ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how a flawed vision of architectural utopia in central Johannesburg – Ponte City – was conceived to serve a racist political system and then radically adapted through appropriation. Ponte City represents an adapted "utopia", originally built as a luxury residential tower, that became an artifact of Apartheid impacted by more recent shifts in spatial occupancy and social organization. The chapter mobilizes the social theories of Foucault, Nietzsche, and Situationist International to lens and critique the migration of Ponte City from a modernist bastion of Apartheid to an island of diversity and optimism. The demographic migration of Hillbrow represents a powerful narrative of cultural struggle in the production of space, and, more specifically, how disenfranchised citizens can appropriate and remake a neighborhood. In 2011, South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse engaged the monumental architecture of Ponte City as a canvas for a series of architectural installations and photographic investigations.
