[URBAN NOTE] "Johannesburg's Ponte City: 'the tallest and grandest urban slum in the world'"

[rfmcdonald]

As part of an ongoing series, The Guardian's David Smith visits Johannesburg's Ponte City, a skyscraper apartment tower with a history mirroring South Africa's.

The young middle class are moving back into Ponte 40 years after it first opened its doors amid a surge of optimism and wall-to-wall shag carpeting. Johannesburg, an economic engine and magnet for immigrants, can claim to be the New York of Africa, so this audacious experiment in skyscraper homes, designed by 29-year-old architect Rodney Grosskopff, was the height of aspiration for apartheid’s ruling white minority.

“Through the 1970s, this was the crème de la crème of living,” says [resident Michae] Luptak, 30, who gave up his job as a chartered accountant to run youth projects here. “If you had this address, you were part of the in-crowd.”

In those days the surrounding area, Hillbrow, was a vibrant multicultural hub of bookshops and cafes. But not for long. By the 1980s the middle class was fleeing to the suburbs, and by the 1990s Hillbrow – home to immigrants from the rest Africa – became rife with drugs, poverty, prostitution, gun crime and urban degradation, and Ponte was dragged down with it.

This was, perhaps, the tallest and grandest urban slum in the world, a gravity-defying dystopia that might have sprung from the imagination of a science fiction writer. It is said two floors were stripped bare and, along with the downstairs parking lot, became an informal brothel. Luptak adds: “From a kitchen sink, there was a tomato plant growing with tomatoes the size of tennis balls.”