Social Work and the City

Urban Themes in 21st-Century Social Work

Charlotte Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137516220
• eBook ISBN: 9781137516237
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book critically explores ways of thinking about the city and its relevance for the profession of social work. It provides a colourful illustration of practice drawing on examples of social work responses to a range of issues emerging from the unprecedented scale, density and pace of change in cities. The associated challenges posed for social work include: the increased segregation of the poor, the crisis of affordable housing, homelessness, gentrification, ageing, displacement as a result of migrations, and the breakdown of social support and care. 

Drawing on multiple disciplines, this groundbreaking work shows that these familiar features of the twenty-first century can be counteracted by the positive aspects of the city: its innovation, creativity and serendipity. It has a redistributive, caring and cohesive potential. The city can provide new opportunities and resources for social work to influence, to collaborate, to foster participation and involvement, and to extend its social justice mandate. The book shows that the city represents a critical arena in terms of the future of social work intervention and social work identity. In doing so, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of social work, social policy, community work and urban studies.

Part I
Making Sense of the City

Introduction and Overview

Social work is a creation of city life. The profession was born and grew up in the city, and has evolved a particular symbiotic connectedness to matters of the city. Its defining methodologies and approaches emerged as a response to the impacts of nineteenth-century industrialisation, urban growth and development. In many ways, the city has shaped the profession and professional identity. This process is far from over. In the contemporary era, social work is being reconceptualised in response to the modern city. It is being reshaped by technological developments, by the speed and scale of demographic diversity, by new sources of distress and disadvantage and, significantly, by new forms of politics and governance. Today’s city is changing rapidly and, in tandem, social work is in the process of reworking its role, approaches, thinking and identity alongside these developments.

An urban revolution is happening under our noses. Cities across the world are being radically transformed, both growing and shrinking within the flux and turbulence of global processes. All around us, places are changing in ways that are both exciting and threatening—and nowhere is the impact of change more keenly felt than in the metropolis (Glaeser 2011). It is possible to be simultaneously fascinated and troubled by what we witness: spectres of deepening impoverishment appear alongside advances that produce emancipation and empowerment. Urbanisation is identified as one of the most significant social trends of the twenty-first century. By the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 50% of the world’s population were city-dwellers (50+ %) and this figure is set to grow to some 75% by 2050 (UN-Habitat 2012). Now, more than at any point in history, people are resident in urbanised areas. The scale and pace of this change is unprecedented—particularly so in the developing world, where nine out of ten people are living in cities in Africa and Asia. We are experiencing the so-called ‘Urban Age’ (Gleeson 2012), the century of the city, and we cannot ignore it.

Amidst profound political, economic, environmental and technological upheavals—which are the result of global economic restructuring—vulnerabilities are exaccerbated, inequalities are growing and new forms of need are emerging. These impacts coincide with a deepening crisis in welfare provisioning as Western democracies have restructured and residualised provision under neo-liberal politics. The reconfiguration of welfare states is by no means an even process. Different states will reflect different manifestations of this political trend. However, notable similarities are apparent in neo-liberal tendencies cross-nationally. The creation of a mixed economy of welfare, the retraction of certain forms of welfare spending and the residualisation of services are noted characteristics of this trend, as are the reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and the individual, and increasing reliance on self-help and on decentralised forms of service delivery (Harris 2014). Our professional positioning demands both an examination and a response to the complex configurations of need produced by these effects.

As a profession, we have set our sights high in relation to addressing these global impacts on human wellbeing. The Global Agenda for Social Work (IFSW 2012), for example, commits the profession to promoting economic and social equality, to promoting the dignity and worth of individuals, to strengthening human relationships and to working towards environmental sustainability. The reach and the breadth of these ambitions is constantly growing as social work seeks to engage with the causes of social distress whilst, at the same time, working on its manifestations in everyday life. Such a manifesto can be overwhelming and produce a sense of ineffectualness, given the magnitude of what is at stake. Social workers are frequently berated—both for having limited horizons and for their ‘heroic agency’ in aspiring to effect social change (Marston and McDonald 2012). We require analytical scales in order to make sense of this, parameters against which to calibrate the effectiveness of interventions and, I would argue, a sphere in which to assert claims for recognition. Cities mediate scale. They are socio-cultural, economic and physical environments that give context to welfare relations. They are the spaces in which global processes are realised and encountered, and the locale in which social work can lay claim to being a key stakeholder.

It is perhaps more useful to assert that social work is, of necessity, glocal, as it operates at the intersection of local, national and global scales (Hong and Han Song 2010). Global events and processes are lived and shaped in everyday lives, and most acutely influenced within arenas that are proximate and immediate. In the contemporary moment, we stand between two countervailing trends. On the one hand, governments and private businesses seek greater levels of globalisation; on the other, across the world a localisation movement is emerging generated by local lives. In this respect, the social work task is multi-layered, embedded in national policy contexts but, at the same time, transcending them in recognising interdependencies that are transnational. The argument of this text is that the city provides an appropriate parameter for action for social work energies, a context within which concerns with the everyday micro-experiences and the wider social structural processes shaping those experiences can be mediated—a context within which our compelling stories can come to bear.

Yet, as a profession, we have neglected to reconsider and re-theorise our relationship to this twenty-first-century phenomenon. For a number of reasons, not least the very symbiotic connectedness of the profession to matters urban, the city has been largely assumed, rather than interrogated. As social workers, we have been seen as so much of the place that a critical revisiting of our positioning, role, strategies and identity within urban contexts has eluded us. The city itself has been subsumed by a focus on responding to its impacts; to issues such as homelessness, migration, sex trafficking, street children, poverty and more. It has, perhaps, been too familiar, too known, as academics and commentators have looked outward to other compelling concerns: the nature of rural social work (Pugh and Cheers 2010), environmental and ‘green’ social work (Dominelli 2012), globalisation (Dominelli 2010) and internationalism (Gray 2005, Gray and Webb 2010), all of which have more recently captured our attention within the profession. Yet, cities lie at the heart of these political, economic and social processes that define and shape the contemporary world. As such, the city readily maps onto wider perspectives that have emerged in social work, such as concern with environmental ecologies and sustainability, with migration and diversity; yet, examination of the processes of urbanisation itself has been neglected.

Cities matter to people, they place and shape (if not determine) what people can do and how they relate. They generate forms of distress, distrust and disadvantage, producing what has been called the urban condition (Meyer 1976) and simultaneously they generate opportunities for the resolution of contemporary issues. Putting people back into the picture as agents of change, valorising their investments in identity and place, opens up the city as a creative space for social work practice and for the co-production of social work knowledge. These matters deserve our attention, for evaluation of the strategies that are being deployed, for a consideration of how social work is responding to new demands and for a consideration of social work itself.

The insights of this text are no less relevant to understanding the issues of rural areas. Depopulation, out-migration, environmental sustainability, social reciprocities and exchange, and other forms of interdependency between town and country can be revealed via an examination of cities. Urban sprawl affects rural ecologies and economies, and urban policies; for example, transport, waste disposal and water supply impact on rural dwellers. Cities form a focal point for rural inhabitants in terms of access to critical services and cultural opportunities, and act as sites for the expression of protest and making the public’s voice heard over political issues that affect them. Hence, it is argued cities act as hubs of human development as a whole (UN-Habitat 2012).

This book takes as its starting point the view that social work practice is a product of its milieu. It argues that the rapid transformation of cities presents new challenges and opportunities for the profession in terms of its methodologies, skills and identity. Accordingly, it is timely to revisit social work’s relationship to the city. This revisiting will require looking back and looking forward, drawing on social work histories to consider continuities and departures as social work mutates in context. It will require interrogating those antecedants in setting the course forward. There are spatial visionings and social work scripts of the city to inquire into, new methodologies being proposed, new forms of collaboration in addressing social issues and innovative interventions to foreground. Above all, this exploration will make disciplinary departures in order to engage with insights emerging from urban studies, social geography and cultural sociology.

Orientation, Themes and Approaches: Some Useful Starting Points

Despite the catchy title of the book, it is more accurate to speak about cities than ‘the city’. Cities are extremely diverse: they differ in their demographic profile, economic infrastructure, institutional arrangements, transport and other aspects of the built environment; they also vary in terms of their global location and connectedness. However, in critically exploring the concept of the urban age, I construct the city as an entity (here, there or anywhere) that requires theoretical and conceptual examination in order to unravel key themes, issues and debates about twenty-first-century transformations and their significance for social work. Indeed, as will become clear, the city is a social construction, an idiom of our making, to which we apply our disciplinary orientation. The question I pose is: What are the specificities of the city for social work consideration and in what ways is the profession responding to this urban dynamic?

There are, of course, a number of theoretical orientations applicable to the analysis of the city as explored in the opening chapter, which draw on a rich tradition in the social sciences. With various emphasis these insights enable us to probe aspects of the social relations of the city at multi-level, accommodating the relationship between the everyday micro-experience and the wider structural processes shaping that very experience. These are not simply analytical abstractions. As a profession, we are concerned with applications, with making change for the better, with interventions and the evaluation of our interventions, with constructing and articulating visions of socially just futures. Cities as an arena of governance provide proximate spaces of influence and opportunity for social work. Thus, I contend that city-making is a process in which we are deeply implicated and in which we have a role to play.

Social work is also a construction characterised by competing claims as to its nature, role, focus of intervention and visionings of the future. It is an activity that is highly contextual, reflecting cultural norms and orientations, and organisational and policy contexts. Yet, at the same time, there are master narratives of origins and destinations; dominant discourses that mark out the professional remit, claims and aspirations, values and knowledges. I don’t seek here to reduce that contestation and diversity. This book works with the construction of social work in its broadest sense, combining multiple roles and actors engaged in practice interventions directly and indirectly, group and community work, those running non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and those working in policy, advocacy work and research. Lavalette (2013) has recently used the term ‘popular social work’ to embrace a wide range of roles and responsibilities undertaken by human service workers, social support and care workers alongside those working in professional and statutory roles. It is the nature of the alliances, the values orientation and the goals that cohere this broad set of activities that comprises social work in the city.

This text seeks to reinsert urban themes in contemporary social work. A clear departure is made from those writers who argue for the individualisation of response as a counter to the forces of alienation, anonymisation and anomie produced by the alien city and ‘the urban crisis’ (for example, Meyer 1976), and also from those who favour analysis of interventions based on the city as a system (Kolko Phillips and Lala Ashenberg Straussner 2002), or other extensions of functionalist analysis. Neither does this text fall foul of the logjam afforded by purely structural analyses of capitalist accumulation alone. This book eschews such approaches and seeks to explore, elucidate and illustrate how cities are complex relational entitites that are experienced and ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Making Sense of the City
• 2. Social Issues and the City: New Directions in Practice
• Backmatter