Inhabiting the Margins: Towards a Framework for Precarious Housing

This article scrutinizes the idea of precarious housing, referring to larger structures and inequalities shaping lived experiences of insecurity and deprivation. Worsening alongside the global housing crisis, precarious housing is both a condition of being housed on the margins of society and a permanent state under capitalism. We propose an analytical framework on precarious housing based on precarious arrangements—the structural domain configuring how housing systems are made and managed, and the precarious condition—the lived domain through which instability is inhabited and contested. Drawing on this framework, we develop a conceptual grammar of precarious housing based on four interrelated dimensions: temporality, uncertainty, urgency, and collective action. Despite growing interest in precarious housing from diverse perspectives, there has been little clarity on this concept. Combined with an increasing need to conceptualize housing challenges, we suggest reengaging with the idea of precarious housing to deepen debates in theory and practice.