Introduction: Urban Precarity

Abstract

Cities have long been associated with precarity. This link seems to have intensified under contemporary global regimes of capitalism, with both popular and academic discourses noting the risks that come with building and inhabiting urban environments. The introduction to this special issue reflects on the various ways in which anthropology has engaged with the relationship between “urbanity” and “precarity.” It argues that current work on precarity either favors the experiences of the Global North or sidelines the urban dimension. Studies that overcome these obstacles, moreover, are largely crystalizing around discussions of infrastructure and securitization. We offer the notion of “urban precarity” as a call for ethnography that cross‐germinates developments in urban studies with those made in our understanding of precarity. By foregrounding the urban, the ethnography collated here suggests that in the cities of late capitalism, precarity emerges as a multifaceted condition, encapsulating not only legal and economic deprivation but also moral, spiritual, political, and health‐related uncertainties. As the protagonists of our ethnography struggle to deal with the many threats bearing down upon them, precarity is also revealed as a condition conducive to world‐building and social transformation, although such forms of creative agency are highly experimental and liable to backfire.

Navigating precarity in everyday (sub)urban space in Helsinki, Finland

“…Despite being messy and unstable, the everyday reality at the shopping center is treated by many with acceptance and compromise (Archambault, 2021;Campbell and Laheij, 2021). Difference was normalized in comments such as, "it is what it is," "people need to be somewhere anyway," or "let all flowers blossom.…”

“…While such work highlights the agency of individuals to manage their own lives, resolving instabilities with temporary solutions might only steer the person from one form of precarity to another, and expose them to other risks (Campbell and Laheij, 2021;Muñoz, 2018a). So far, the vignettes have suggested that coping with precarity requires informal acts of labor, another key aspect of precarity that emerges on the street.…”

“…This article focuses on precarity as an urban concept characteristic of contemporary cities as “both product and producer of urban life” (Lancione, 2019, 182), although we acknowledge that precarity can also take rural forms (e.g., Bowers, 2021; Hougaard, 2022). Recent studies on urban precarity (Campbell and Laheij, 2021; Harris and Nowicki, 2018; Philo et al, 2019) have explored precarity multifacetedly and not only as a structural condition but as one that is lived, sensed, and experienced. Research topics have included, for example, struggles related to poverty and housing rights (Lancione, 2019; Muñoz, 2018b; Nichols and Braimoh, 2018; Teodorescu and Molina, 2021); psychological and ontological security (Johnson‐Schlee, 2019; Lowe, 2018; Philo et al, 2019; Söderström, 2019); and the mechanisms through which precarity is “ done or experienced ” in “material and practical ways… within the specific spaces where these experiences occur” (Muñoz, 2018a, 413, emphasis in original).…”

“…Precarity, generally understood as the “generic instability of urban lives in current times” (Schilling et al, 2019, 1345), encompasses uncertainties in various aspects of urban life, including labor, housing, politics, environment, and health. Although late capitalism and the resulting labor conditions have been identified as key drivers of precarity in cities (e.g., Harvey, 2003; Kalleberg, 2009; Standing, 2011), this study employs a more comprehensive perspective that incorporates sources of precarity from a broad spectrum of human life (Butler, 2004, 2012; Campbell and Laheij, 2021; Ettlinger, 2007; Harris and Nowicki, 2018; Philo et al, 2019). Following this approach, we consider precarity to be a socio‐spatial condition that reveals the precariousness of urban people and places in ways that are unequally distributed, lived, and experienced.…”

“…Rather, we understand the concept of precarity to be urban in more general terms, in that it becomes manifested in various locations of the city and is not limited to “suburbia.” The informants of this study convey a better understanding of how precarity is navigated in the city, how particular places can be significant for such navigation, and how spaces of precarity emerge and work on the level of everyday life. This is important because understanding the microgeographies of precarity can reveal aspects of precarity on other scales (Ettlinger, 2007) and processes that can lead to acceptance, compromise, and hope—to “feeling otherwise” (Archambault, 2021; see also Campbell and Laheij, 2021).…”