Though some of this work was conducted in Britain, it b should be noted that the vast majority of these studies were concerned with the geographies of homelessness and homeless service facilities in North American cities In the absence of a more developed comparative literature, it is therefore very hard to know whether or not the patterns and processes traced in North America were in play in the UK or elsewhere in Europe at this time. Nor were scholars necessarily in agreement as to the impact of such processes. While most argued that the location of services in skid row tended to further stigmatize service users, others suggested that the concentration of SROs and other services in tightly defined areas shelters, offered a important focus around which homeless people's own support networks could develop Indeed, by the early 1990s, geographers were increasingly interested in the survival strategies adopted by homeless people when on the streets and in the role that homeless people's own street networks played in these strategies. Deploying the insights of time geography, workers began to map the daily life paths of stree-homeless people. Though such pathways were indeed often focused around the institutional spaces (of shelters, t drop-in centers, and soup kitchens) that provide a focus for homeless people's daily routines, other spaces and other pathways too were recognized as important. Thus studies began to explore people's earning strategies, for example, or the possibilities that homeless people's own temporary encampments offered for establishing some sense of 'home' among those unable or unwilling to access the strictly regulated spaces of the formal shelter system. Crucial here was the attention paid to gender relations and to the very different roles that homeless men and women often took on when on the streets and in their relationships with one another. Broadly speaking, scholars that such partnerships and wider recognized street networks were often crucial to an individual's survival, and to homeless women in particular, as they enabled a pooling of resources and a more effective allocation of the tasks essential to day-to-day survival. At the same time, it was clear that as people became more adept at surviving on the streets so too they often internalized a powerfully negative sense of themselves as "homeless, and experienced a further worsening of their material circumstances.