The Involvement of Social Work in Negotiations of Urban Poverty and Deviance in Public Space

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This research project investigates the extent and the ways in which outreach social workers in German cities are involved in processes of negotiating social participation and exclusion of social groups associated with poverty and deviance in public spaces. At the intersection of urban sociology and social work research, a relational interactionist perspective is adopted to reconstruct the production of spatial orders of public spaces through interactions of multiple actors and at the interplay of three arenas of negotiation: local discourses of problematization, governance arrangements, and street level. In particular, it will be investigated which different positions social workers adopt in this process and, as a result, which effects on the representation and participation as well as spatial exclusion of marginalized social groups can be observed. Thus, different rationalities and practices of outreach work will be analyzed, which in various studies have been described as, for example, either repressive or inclusive, or aimed at managing conflicts, but whose specific conditions of possibility have not yet been sufficiently understood and made explainable. By examining place- and city-specific contexts, it will be explored how it becomes possible that, facing similarly problematized phenomena, outreach social workers act differently and with different consequences for their clients and their possible uses of public spaces.First, in a standardized online survey of municipal administrative actors from every major German city, it will be examined whether an increase in the relevance of social work can be identified within urban policies that address problematized public spaces. Second, in order to identify specific local conditions of the respective social workers’ rationalities and practices, qualitative case studies will be conducted in two cities, distinguishing three types of problematized spaces each (inner-city shopping zones, places in disadvantaged as well as gentrified neighborhoods). In a multi-method case study design, the analysis of local media discourses and political or administrative documents, different qualitative interviews (with governance actors, problematized persons resp. clients, and social work professionals) as well as ethnographic go-alongs will be combined to reconstruct negotiations on the three relevant levels and their interplay. Ultimately, these case studies will be analyzed in a cross-case comparison with the aim of identifying variations in social work rationalities and practices and examining whether and how these can be understood and thus explained through place- and city-specific constellations.