Cumulative Precarity: Millennial Experience and Multigenerational Cohabitation in Hackney, London

Abstract

This article interrogates and expands understandings of millennial economic insecurity by focusing on the experiences of three people living in socially rented accommodation with their families of origin in Hackney, London. Taking into account the legacies of state violence that racialise Britain’s political economy, I argue that millennial precarity requires theorisation across multiple temporalities in order to account for cumulative, intergenerational experience as well as intergenerational dissonance. This article focuses on the affective work required to mediate cumulative precarity with familial relationships, with an emphasis on the ways that participants arduously—yet artfully—weave between multiple temporal scales of experience within concentrated shared space in order to care for and communicate with their family members. Through synthesising geographical scholarship on generational experience, everyday experiences of policy and the spaces of precarious labour, this paper contributes to expanding economic geography’s engagement with ongoing histories of coloniality in the UK.

The intimate socialities of going carbon neutral

“…To close, I want to acknowledge that the forms of austerity that continue to amplify many young adults' precarity in Britain were at some distance from the experience of the Growing Up Green participants. As MacNeil Taylor (2021) (and many others) demonstrates, how austerity shapes everyday intimacies has a bearing on individuals' subsequent orientations to a wide range of challenges, opportunities, and everyday events. For that reason, whilst a detailed consideration of this has been outside the scope of this paper, it is important to note the significant heterogeneity within young adults' everyday intimacies, not least along lines of class and race, and how in turn this shapes their inclinations towards environmental care.…”

“…At the same time, thanks to increasingly visible forms of youth‐led action on the climate emergency (e.g., Children's Geographies special issue, 2021; Thew et al., 2020), the truism that ‘youth are the (sustainable) future’ feels justifiable. Yet the growing socioeconomic precarity in Global North economies, with its attendant practical destabilisation and emotional anxiety (Aeby & Heath, 2020; MacNeil Taylor, 2021), prompts significant questions about the extent to which young adults have the means to live up to the responsibility for ‘being the change’ that some discourses have assimilated (Sloam, 2020). This is aside from equally important ethical questions about the intergenerational injustice of placing such responsibility on the generation which has contributed least to the climate crisis (Diprose & Valentine, 2019).…”

Social reproduction, labour and austerity: Carrying the future

“…Intersections of class, race and gender especially dramatically shape expectations and experiences of reproduction (Briggs, 2017;Jensen, 2018;Saunders, 2020). These inequalities seep into the fabric of everyday life -rising rents, shrinking social housing stock, unsuitable cohabitations, destitution, adults living or moving back home with parents (Taylor, 2021;Wilkinson, 2020); unemployment, indebtedness, insecure and precarious work (Davis & Cartwright, 2019); retreating state support, decimated care infrastructures, welfare and local government (Hall, 2020;Pearson, 2019); and, as the focus of this article, altered possibilities and decisions about reproduction because of changing life-courses, intimacies and affordabilities (Hall, 2022a;Holmes et al, 2021;Lebano & Jamieson, 2020). Stenning's (2020) research in the North East of England also highlights how austerity has widened the scale of socio-economic inequality, drawing in a 'squeezed middle' class, as well as exacerbating ongoing everyday inequalities faced by working-class people (Saunders, 2020).…”

Desiring Space: The Affective Politics of Intimacy in Shared Rental Accommodation

“…20-21). With half of Hackney's population, of 276,000, under the age of 29, a significant proportion of the borough's residents are both young and economically precarious, with many either unable to leave family-of-origin homes owing to the expense of the private market (Taylor, 2021), or reliant on the private rental sector's expensive and unregulated housing.…”