CHAPTER EIGHT
Remnants of Apartheid in Ponte City, Johannesburg
Denise L Lim
Introducing Ponte City Like a matryoshka doll, Ponte is a building nested in spatial scales of its own city, country, continent and globe. Located in the inner-city suburb of Berea in Johannesburg, this residential high-rise is recognisable from various vantage points throughout the city due to its great height, unusual cylindrical shape and bright red Vodacom sign that wraps around the exterior of the tower’s topmost floors (Figure 35). As a notorious Johannesburg landmark that incongruously challenges and reinvents what it means to be a ‘world-class’ city in a global context, this residential tower is imbued with complex social, cultural and political meanings. Built in 1975, Ponte was imagined as a utopia dreamed up by a white supremacist state. The 54-storey tower was designed to be a self-contained ‘city within a city’ for the upwardly mobile middle classes who could take an elevator straight to their luxurious apartments in the sky or descend into a promenade lobby stocked with every amenity imaginable. The lobby, also known as Ponte Nucleus,1 was designed for tenants to enter their own private shopping complex complete with up to 54 different stores, including an “estate agency, building society, food market, bottle store, dry cleaners, home-movie depot, art gallery, book shop, several clothes shops, a shoe shop, a record, hi-fi, radio, camera and TV shop, a florist, a chemist, and a fruit shop.”2 Furthermore, as urban designer Melinda Silverman adds, there were plans to include a pizzeria in keeping with the building’s Italian name.3 Designing Ponte as a ‘Little Europe’ reflected the racialised fears and fantasies of the apartheid regime, where access to the building was highly restricted and securitised to ensure a ‘safe’ white space. Ponte was also The Aesthetic and Spatial Politics of Ponte City
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