Loitering: Reassembling Time in the City-Of-The-Global-South

One of the most powerfully visible ways in which public space in inner city Johannesburg is ordered is through the material presence of apparently idle young men - a context profoundly linked to the precarious position of young and immigrant men in the post-apartheid economy. For the most part, these young men are regarded with disdain, the objects of fear and anxiety. In the following discussion, based on two years of field research with a group of unemployed young men (between the ages of 15 and 30 years old) who attend a weekly bible study and soup kitchen at a church in the inner city, I demonstrate ways in which these young men structure their daily lives in response to the over-abundance of time. I consider how the act of loitering in public space serves to reassemble the relationship between time and value at the peripheries of the urban economy, extracting value from the apparently idle activity of waiting in the present, but uncoupled from a sense of control over the past and future.