Livelihoods at the Margins: Surviving the City - Softcover

"In this book you will meet the worlds most oppressed people and converse in a reflective cross-disciplinary way about their modes of life, their vulnerability and their resilience. Kudos for James Staples and his team who have brought these lives to light and created the best sort of policy relevant research." - Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University "In this book you will meet the worldA's most oppressed people and converse in a reflective cross-disciplinary way about their modes of life, their vulnerability and their resilience. Kudos for James Staples and his team who have brought these lives to light and created the best sort of policy relevant research." - Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University "In this book you will meet the worldas most oppressed people and converse in a reflective cross-disciplinary way about their modes of life, their vulnerability and their resilience. Kudos for James Staples and his team who have brought these lives to light and created the best sort of policy relevant research." aBarbara Harriss-White, Oxford University "In this book you will meet the world's most oppressed people and converse in a reflective cross-disciplinary way about their modes of life, their vulnerability and their resilience. Kudos for James Staples and his team who have brought these lives to light and created the best sort of policy relevant research." --Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University "In this book you will meet the world s most oppressed people and converse in a reflective cross-disciplinary way about their modes of life, their vulnerability and their resilience. Kudos for James Staples and his team who have brought these lives to light and created the best sort of policy relevant research." Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University" "Here are fine-grained accounts of survival strategies on the very margins of poor societies. A new generation of anthropologists and development planners bear witness to the resilience and resourcefulness of some of the most impoverished people in the world. Anyone who wants to understand, and to help, should read this book." Adam Kuper, Brunel University"

Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners―they are people living on the margins of urban life who are ubiquitous but widely misunderstood and notably absent from mainstream economic analyses. In Livelihood on the Margins, anthropologists and practitioners engaged in hands-on development work use fine-grained ethnographic research to cut through the conventional narratives that romanticize, victimize, or demonize these populations. They go beyond the trendy “sustainable livelihoods” approach to development to examine the relationship between the agency people can actually wield over their own lives and the broader socio-political constraints that persistently push them to the margins. Making these multi-level connections across a wide range of world regions and situations, this volume shows how the micro-concerns of ordinary people might usefully guide the macro-concerns of governments, NGOs, and global institutions who are engineering large-scale social and economic development programs. Livelihood at the Margins is an engaging and eye-opening read for undergraduate and graduate students studying development in anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines, as well as a useful tool for developments studies researchers and practitioners.