Managing service hubs in Miami and Osaka: Between capacious commons and meagre street-level bureaucracies

Abstract

As key sites of governance and poverty management, service hubs are conspicuous inner-city clusters of voluntary sector organizations that serve vulnerable urban populations, including people grappling with homelessness, substance abusers and mental illness. In this paper, we frame service hubs as potentially embodying capacious commons on the one hand, and meagre street-level bureaucracies on the other, reconstituting Lipsky’s individual focus to embrace the agency level. We use a comparative case study approach, focussing on two service hubs – Kamagasaki in Osaka and Overtown in Miami – to show how organizations in each combined, in various ways, the two logics in practice. The results suggest that service hubs acted more as ‘managed commons’, but with some tendencies towards street-level bureaucracy. This conversation between the commons and street-level bureaucracies, and its comparative application to the voluntary sector within service hubs, serve as our primary conceptual and empirical contributions, respectively. We conclude by considering how the two logics overlapped and created hybridized models of poverty management.

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