We shed light on understudied social infrastructure by focusing on the service hub, those conspicuous clusters of voluntary sector organizations designed to help the most vulnerable urban populations. Using Kamagasaki, Osaka as an exploratory case study, we find that the service hub acts as a distinctly inner-city social infrastructure marked by very close proximity of clients and services, as well as high accessibility, mutuality and provisionality, and clear motivations to ensure day-to-day survival. But the conversation between service hub and social infrastructure indicates that our case study must be understood as a bypassed infrastructure, unsung and out-of-sync with the market (but increasingly less so with the state). Kamagasaki suggested as social infrastructure of castoffs, standing apart and increasingly incompatible with current urbanism and its emphasis on privatization, gentrification and neoliberal co-optation, or even with the older 'infrastructural ideal' of the Fordist era, with its emphasis on large-scale universality.

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We revisit the urban margins by recasting service hubsconspicuous clusters of helping agencies in inner-city locales, designed to serve vulnerable populationsas both spaces of survival but potentially transformative, emerging as so-called 'cracks' in the city. We undertake this recasting using the concept of the commons. Using case studies in London, Miami and Osaka, we focus on the everyday practices of commoning and the role service hubs play in the city as spaces of sustenance, care and solidarity. The results are mixedservice hubs enabled unfettered survival and operated largely outside of capitalism, ensuring that some spaces in the city remain de-commodified and 'at the margins'. However, the service hubs were also limited in their transformational capacity. These results contribute to a sense of commons at the margins, rethinking them more as an edge between capitalism and an existence separate from it, rather than presenting them as exclusively marginal in the sense of subordinated, excluded and bordered.

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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.