Lift Stories: The intimate publics of elevators in 20th century Johannesburg

This project thinks through the space of the lift as urban affective infrastructure in Johannesburg over the 20th century. Using archival research, newspaper accounts, literary representations, films and interviews, the project writes an ‘atmospheric’ history of the city through its lifts. It suggests that such taken-for-granted everyday places offer a site from which to rethink changing relationships in the city. From the early decades, Johannesburg architecture built upwards with imported elevator technology, even as mine shafts extended downward with the local production of cages, hoists and cables. The workings and aesthetics of passenger lifts reflected at different times the signs of modern development and progress. Lifts also marked a space of awkward intimacy and sociality that surfaced entanglements and contradictions of race, class and gender relations, including through segregation as public amenities. Moreover, installing, fixing, maintaining, and operating lifts involved much labour, some of which included restrictions through job reservation. The project argues that lifts as urban infrastructure in their varied forms (passenger lifts, goods lifts and mining cages) entwine technology, labour and affective space to tell a story of changing everyday political publics in South Africa.