In this detailed investigation into making life in conditions of urban precarity, Thieme asks how we should think about cities and how we should approach urban ethnographic inquiry. She orients her investigation of the city by looking at how people on the edge of political, social, and economic urban life express and make sense of life, labor, and belonging in the city. She uses Nairobi as a starting point to rethink urban struggles and aspirations in uncertain economic times. Specifically, for Nairobi, she is interested in how young urban Africans are making a living and making a mark in the city without jobs and where service provision is uneven or absent. Centering Nairobi, Hustle Urbanism aims to shed light on how cities operate, where making work and making things work is decoupled from salaried job and public provisioning. This leads her to ask what Nairobi can tell us about the future of work more generally.
Nairobi, along with other African cities, are too often portrayed in scholarly works in terms of crisis, negation, and failure. Attempting to avoid this trap, Thieme has to reckon with how to address both the conditions of precarity as well as the potential and capacity provided by the context of Nairobi. This raises ethnographic questions about how we do urban ethnography and how we read African cityscapes. Where do we orient our attention to make sense of what is going on? And how and from where do we theorize?
Situating her answers from the perspective of the street, or the Mtaa, Thieme portrays a vibrant, flexible, ever-changing urban youth culture, sociality, and politics which she terms, following her interlocutors, “hustling.” Indeed, hustling operates because and despite of structural insecurities and incompleteness and includes diverse strategies that make up lives and connect livelihoods to justice claims. While hustling has varied meanings explored within the book, Thieme characterizes it as encompassing at least the following four things: a narrative of struggle in insecurity; self-provision and adaptability; place-based exchange, distribution, and reciprocity; and finally, an oppositional and performative disposition. Thieme seeks to understand the significance of hustle to understanding ordinary configurations of life in the context of injustice, and the persistence of hopeful imaginaries.
The main focus of the book is youth aged between 18 and 35, who live in the Mathare neighborhood of Nairobi and who are marginalized from formal labor and in insecure housing. Although forced to grow up too quickly in terms of providing for themselves, the youth are stuck in waithood, not able to socially transition into adulthood due to their living and work conditions. As such, the youth form intense age-based friendships that support economic activities, service provision, and risk mitigation. Hustle Urbanism shows how through forming youth groups that work in service provision, young men both created jobs for themselves and provided garbage collection and community toilet cleaning services in the context of governmental lack.
Thieme shows how the youth groups operate both within a territorial base and a network of trusted relationships. Along with the ever-present instability of precarity, the intense localized and age-based relationships limited the ability of scaling successful service provision or economic enterprises. Rather, most youth spread their risk across multiple different endeavors. Even particularly successful individuals understand that their circumstances might suddenly change, and they maintain relationships among agemates, within a territorial base and among clients to guard against changing times. Thieme argues that as a result, hustling did not include wider coalitions building beyond the local territorial base, and that it was risky to legitimize a business as informality served as protection against risk.
Family was important to the success of hustling and life in the mtaa. Young people relied on the help of siblings and parents (in particular, mothers) for housing and education as well as childcare and economic support. Yet family in the form of marriage could also be a trap for women who wanted to get by on their own terms within a system dominated by men. Many young men and women strove to find generational permanence by providing a better life for their children through education and through securing a piece of land in the countryside. Thieme shows that intergenerational permanence and longevity was only possible if outsourced to the countryside.
Although the interlocutors and examples in Hustle Urbanism are predominantly male, the life history of Eliza, a self-described Ghetto Gal, is particularly salient. The detail of Eliza’s life highlighted what was necessary for a woman to participate in the service provision work of hustling. Yet, I would have also liked to hear more from the perspective of women who are not involved in public hustling (so well described for men and Eliza) to more fully understand how hustling is also an everyday part of the female mtaa experience.
Thieme’s poignant, careful, ethical, clear, and honest inquiry into life in Nairobi shows how hustling can be affirmative, generative, dynamic, and innovative but also exploitative and insecure. Yet it is also a versatile urban perspective from which to theorize youth in cities. It can accommodate different expressions of provisioning, aspiration, endurance, and solidarity without losing sight of vulnerabilities and precarity, allowing us to reckon with conditions for youth in many cities across the world.
