The observations of the men and women, young and old, from the two poor neighbourhoods in Liverpool at the centre of this book are both harrowing and enormously illuminating. They remind us, as the editor notes, that they are more than cannon fodder for the community ‘participation’ exercises of experts. They bring to life the reality of urban poverty as a complex and highly differentiated condition, and of the urban poor as knowing, aware of how they are perceived, aware of the power of mainstream representations of their condition and of who they are. These men and women also tell us that they are proud of some aspects of their communities even as they are aware that these are misrepresented or obscured by more negative overarching images, proud of themselves even as they understand that they may be considered failures by the broader social system and may indeed never live up to their potential given the limitations of their situation. These residents know that they are not simply a ‘suitable case for treatment’ as experts would have it.

Some of the authors in this book move deeply into the specifics of these two neighbourhoods and do so through a diversity of analytic pathways. Fagan moves in through the optic of gender, Uduku through ethnicity, Goldson and Lansley through age, Hall through visual representations, Rooney through community development, and Ben-Tovim through Liverpool's futures. Others (Evans, Wilks- Heeg, Meegan, Jones and Novak) locate Liverpool and the issue of urban regeneration in a broader spatio-temporal frame without losing a sharp focus on these two neighbourhoods. Collectively they produce a mosaic that begins to approximate to the complex reality captured succinctly in the statements of the residents themselves.

Through their diverse optics these authors make this collective effort into a particular type of multi-sited ethnography. Rather than studying simultaneously several sites to understand a particular dynamic or condition, they transform their single site into multiple sites. The collective work has the effect of unpacking its object of study – too easily represented through the summary image of urban poverty – and allows the reader to do his or her own re-synthesising. In doing this the book also resists the common strategy of comparisons between the urban poor and non-poor as the method to understand urban poverty.