Goeiman, Johnathan2026-01-132026-01-132025https://hdl.handle.net/10566/21676This thesis is centred around a case of urban street waste-pickers dwelling in an affluent neighbourhood of Johannesburg. It explores the complexities of power in place to better understand the entangled processes through which power is fragmented across the urban and how place-making strategies are developed and gain materiality from the margins. Accordingly, this thesis develops the notion ‘infrastructural place-making’ as the mechanism through which street waste-pickers navigate, contribute, make sense of and are entangled within everyday spaces of the urban. This notion brings forth phenomenological dimensions such as the objectivity of the body, its lived experience and its subjective relation to urban space. In this regard, this thesis frames street waste-picker bodies as extensions of urban waste infrastructure - demonstrating how complex waste networks are sustained through: (i) navigating symbolic and material forces of exclusion; (ii) the making and unmaking of informal dwelling structures; (iii) mobilities within the streetscape and (iv) the physical labour of street waste-picker bodies themselves. These socio-material networks are often rendered invisible as movements are ephemeral, informal dwellings are developed on fringe lines of the urban and that street waste-picker bodies are not conventionally understood to be infrastructural within dominant urban imaginaries. These (in)visible relations are brought to life and given material expression through a phenomenologically informed ethnography with a research design that is qualitative, interpretive and exploratory. In doing so, this thesis navigates situated encounters with street waste-pickers in Johannesburg to reveal important patterns of (in)visibility and exclusion related to how socio-material infrastructures are made in the everyday and how the city is unevenly, and often, violently experienced. Through navigating these entanglements of power and by disentangling the lived experience(s) of street waste-pickers, ‘place’ is revealed through its entanglement with slower forms of ‘infrastructural violence’. In doing so, this thesis offers insight into how the everyday city is made, inhabited, and navigated from its margins.enUrbanWaste-PickersJohannesburgStrategiesStreetThesis