Urban Lives Project
At the Urban Lives Project, we explore the hidden layers of the unhoused community, the depths and complexities that most people never notice. While existing studies and advocacy services have documented the pathways into homelessness or catalogued daily routines, our focus is not limited to what is readily visible, we want to engage with the heart of this population: their modes of survival, the formation of relationships and community structures, the development of shared language, and the cultivation of agency and self-protection despite systemic marginalization.
We are not a service organization or advocacy campaign – we are a digital ethnography lab. Our mission is simple but ambitious: to discover, explain, and produce new knowledge through observation.
What does it mean to carry your life in a backpack - what is carried and what is left behind?
How do trust, interdependence, and betrayal co-exist in shared spaces, where life is shaped by scarcity and trauma?
How do unhoused individuals navigate services, and how do these interactions shape their access to resources and trust in institutions?
How do unhoused individuals remain resilient and find strength?
Why It Matters
As of January 2024, over 187,000 people were experiencing homelessness in California. In Orange County alone, there were over 7000 unhoused individuals, a 28% increase from 2022. As housing costs continue to soar, homelessness will only become ever more prevalent in our communities.
However, while these statistics are important, people are behind the numbers – homelessness is very much a lived human experience. What about the personal and emotional side of life on the streets? What about the systems of resilience and culture that emerge in the margins?
Our research makes these invisible layers visible. We document not just hardship, but the complex interior worlds of unhoused individuals: how they relate to each other, how they navigate aid systems, and how they hold onto a sense of security.
This work doesn’t promise easy answers, but it does offer deeper understanding. Because understanding is its own form of justice.
