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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Urban ethnographers can explore spaces forgotten or given up for lost, replacing illusions with maps of social reality. The city is filled with milieux that remain scarcely known to the inhabitants of other spaces. Paradoxically, as the rationalization of urban life continues, boundaries enclose some lives more tightly, isolating and making them more vulnerable. By re-discovering the lives of people in those spaces, by replacing stereotypes about them with descriptions that convey their vitality, dignity and humanity, ethnographers may restore some lost relationships in urban milieux, and in a modest way reduce the isolation.
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