Passive Resistance: Waiting & Loitering
An Insurgent Counter-Defense Against Spatial Warfare is
a spatial manifesto that redefines loitering as a tactical form of resistance against urban exclusion. This project critiques how design, security, and privatization perpetuate spatial segregation in Johannesburg, disproportionately targeting gig laborers such as Uber Eats delivery drivers, a role largely occupied by Black men whose movement and visibility have historically been controlled and criminalized.
These workers sustain the city’s economy while being structurally excluded from its spaces. Situated at Rosebank’s Quatrain Station, the proposal introduces a Recharge Hub that draws on the spatial logic of trench warfare. The trench is both metaphor and method, a defensive spatial response to economic and territorial policing.
Trench
The architecture transforms loitering into opportunities for growth, care, and collective empowerment through spaces for rest, legal aid, and education. By legitimizing presence in contested space, the intervention challenges inherited systems of spatial violence and reimagines idle time as a radical act of reclamation. This project presents as both design and defiance, a counter-architecture of care, resistance, and solidarity embedded within the margins of the segregated city.
Uber Delivery drivers are
Waiting for orders
Waiting for fair wages
Waiting for recognition as more then convince workers.
Waiting at street corners,outside restaurants, in parking lots.
Waiting for the next trip, the next tip, the next opportunity.
Waiting for safety on the roads, for protection from crime, for policies that acknowledge their labor.
Waiting for a system that values their time, their fuel, their effort.
In this waiting, hours slip away, days turn into months the sun shines and the rain fall but they still Wait, they loiter.
For a city that depends on them but barely sees them
WARFARE
3.POLEMIC SECTION
This project proposes an architectural counter-defense to the systemic exclusion of Uber delivery drivers in Johannesburg’s urban landscape. At its core, it explores passive resistance through loitering
The Polemic Section illustrates this condition as a battlefield, an urban war zone, where the Corporate Powers launch attacks on the existence of Uber drivers through policies, surveillance, and spatial exclusion. In this war, superior firepower is not artillery but the violence of capital, zoning laws, and private security. The drivers, lacking formal power, resort to an architecture of defiance—they carve out trenches in the city: spaces of occupation, retreat, and tactical adaptation. This project imagines those trenches not as ruins of defeat but as structured, strategic responses embedded within the urban fabric.
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
The Intervention is organised into Three levels each derived from the conceptual framework of trench warfare: the Frontline Trench, Support Trench, and Reserve Trench combined. These floor plains structure the spatial and functional logic of the building, providing a layered response to the needs of gig workers who operate on the margins of the urban system.
Ground Floor
The ground floor of Intervention is a fully public space that forms the subterranean layer of the building, extending directly from the existing Quatrain Station. This creates an epibiotic relationship, a term from our site analysis, describing how the new structure connects to the old one like a secondary organism attaching to a host. Rather than replacing the existing station, the intervention grows above it, adding value through spatial and social support.
A new circulation path links the train station to the intervention, giving Uber Eats delivery drivers faster access to the city’s transport routes
This ground floor acts as a protective buffer zone, designed to support pedestrian life. It offers places to sit, gather, and wait, creating a new type of public space set apart from the fast-paced commercial environment above. While partially sunken, the space is open and visible, carefully designed to provide shelter and a sense of safety.
First Floor
The Frontline Trench forms the most active part of the hub, spaces that face the public, offering direct services such as a charging lounge
Ablutions , kiosk , a sick bay registration office , internet cafe a seminar room and form discussion spaces These are the immediate tools drivers need between deliveries, positioning this trench as the first line of defence in the daily struggle for survival, comfort, and dignity.
In combination with the Reserve Trench , the first floor offeres a small communal zone designed for play and leisure.
Second Floor
Located deeper within the structure, offers semi-private spaces such as legal aid offices, counselling rooms, and job support services. This trench provides infrastructural support beyond the physical acknowledging the psychological and structural pressures that come with precarious work. It becomes a place where drivers can seek help, plan longterm decisions, and gain access to systems typically out of reach.
