The hustle is life: How Nairobi’s youth forge hope in forgotten neighbourhoods
Tatiana Thieme, an associate professor of Human Geography at University College London.
What you need to know:
- Drawing on 15 years of research, Tatiana Thieme documents the unseen labours and creative strategies youth use to build a future where the state has retreated.
She wanted to better understand how people living and working in popular neighbourhoods described and analysed their own realities rather than how they might adopt particular development or business theories of change. Since 2005, she kept returning to Matharei in Nairobi, immersing herself in the neighbourhood, engaging with youth and diverse groups of people.
In her book, Hustle Urbanism; Making Life work in Nairobi, published in 2025, Tatiana Thieme writes about marginalised Kenyan youth living in underserved neighbourhoods, emphasising the need to take seriously the social and working lives of youth in Nairobi-the innovative and adaptive strategies, and youth participation in the social, economic and political life of the city.
Importantly, she reveals that in Nairobi’s underserved neighbourhoods, ‘hustle’ has emerged as both a vital survival and livelihood strategy, and a way of life for youth. In her book, Tatiana shows how young people develop tools for resisting the legacies of colonial violence and uneven underdevelopment. She offers critical theorisation of precarious urban environment and the affirmative modes of making life work in the city against the odds.
“In Nairobi’s underserved neighbourhoods, ‘hustle’ has emerged as both a vital survival strategy and a way of life for youth,” writes Tatiana.
Exploring the multiple meanings and manifestations of the hustle economy, Tatiana, now an associate professor of Human Geography at University College London, 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.
The book provides a deep engagement with ‘self-narrations’ of young Nairobians whose perspectives tend to be under-represented in mainstream discourse. The book seeks to understand the meanings and situated practices of hustling and argues that it is vital to pay attention to hustling in its plural registers.
“For youth living and working in marginalised neighbourhoods of Nairobi, hustling is an expressive articulation and an urban practice,” Tatiana writes.
In the summer of 2005, Tatiana had an opportunity to take part in a collaborative action research project focused on piloting a participatory methodology for sustainable business development in Kenya, led by Cornell University academics from the Johnson Business School in the United States. They were a six-member team with different disciplinary training, all in their early twenties and either in the middle of or just having completed their master’s degrees.
Urban context
They spent time in Nairobi’s largest and most well-known popular neighbourhood, Kibra, travelled to Kisumu and Nakuru and did home-stays in Molo, Nakuru County. Following that experience, she realised that she wanted to come back and better understand the social and working lives of young people they collaborated with, and she was especially interested in the urban context, where young peope were all at once celebrated for their ‘entrepreneurial capabilities’ and yet systematically stigmatised for being ‘trouble makers’.
Once she embarked on a PhD programme a few years later, she returned in 2009 to start language training and fieldwork, focusing on Mathare, where she had countless conversations with locals, youth, and youth organisations like the Kasarani Youth Congress, NGOs, local governments and academia like the University of Nairobi, among others. She returned in 2011, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2023 and 2024 for field trips in Mathare.
Over those 15 years, fieldwork included engaging in both toilet cleaning and garbage collection as an apprentice researcher in order to learn about the graft and craft involved in the often invisible and undervalued sanitation and waste labours that take place in the city. These, she says, were crucial precursors to interviews and other forms of data collection because they permitted learning and understanding by doing rather than just observing or asking.
Tatiana drew on an in-depth fieldwork to illustrate how hustle manifests in Nairobi; reflecting aspects of informality, precarity, the gig economy and entrepreneurship. Crucially, Tatiana moves beyond viewing hustle merely as economic coping. She presents it as a form of creative resistance and latent political critique, through which marginalised populations navigate, subvert, and persist in the face of systemic exclusion and uncertainty. Thus, hustle is not just about "getting things done," but also about asserting agency and shaping life amidst constraint.
Also read: The informal economy: Kenya’s real employer
In the book, Tatiana delves into the forces that shape urban spaces, exploring how cities and their inhabitants navigate the complexities of hustle, ambition, and survival.
“Youth in Nairobi contend with an unemployment crisis, continued disinvestment in basic services, and persistent marginalisation.”
Through the book, Tatiana is shining a spotlight on the shared condition and position of marginalised youth living in neighbourhoods exposed to underinvestment, inadequate infrastructures and overly policing.
Youth in Mathare have inhabitated a lifeworld that is stigmatised as rife with joblessness, violence, and crime. But Mathare is also the source of something worth paying attention to-resourcefulness.
For example, Tatiana illustrates innovative ways in which landless and wageless youth have appropriated household residential solid waste as a resource for income generation in the face of continued state underinvestment in basic service provision in these peripheralised neighbourhoods.
Most importantly, she points out how in the popular neighbourhoods of Nairobi, gendered spaces and roles play out in public view, where social and economic life interconnect with domestic tasks that extend to the streets. Girls and women are mostly seen fetching water, washing clothes, cutting vegetables, meaning that reproductive labour spills into the public footpath.
In particular, she argues that young women’s stories merit particular attention, especially when their lives are impacted by intersectional vulnerabilities.
“in particular, the stories of young female ‘hustlers’ tend to either be missing or dwell only on narratives of victimisation” says Tatiana.
Overall, Tatiana’s works shows how young men and young women 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. She offers critical theorisation of precarious urban environments and the affirmative modes of making life work in the city against the odds.
