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This chapter provides available knowledge regarding a community organizing practice called “street work” that is little known and poorly understood with a meager and often sporadic and sketchy literature. It gives an overview of the historical development of street work and examines the major parameters of street work practice before presenting the underpinnings of its present situation.

This chapter describes the beginning, exploratory phase of the process in which street ethnography constituted the bulk of street work aiming at elucidating some of the realities of street children and street life.

This chapter utilizes both critical and empirical forms of enquiry to uncover the relationship between dominant constructions of the ‘problem of prostitution’ and the associated norms that operate across various historical epochs, focusing in particular on the recent association between street sex work and anti-social behaviour. It shows that the alleged antithesis of sex work to community safety owes as much to the ideological operation of the law as to any inherent feature of commercial sex. The chapter considers the practical implications of recent reforms, which continue to follow this ideology. It outlines some of the dangers of policy frameworks and techniques of control that continue to situate sex work as antithetical to the cultivation of community safety, by reflecting on a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation-funded study, which examined the experiences of those living and working in areas of street sex work.

This chapter critically considers the assumptions underlying policy proposals for sex-working drug users and drug-using sex workers in New Labour's prostitution strategy. It argues that by conflating sex work with other social problems, particularly drug addiction (see, for example, Cusick and Berney, 2005; Melrose, 2006a), the strategy conveniently sidesteps the wider structural problems associated with involvement in street sex work, such as poverty, social exclusion, and homelessness. The chapter explains that what the strategy offers are punitive responses that provide ‘individualized solutions to de-contextualized social problems’ (Phoenix, 2003), rather that structural solutions to socially contextualized social problems (Buchanan, 2004; Cusick and Berney, 2005; Melrose, 2006a).

This chapter examines the impact of gentrification and prostitution on urban neighbourhood space. The studies in five British cities suggest there are a multitude of tensions that may arise in areas of street sex working, and, irrespective of the cause of these tensions, the result is a differentiated landscape of tolerance. The chapter argues that the social disruption caused by gentrification may pre-empt and provoke concerted campaigns of enforcement and social exclusion. It also discusses community response to sex work and looks at sex work in the context of urban regeneration.

This chapter analyzes how two spatio-legal transformations of Mexico City—the constitution of a workplace for the urban poor and the regulation of land as a means for locating the poor—were shaped, developed, and contested through different legal disputes in the context of the formation of the postrevolutionary state in Mexico City (1930–50). During that period, both Mexico's capital city and its legal system were in transition. The chapter provides new evidence for a debate about the legalities of space prompted by the law and geography turn in sociolegal studies. The chapter is organized around the idea that the impact of the law and geography movement may be enhanced if it locates its findings within a wider context, such as that of the (trans)formation of the nation-state.

This chapter contains a brief biography and transcript of an interview with Silvia M. Staub-Bernasconi, a leader in Swiss social work education, who was awarded the Katherine Kendall Award of the International Association of Schools of Social Work in 2010, for her contribution to international social work education. After studies in social work in Zurich and the USA, she became a street worker with gangs and with migrants. Developing ideas about social work as an action science, concerned with sources of power as well as individuals, she focused on social work as a human rights profession, and was involved in developing a European doctoral programme, INDOSOW. Her experience of students who had been oppressed in many countries led her to teach social work by connecting biography with sociocultural contexts. In the future, social work must separate itself and neoliberal ideas, meeting its triple mandate for a science base combined with individual care and political and social concern.