Tatiana Thieme. Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi. University of Minnesota Press, 2025. 360 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $30.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9781517917999.

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