The Routledge Handbook of Precarious Housing

The Routledge Handbook of Precarious Housing offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of one of today’s most urgent global challenges: the growing normalization of insecure, unaffordable, and uninhabitable housing.

Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this volume exposes precarious housing not as an exceptional crisis, but as a patterned outcome of financialized, racialized, and post‑settler‑colonial societies. Through wide‑ranging theoretical reflections and case studies―from social housing and rental markets to informal settlements, climate‑exposed neighborhoods, migrant housing, and student accommodation―this book illuminates how precariousness is produced both structurally and experientially, shaping dwelling through uncertainty, waiting, instability, and everyday improvisation. Organized around key themes including tenure security, infrastructure, homelessness and health, climate change, predatory actors, social movements, and examples of policies and programs that address precarious housing, the Handbook develops a shared conceptual grammar rooted in temporality, uncertainty, urgency, and collective action. It reveals precarious housing as a terrain of struggle where residents, activists, planners, and policymakers contest dispossession, experiment with alternative forms of dwelling, and reimagine more just futures.

Essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and advocates, this Handbook reframes precarious housing as a central site through which the politics of habitability, governance, and radical justice are negotiated today.

Chapters 5 and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 International license (Chapter 5), and a Creative Commons [Attribution] (CC BY)] 4.0 International license (Chapter 19).

Abigail Friendly is an Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She explores intersections between planning and governance and the potential of planning tools and community participation to address spatial inequality in cities. Her recent research investigates precarious forms of housing experienced by marginalized residents. Friendly is an international expert on the Brazilian experience in applying the right to the city. Her recent book is titled Claiming the Right to the City: Rethinking Urban Transformations in Brazil. She holds degrees in Urban Planning and Political Science.

Ana Paula Pimentel Walker is an Urban Planning Associate Professor at The University of Michigan. She investigates how communities engage with urban governance and evaluates the significance of participatory institutions in planning healthy, environmentally just cities. Through action-oriented research, she investigates the overlapping forms of oppression that constrain the participation of marginalized communities in local decision-making. Her work also amplifies the voices of migrants and precariously housed residents through community organizing, popular education, and access-to-justice initiatives. Pimentel Walker is the recipient of the 2025 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association. She holds degrees in Law, Urban Planning, Latin American Studies, and Anthropology.