Countdown city: contingency as urban condition, hustle as exit, and everyday crisis in Seoul

This paper examines contingency as an everyday mode of being in cities, beyond labour conditions. It departs from accounts on contingency as symptoms of crisis that are cyclically created and fixed, to discuss contingency as urban conditions. The paper draws from ethnographic encounters with short-term workers, or hustlers, who embody socio-spatial mobility practices and agency particular to everyday contingency. As the encounters show, contingency as urban conditions compels people to constantly reassess work, finance, and social relationships as opportunity costs, while elongating the gap between normal states. Hustle is practised as a means of life-building for now and a way to exit from now, converging in a countdown from the uncertain present to a fantasised future. The paper addresses hustler as a historical urban subject that rejects reduction to working class, precariats, or rebels. It pivots away from narrating everyday through politically charged subjects and articulates less heroic agency. The paper proposes countdown temporality, (im)mobility, and hustler subject as time-space and agency of everyday crisis. Situated in the aftermath of South Korea’s rapid economic growth, where the overcome-able crisis narratives have long fuelled aspirations for progress, the paper contributes to theorisation of everyday crisis and expands its epistemological boundary.