“My book project thinks through the space of the lift as urban affective infrastructure in Johannesburg over the 20th century,” said Bridget Kenny of the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. “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 and to the city and the wider political conjunctures.”
She explained that her title comes from a 2022 exhibition How to Fix a Lift, in which she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Simon Gush to present the research in an immersive photo installation.
“The book project is still in trenches, where I’m battling away,” she added.
She explained that lifts are about verticality and its technologies, as well the signalling of modernity and progress that they provide. “They help us to think about cities more three-dimensionally and volumetrically,” she said.
“Lifts make living and working possible in high-rise buildings. For skyscrapers to be possible, lifts had to be invented. Vertical transport problems had to be solved for the tallest buildings (like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) to be built ,” she said.
“In such buildings lifts consume two to 10% of the building’s energies increasing to 40% during peak times.”
This meant the need for advanced technologies for cable design, ultra-light carbon fibre and now magnetic levitation (MagLev) to develop lifts that could move up and down and, even sometimes, horizontally.
In South Africa the first skyscrapers in Cape Town and Johannesburg were erected in the late 1800s. These were mainly warehouses, department stores and offices including the mining-house headquarters. Kenny noted that the Carlton Centre was the tallest building in Africa when it was built in 1971 containing 56 lifts. “The visual verticality mapped Johannesburg’s achievements,” she said.
She explained that in the beginning lift technology was imported – some companies did establish production in South Africa but later left. A lot of production is now in China. There are also, of course, still old lifts that need to be maintained and a market in such lift parts.
“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 Mponeng Mine, the deepest at 3800 m currently relies on the world’s tallest elevator which travels 2283m at one go at a speed of 65km per hour.)
Under apartheid, tall buildings and deep mine shafts (and the lifts they needed) conveyed an ongoing discourse of progress.
“The geography of apartheid South Africa is overwhelmingly horizontal. But there was also verticality, and lifts enabled the urban space to become vertical,” she continued.
Small spaces, a range of relationships
Kenny explained that “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.”
In terms of the Separate Amenities Act Passenger lifts were defined as carrying ‘Europeans’ only, while Goods lifts could carry ‘non-Europeans’ – all part of the segregation of everyday spaces by race.
“Installing, fixing, maintaining and operating lifts involved much labour, some of which included restrictions through job reservation.”Also under apartheid, the lift operator was mostly male apart from female operators in department stores. Lift engineers were white. In Johannesburg, Pretoria and Bloemfontein, the job of lift operator was reserved for whites from 1960 to 1977.
Kenny noted that job adverts for lift engineers reflected the good salaries and ongoing training opportunities available and made it clear that black people couldn’t access training for these positions until the 1970s. She also showed examples of complaints in the few cases where lift operators were black.
“Interestingly, 28 job reservations were made across 13 sectors in the total history of section 77 of the Industrial Conciliation (Amendment) Act of 1956– passenger lift operators was one of the first. By the late 1950s job reservation exposed the unsaid but affective atmospheres that circulated.”
Affective urban infrastructures
In addition to the practical segregation issues, Kenny focused on lifts as affective spaces − physical spaces in which people come into close, and in the case of mine cages, claustrophobic proximity.
“Lifts invoked spaces of aspirational belonging, but often produced ambivalence and non-belonging.”
“Intimacy closes in on those within walls with the uneasiness of people thrown together in obligated proximity and the sensibilities of time and space,” she added.
“There is a materiality to those relations, a preconscious feeling in a body,” she explained. “I’m interested in ideology and how affect enables a moment of ideology before its articulated into a discourse or crystallised into a hegemonic framing.”
Lift Noir – lifts as accident scenes
Another chapter of the book will focus on lifts as accident scenes and in particular mining-cage accidents in South Africa (here she also mentioned the work of Asanda Benya, STIAS Iso Lomso fellow, whose work on the gendered space of the mining cage she described as some of the best work in this area).
“Mining-cage accidents (like the Vaal Reefs Accident in 1995 which resulted in the death of over a hundred miners) highlight concrete relations of exploitation and oppression, blackness as flesh. The accidents are depicted as national tragedy and can become sites of resistance and, unfortunately also over time, collective fatigue.”
“Huge disasters highlight our incapacity to deliver. What would a safe elevator trip mean in these circumstances? Can we actually make mining conveyance (to deep depths)safe?”
Kenny will also look at more small-scale passenger lift accidents. . In such cases she explained that lifts became the site of crime, death and accident, highlighting ongoing questions of relationships and urban change, social orders and commonsense, infrastructures of capital and law and state control.
“Lifts connect capital and state in everyday relations including the breakdowns in these.”
‘I’m not doing a social history of lifts but rather suggesting that spaces like lifts − small spaces of empire − offer a way of viewing connections and also the ideas and sensibilities that are floating within them. I’m also trying to connect labour and affect.”
“By looking at lifts specifically I’m tracing a more mundane technology and how it constituted everyday politics. 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 intimacies in South Africa.”
“I’m interested in how the meaning and the materiality of lifts is fixed over time in different ways,” she concluded.