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, the volume exposes precarious housing not as an exceptional crisis, but as a patterned outcome of financialized, racialized, and post-settler-colonial settlements. Through wide-ranging theoretical reflections and case studies—from social housing and rental markets to informal settlements, climate-exposed neighbourhoods, migrant housing, and student accommodation—the 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.