Hustling a living: crafting a life under precarious conditions in urban South Africa

This chapter focuses on how a growing youth demographic navigates widespread joblessness and economic uncertainty through ‘hustling a living’. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Zandspruit, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg, it explores young men's diverse hustling practices, the crucial networks that underpin them, and their aspirations for the future amid conditions of generalised precariousness. Emphasising the ‘social thicknesses’ of hustling and the essential role of distribution, the chapter challenges traditional distinctions between the formal and informal economy, while also calling for a holistic understanding of work under contemporary capitalism that reconnects the dots between living and working or the realms of production and reproduction.