Tatiana Thieme’s Hustle Urbanism: making life work in Nairobi is the product of almost two decades of ethnographic engagement with Nairobi, particularly the neighbourhood of Mathare. Based on research spanning 2005 to 2023, the book reflects Thieme’s sustained attentiveness to the multiple registers of hustling. Hustling is more than a survival strategy in the absence of wage work and services; it is an economic practice, a way of living with others, a form of care and a mode of activism, as well as political and cultural expression.
Thieme adopts what she calls a ‘patchwork ethnographic approach’ (p. 22), returning to Mathare periodically over nearly two decades. This iterative method allows her to capture the longitudinal dynamics of hustling: how young people’s trajectories shift over time, how new actors enter the scene, and how the political and economic landscape of Nairobi itself changes. At the same time, Thieme resists celebrating hustling as ingenuity alone, situating it within the legacies of colonial violence, neoliberal development agendas and persistent inequality. Hustling, in her account, is simultaneously resourceful and constrained – a life-making practice born of hardship, yet one that opens up new possibilities for belonging and meaning.
The book’s structure – seven substantive chapters framed by a reflective introduction and conclusion – moves fluidly between history, theory and ethnography. The opening chapter traces the genealogy of hustling across time and space, from racialized struggles in Jim Crow-era US cities and hip-hop culture to contemporary Nairobi. The second chapter provides historical context for Nairobi’s political economy, especially valuable for readers less familiar with Kenya. The middle chapters anchor the analysis in Mathare, exploring youth-driven eco-hustles in waste management, partnerships with social businesses and NGOs, the gendered dynamics of hustling, and the trajectories of ‘stayers and leavers’. The final chapter turns to the performative dimension of hustling – activism, tourism and hip-hop – where storytelling becomes both a livelihood and a political act, reclaiming the city and challenging stigmatized narratives of Nairobi’s youth.
Several contributions stand out. First, the book deepens debates on urban informality by showing that hustling is central to Nairobi’s social and economic life. Second, it unsettles entrepreneurial framings of informal economies. Rather than focusing on profit making, Thieme foregrounds practices such as community-led sanitation and garbage collection, which are less about entrepreneurship than about repair and ‘community-oriented care’. Even when waged employment is secured, she shows how its precarity often makes hustling – premised on what she calls ‘redistributive solidarity’ – the more reliable foundation for sustaining livelihoods and obligations. Third, the book advances methodological and ethical debates on ethnography, including what it means to decolonize research and writing. Thieme’s long-term engagement is paired with a reflexive, conversational tone that foregrounds the analytical contributions of her interlocutors, many of whom are close friends. While not co-authored, the book is deeply shaped by collaboration, with an afterword by one interlocutor underscoring its collective ethos.
I found two themes especially striking. One concerns intergenerational ties and obligations. Thieme distinguishes between older and younger youth: those whose hustling practices took shape before digital technologies, and those for whom digital infrastructures are central. These generational dynamics surface in community projects, where older youth often claim legitimacy by creating opportunities for younger ones, reflecting what Thieme terms ‘the logic of intergenerational distribution and obligation’ (p. 211).
The second theme is the tension between Mathare as a place of residence and the idea of home. For many, Mathare is where life happens, yet aspirations for home remain tied to acquiring land upcountry. The story of Eliza, a single mother, captures this dynamic. It was her persistent hustling in Mathare that enabled her to send her son to boarding school and purchase land outside the city, to secure his future. Yet she described Mathare as her ‘sitting room’, the place where she had social and emotional ties that grounded her, even as she sought an exit route for her child.
The book’s strengths are numerous, but it is not without limitations. At times, the concept of ‘hustling’ and ‘hustle urbanism’ risks being stretched too broadly, encompassing such a wide range of practices and actors – from NGOs and corporate partners to youth organizations and activists – such that its analytical boundaries become somewhat diffuse. Gender is addressed in depth in Chapter 5, but the overall focus on men’s hustling trajectories means that the experiences of women remain less fully explored.
These critiques do little to diminish the book’s achievements. It provides an ethnographically rich account of Nairobi while engaging global debates on precarity, informal economies and the future of work. Methodologically, it demonstrates the power of long-term, collaborative and reflexive ethnography to capture layered urban dynamics. Most importantly, Thieme models a mode of writing – through sketches, vignettes and collaborative analyses – that, like hustling, is partial, provisional and situated; resists neat conclusions; and invites ongoing dialogue and debate.
In sum, Hustle Urbanism resists romanticization without denying ingenuity; it centres young people while situating them within entangled networks of actors; and it locates Nairobi’s hustling within both local histories and global struggles to forge a life without stable wage employment. The book leaves readers with pressing questions, including Thieme’s own: does hustling entrench hardship, or does it offer new possibilities for making work, making life, and making meaning in changing times?
