WEEKDAY URBANISM
Where Nothing Happens (And Everything Happens)
This project tries to trace the everyday routines that define Shtromka. It focuses on the small gestures people repeat on ordinary weekdays: the quick chats, the quiet pauses, the steady shortcuts, the subtle ways space is used and reshaped. These moments are easy to miss, yet they create the atmosphere and rhythm of the district. The project offers no new design proposal; instead, it invites a different way of paying attention. By noticing what usually fades into the background, a new understanding of Shtromka emerges. The simple act of slowing down and paying attention somehow became the foundation of my project. For me, Weekday Urbanism isn’t a theory; it’s a way of noticing the everyday patterns, routines and gestures that shape Shtromka.
The Unpacking
My projects revolve around some nodes I observed thorughout the neighbourhood, but I want to unfold one story in particular, A simple bus stop bench, the most ordinary infrastructure, its so easy to unnoticed but this stop tells us how to see it. I anchor myself in one ordinary point of the neighbourhood and allow its weekday rhythm to reveal itself. The city may conceive this site as infrastructure, a space for leaving, but residents continuously produce it as lived space, a place for staying, exchanging, resting, hesitating, drifting. In Lefebvre’s terms, it is the everyday that flips the space from the planned to the lived (Lefebvre 1991). That quiet transformation is exactly what interests me.
Over repeated visits, I watched how waiting, something we normally treat as dead time, becomes a generator of possibility. A bench shifts into an intimate zone where strangers speak like old neighbours. A cluster of men around a hand-cart refashion a sidewalk into a temporary public square. A delivery rider leaning on the kiosk creates a micro-territory that lasts only a few minutes but somehow leaves a trace. These scenes dissolve as quickly as they appear, yet they accumulate into the atmosphere of the bus stop. Nothing happens, and yet everything happens.
How I Read Weekday Urbanism
Everyday Urbanism (Margaret Crawford)
My main lens. Crawford argues that ordinary routines constantly remake the city.
Four core ideas:
• The ordinary is productive
• People reinterpret designed space
• Informality reveals hidden possibilities
• The city is made through useThese principles allow me to treat small weekday actions as urban forces.
These principles guide how I look at the bus stop: not as infrastructure, but as a living social ecosystem.
The Production of Space (Henri Lefebvre)
Lefebvre proposes that every place has three overlapping layers:
• Conceived Space (what planners draw)
• Perceived Space (movement, routines, rhythms)
• Lived Space (meanings, emotions, attachments)
This helps me understand why the bus stop behaves beyond its design. The city intended a machine for leaving; people produced a place for staying.
Intuitive Districts (Caroline Humphrey)
Humphrey shows that people navigate cities through familiarity, atmosphere, memory, and unwritten cues definetly not just maps. Districts are not fixed boundaries; they are zones of comfort and recognition.
This explains: Why some people feel “at home” at the bus stop. Why some gazes feel like boundaries. Why the same bench becomes a living room, a lobby, or a refuge, depending on who arrives.
These three lenses help me notice how the most ordinary place produces social relations, spatial logics, and invisible boundaries during a normal weekday. Nothing special needs to happen for the city to change. It already changes through the everyday.
My weird fieldnotes
These fieldnotes capture the bus stop in its raw, unedited form: observations written quickly and a quick sketch of all the actors I can see. What begins at 14:22 with two older women sharing a bench becomes, only moments later, a completely different social arrangement: men gathering, a hand-cart entering the scene, bodies reorganizing themselves into a temporary micro-community. The notes also reveal something that photographs cannot: the presence of me. “Why is everyone looking at me?” “Is this social tension I feel?” I asked myselt. This moment reflects what Caroline Humphrey describes as the intuitive dimension of districts, where one learns the unspoken atmospheres of a place through bodily sensation rather than map or plan (Humphrey 2024). The page becomes more than documentation. It is evidence of how the bus stop produces not just social interactions among locals, but also the positionality of the one who watches. It shows how everyday space is made, remade, and felt in real time.
More Layers, More Layers
This image gathers the layers that quietly structure the bus stop, layers we rarely name, yet constantly feel. Lefebvre reminds us that we often fail to see the “human facts” because they hide inside humble, familiar objects (Lefebvre 1991). Here, those objects become stages for micro-encounters. A bench becomes an anchor, holding strangers in temporary coexistence. A moment of being watched turns into the invisible eye, the subtle social sensing that shapes who feels at ease. A shared pause on the ledge becomes intimacy, a soft rewriting of public space. And the presence of gig-workers, waiting riders, and locals together produces a lobby, an informal reception zone created entirely through everyday routines. Crawford argues that the creativity of the city lies in its ordinary places, where people reinterpret and reimagine the familiar through simple, repeated acts (Crawford 1999). At this bus stop, those acts accumulate into a living logic- not planned, not monumental, but produced through repetition, attention, and the quiet negotiations of weekday life.
Bus stop as a space for Intimacy and Anchoring
These moments show how weekday life quietly rewrites the function of a place. At 14:22, two women who arrived as strangers created a brief zone of intimacy on a bench designed for waiting. Their silence, the wind, and their gradual turning inward produced what Lefebvre would call a lived space: improvised through bodies, timing, and mood rather than design (Lefebvre 1991). Twenty minutes later, the same bench transformed again. Three men gathered around it, forming a triangle of conversation, pulling a passerby out of his original path. What the city planned as a transit point became an anchor, exerting its own gravitational pull. Crawford describes this as the ordinary city’s capacity for reinvention, where familiar spaces become stages for new social possibilities (Crawford 1999). In these two small scenes, the bench demonstrates its true role: not a neutral piece of infrastructure, but a social device that lets the weekday rhythm push against the intended logic of the street.Logics and the life around the Bus stop
These two scenes show how weekday routines push against the city’s intended logic and instead produce their own. Around lunchtime, the bus stop becomes a commercial lobby: a bike rider and a driver wait not for a bus, but for orders cooking in the kiosk’s cramped kitchen. Their bodies spill into the shelter, repurposing it as an annex where gig work and cigarette breaks coexist. This is everyday urbanism at work, the public stop absorbing the private overflow of the restaurant, revealing how spaces designed for one purpose quietly take on another (Crawford 1999). Later in the afternoon, the rhythm changes. A woman with a stroller and dog cuts diagonally across the paved grid. Cyclists slice through the pedestrian zone to keep momentum. A man rushes for the bus, drawing a straight line instead of obeying the crosswalk twenty metres away. Lefebvre argues that the body holds its own intelligence, producing lived space through movement rather than maps (Lefebvre 1991). These diagonal paths: these “hypotenuses” are the real urban geometry, carved by the desires and efficiencies of the people who live here. Together, the two scenes show how the bus stop is not just a transit node but a place constantly renegotiated by need, time, and movement.
My positionality
Standing at the bus stop, I came to observe others, but the moment I opened my notebook, the gaze reversed. The neighbourhood looked back. What I treated as a “public” bench suddenly felt private, almost domestic. As a brown body in a predominantly white space, my presence carried a different weight. I felt like I wasn’t only watching; I was being read. This friction is part of how everyday spaces operate. Escobar writes that “we design tools, and then our tools design us” (Escobar 2018). The bus stop is one such tool: planned as neutral infrastructure, yet capable of shaping how a newcomer sits, breathes, and feels seen. My simple act of writing transformed me from an anonymous passerby into a figure under quiet scrutiny. The community produced boundaries without building anything- only through attention, glances, and the soft calibration of who belongs. Crawford reminds us that everyday spaces constantly reinvent themselves through such micro-relations (Crawford 1999). Here, the bench becomes a living room, the footpath becomes lived logic, and the gaze becomes a boundary that redraws the edges of the district. This moment taught me that weekday urbanism is not only about observing others; it is also about learning how the city observes you back. What I encountered wasn’t hostility, but the delicate negotiation of entering someone else’s weekday world, an intuitive district made from pauses, hesitations, and one quietly returned smile.
1. Crawford, Margaret. 1999. “Introduction.” In Everyday Urbanism, edited by John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, 1–14. New York: Monacelli Press.
2. Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
3. Humphrey, Caroline. 2024. Intuitive Districts: Agentive Images in a Post-Socialist City.
4. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.