New Routledge Handbook Examines the Global Challenge of Precarious Housing
Lenita Kefala, researcher at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University and Carina Listerborn, Professor of Urban Studies at Malmö University, have contributed a chapter in the handbook on women’s experiences of temporary housing solutions in Sweden.
The newly published The Routledge Handbook of Precarious Housing offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of the growing normalization of insecure, unaffordable and inadequate housing worldwide. Bringing together contributions from scholars across the globe, the volume explores precarious housing not as an exceptional or temporary crisis, but as a structural condition shaped by financialization, racialization and post-settler-colonial relations.
Through theoretical discussions and case studies, the Handbook addresses a wide range of housing contexts, including social housing, rental markets, informal settlements, climate-exposed neighbourhoods, migrant housing and student accommodation. It examines how precariousness is produced both through broader political and economic structures and through people’s everyday experiences of uncertainty, waiting, instability and adaptation.
The volume is organized around themes such as security of tenure, infrastructure, homelessness and health, climate change, predatory actors, social movements, and policy responses. In doing so, it presents precarious housing as a field of political struggle in which residents, activists, planners and policymakers challenge dispossession and develop alternative approaches to housing and urban life.
Chapter 41, “Housing Precariousness in Sweden: Highlighting the Experiences of Women with Temporary Housing Solutions,” is written by Lenita Kefala, and Carina Listerborn. The chapter examines how changes in the Swedish housing market have contributed to the expansion of insecure housing arrangements. Although the Swedish housing system has historically been associated with egalitarian and universalist ideals, deregulation and the increasing neoliberalization of the economy since the 1990s have contributed to rising housing costs and weakened welfare-based support structures.
As a result, people without stable incomes or extensive social networks are increasingly dependent on temporary accommodation, subletting or lodging arrangements with insecure contracts. These developments have particularly affected young people, migrants and single-parent families. The chapter focuses specifically on the experiences of middle-aged, predominantly single women, many of whom have a migration background, a group that has received limited attention in research on precarious housing.
By combining structural analysis with individual and everyday experiences in Stockholm’s housing market, Kefala and Listerborn highlight how housing precariousness intersects with inequalities related to gender, migration and age. The chapter also demonstrates how insecure housing extends beyond the absence of a permanent home, affecting people’s wider life circumstances, wellbeing and possibilities for planning their futures.
The chapter is avalible through Open access:
Housing Precariousness in Sweden: Highlighting the Experiences of Women with Temporary Housing Solutions by Lenita Kefala and Carina Listerborn
Last updated: 2026-10-21
Source: Department of Human Geography