Youth, Work and Housing: A Nexus of Precarity

Abstract

Globally, young people’s efforts to secure access to work and housing are characterised by considerable precarity and often impede youth transitions. Contributing to debates in housing studies, labour and youth geographies, this paper conceptualises ‘a nexus of precarity’, analysing young people’s experiences of unattainable and poorly paid work alongside their often unaffordable and poor-quality housing in Ethiopia and South Africa. Policy, particularly across the global south, focuses on youths’ employment challenges leaving access to affordable housing under-addressed. This paper argues that understanding the intimate connections between youths’ home and workspaces, and work and housing circumstances, are critical to youth transitions. It employs a framing of temporalities, spatialities and socio-political dimensions to illustrate the varied historical and multi-scalar processes shaping youth work and housing. The idea of a ‘nexus of precarity’ characterising young people’s lives, is advanced through a comparative analysis focused on Hawassa, Ethiopia and Ekangala, South Africa.