move as quickly and freely as possible to arrive somewhere in order to begin the work of a paramedic – informed by a knowledge of short cuts, the ability to drive through red lights and GPS navigation. In the extreme case emergency response cuts out the urban terrain completely. They use a helicopter. For outreach workers, moving in and with the urban environment is not adjunct nor inconvenience, but is central to, is outreach work. Rather than simply moving and arriving, our informants are, instead, searching, patrolling often with no fixed destination in mind.
There are a couple of exceptions, ‘Mike Watkins’ is one. Not so much as to protect his identity but to reflect his lack of interest in or need for publicity. Another is the various individuals encountered by our informants within the course of these twenty-four hours; the street homeless, and sex workers in particular. They were never our direct respondents, nor the focus of the research, and have been given pseudonyms.
The Drug Rehabilitation Requirement is a community-based penalty/programme offered in this case as an alternative to prison; Heather's DRR requirement includes a drug treatment package, regular supervision and mandatory drug testing.
That is not to say that we were surprised by this, only that the focus of the research on patrols was more profound than a means to ‘get at’ the city's vulnerable for research purposes.
At the time of writing, the Breakfast Run has received a sufficient number of complaints from various businesses and premises, who see them as ‘attracting’ the street homeless to the city centre, that they can no longer stop at Central Square, nor along the central shopping street. This further illustrates both the centrality of appearances in the centre of things and also the pressures that the rhythms of shoppers, tourists and workers arriving in the city in the morning exert.