Hustle Urbanism

Making Life Work in Nairobi

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Tatiana Thieme

In Nairobi’s underserved neighborhoods, “hustle” has emerged as both a vital survival strategy and a way of life for youth. Exploring the multiple meanings and manifestations of the hustle economy, Tatiana Thieme shows how young people develop tools of resistance against the legacies of colonial violence and uneven urban development while carving out spaces of opportunity for themselves and their peers.

Children on sunny urban street skipping Double Dutch with jump ropes made of braided plastic waste. Title in large multicolored letters above.

Background image by Tatiana Thieme

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  • rights
    The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges University College London for funding the open access fees for this work.

    Portions of chapter 3 are adapted from “The ‘Hustle’ amongst Youth Entrepreneurs in Mathare’s Informal Waste Economy,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 3 (2013): 389–412, http://wwww.tandfonline.com/. Portions of chapter 4 are adapted from “Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs, and Social Needs into Market Demands: Corporate–Community Encounters in Nairobi, Kenya,” Geoforum 59 (2015): 228–39. Portions of chapter 5 are adapted from “‘The Ghetto Will Always Be My Living Room’: Hustling and Belonging in Nairobi Slums,” in Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects, and Politics, ed. Michele Lancione (Routledge, 2016). Portions of chapter 6 are adapted from “‘Youth Are Redrawing the Map’: Temporalities and Terrains of the Hustle Economy in Mathare, Nairobi,” special issue of Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 91, no. 1 (2021): 35–56.

    Copyright 2025 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

    Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
  • isbn
    978-1-4529-7419-4
  • publisher
    University of Minnesota Press
  • publisher place
    Minneapolis, MN
  • restrictions
    Please see the Creative Commons website for details about the restrictions associated with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
  • rights holder
    Regents of the University of Minnesota
  • doi