Maboneng, its name a Sotho word meaning “place of light,” has been rapidly growing at about 3 times the rate of South Africa's standard of about +6% annually. Located in Johannesburg's Central Business District (CBD), the district was cut from a section known as Jeppestown, and is situated between two major streets, Commissioner and Marshall. It served as a beacon of hope for the once-abandoned eastern margin of Johannesburg's CBD, now breathing with new life.

It still holds many uncertainties, since it remains in the fairly new stages of development after a decade-plus. With a rising demand for trendy, urban property, the threat of exile for those who cannot afford to live under new pricing looms overhead, and the initial boom has been tempered by liquidated investments.

Like many South African cities, apartheid's end had led non-whites to leave their mandated neighborhoods and migrate into the cities themselves. In Johannesburg, the industrial neighborhoods were an affordable option, since they had declined in the 1970s. As they moved in, demographics shifted further. Many whites who were living near, working in, or investing in these industrial areas fled, along with their money. Economic failure resulted from the closing of industries, resulting in dilapidated structures and a general rise in crime.

Jonathan Liebmann, the entrepreneur who headed Propertuity Development Company (backed by Jonathan Beare) when he was still in his twenties, instigated Maboneng's revitalization efforts. He bought some empty buildings in 2008/09, revamped them, and rented out small-scale studio space artists such as William Kentridge and Mikhael Subotzky, as well to design firms. The artists' followers started gravitating towards their studios, generating cultural buzz. The district’s growth as an attraction led to activities such as Arts on Main and Market on Main—weekly food, shopping, and art sales held in and around the warehouses let to Maboneng's founding artists. Liebmann privately developed most of "Maboneng"--38+ structures.

Liebmann's plan was to create an artistic, entrepreneurial, and social incubator that would bring together a mix of people with differing ethnic, educational, and economic backgrounds. Providing varied kinds of spaces where they could interact and form new connections fit with a new idealism in the post-apartheid era.

However, stylish new architecture and even the choice of signage fonts created a divide with an exclusionary effect on those not part of the integrated middle and upper classes. The Africanization of the district's name suggests a cultural blessing even as physical appropriation of space grows. The illuminated sign that stamps the Precinct with that name stretches across Kruger Street. It acts as a beacon for photos, reinforcing the curated characterization of the neighborhood and its trendsetting goals.

Local artists took most of the creative control in transforming the district, much as they did in industrial areas of New York City, like SoHo, Chelsea, or DUMBO. Not only were old industrial buildings being renovated and used by artists, but their exteriors served as canvases for street art. All in all, this “culture-led” revitalization offered innovation, collaboration, and development efforts that may have very well sustained the cosmopolitan, visionary neighborhood of modern desire—for some.

The neighborhood's retail investments increased demand for new or repurposed structures. With its close proximity to transportation, Maboneng became a booming retail center, equipped with fashion boutiques, malls, and houseware shops. Increased international travel to Maboneng for shopping day trips by Zimbabweans, Malawians, and Zambians brings in new consumers.

Many small, private businesses operate in the district, such as OPEN, a “co-working space” unveiled in 2012. Set up like a café. many young entrepreneurs, investors, and artists can order a cup of coffee, work alone, hold meetings, or network with others in a collaborative space, a practice growing throughout the world. Cafes, restaurants, and crafts also find niches.

Maboneng's reputation as one of Johannesburg's hot spots was reinforced by its use as a setting for the 2015 limited series "aYeYe" about three young black creatives sharing a Maboneng loft while working at an advertising agency. Paradoxically, this may have been an unintentional death knoll for the district. As has happened in other art-transformed spaces worldwide, many of the artists who pioneered the area departed as prices increased and the "coolness factor" attracted the bourgeoisie.

Growth in Maboneng continued, including projects like the Museum of African Design, transformed by Propertuity from an auto panel beater's shop to a non-collecting museum in 2013. Besides exhibitions, it hosts fashion shows and other events and includes a maker space with workshops. The Bioscope cinema (now closed) and POPart Performing Art Centre (no longer hosting full-scale performances) also provided both destination spots and employment. Proximity to the university helped fuel activities relating to the arts.

Murals and graffiti have been a strategic element in the district's branding. Not only are they ubiquitous, they are the focus of several tours. These are, however, restricted to the core sections of Maboneng, rather than its grittier outskirts, still perceived as somewhat dangerous for the middle class. Those highlighted are mainly commissioned, rather than spontaneous paintings, with both corporate and local government sponsorship.

Not all of Maboneng's residences are luxurious spaces. Many impoverished families live in informal housing within still derelict warehouses where frying oil buckets serve as furniture and milk carton labels provide wallpaper that covers holes. Some “apartments” are as small as 7' x 7' and house an entire family. Up to 150 families in Maboneng are fighting the rising cost of living and attempting to keep eviction at bay as the demand for more space continues to rise.

The general neighborhood depended on a cash economy, which unfortunately correlated with a rise in crimes such as burglaries of businesses, carjackings, thefts from individuals, and corruption in rent charges, especially in the informal housing sector. Cash usage also complicated research relating to the socioeconomics of the neighborhood, since cash cannot be traced like bank card purchases. An inability to track consumer patterns may have kept planners from predicting which investments would be soundest, and also prevented avoidance of declines in growth and expenditures.

The lack of a coherent management and development policy continues to polarize the neighborhood instead of unifying it through an inclusive vision. An insufficiency of hotels hinders development, but Airbnb fills this gap, as do a few boutique hotels, some extensively decorated by artists. London-based architect Sir David Adjaye designed a retrofit of a former diamond polishing business, transforming it into a combination apartment house (where he holds or held a flat) and the small Hallmark House hotel.

Maboneng suffered a major blow only a decade after its birth. In 2016, RMH Property bought into developer Propertuity, holding a large percentage of the company. In 2018, Propertuity's founder Liebmann departed, and the following year, RMH decided to fold the company, liquidating many of its properties for much less than they had been valued.

While this contradicted assurances that complete neighborhood renovation would be possible, a six-block development within Maboneng called Jewel City opened in 2020. In a fortress-like space once occupied by diamond and gold dealers, demolition allowed new structures rather than rehabbed buildings. It includes 2200 apartments, as well as retail space, offices, and a school. A pedestrian passage encourages strollers, and new murals vie with a McDonald's sign. While the original development of the Maboneng Precinct explicitly excluded chain stores and franchises, the Jewel City aspect includes not only fast-food places but supermarkets and other amenities, albeit some with mural decorations.

While some of its original creators have departed, there is still hope that the “Place of Light’s” ever-growing vision will not be extinguished. The recent injection of more than $141.5 million suggests that revitalization efforts have not ended, even if the district's cutting edge has dulled.

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The regal estate that fronts Devil’s Peak next to Table Mountain was home to British colonialist, politician and imperialist Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), whose belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy led him to enact voting and property laws that helped steer South Africa towards apartheid. The Groote Schuur, Dutch for “Big Barn,” was first constructed as a Dutch East India Company granary in 1657, and passed into private hands in the 18th century. Rhodes then leased it, purchasing and renovating it in 1893, along with 1500 acres of surrounding mountains and land. Ever since, the Cape Dutch structure has been an exclusively governmental estate, used to house political officials during their years in office.  When Rhodes acquired the Groote Schuur, it was in a dilapidated state. Rhodes had amassed a fortune consolidating diamond concessions through the establishment of De Beers. He decided to rejuvenate the property and hired Sit Herbert Baker, an English architect who made many notable government structures in South Africa. The Groote Schuur underwent massive renovation and expansion to revamp its original Cape Dutch appearance while preserving its character. Baker invented a new vernacular, exaggerating some of the curving gables and marrying them to certain English features, such as barley sugar chimneys with their twisted appearance. Although a fire destroyed much of it in 1886, Baker rebuilt it to his first plan, abjuring thatched roofing for tiles. Its enlargement included an entirely new front façade and a large terraced back porch, as well as a new wing that contained a leisure room for billiards, a master bedroom with a great bay window, and a grand hall with a huge fireplace. Its interior also incorporated indigenous yellowwood and stinkwood. The home’s architectural elements are comprised of decorative gables, collonaded verandas, whitewashed walls, and teak woodwork, giving the structure the air of a country estate. A bronze relief by Scottish sculptor John Tweed stands over the front door, framed by Ionic columns. Although it represents Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival and the founding of his colony, it has also been read as Rhodes’s constructed foreshadowing of his own further development as an empire builder, van Riebeeck like John the Baptist to Rhode’s Christ. Rhodes also commissioned Baker to furnish the estate, and he filled the house with furniture, books, glassware, and other decorations from the Cape in a shift away from popular London-imported furnishings. Baker’s skill and interest in the Cape Dutch style inspired Rhodes to collect colonial furnishings and keep African elements a part of his interior decorating.  Furnishings include an expertly-crafted Egyptian writing table, an old Cape Town armoire with hidden drawers, an elephant-shaped drinking cup, and an enormous bathtub carved from a single formation of Paarl Mountain granite. The Groote Schuur’s interior remains almost entirely as it was in Rhodes’s day, which means that heads of state through much of the 20^th century lived in old-fashioned surroundings that underlined the enshrined past. The narrative was that of a kind of manifest destiny: that what Rhodes considered the “higher races” were fated to rule their inferiors. One of Rhodes' favorite symbols derived from Great Zimbabwe in what was then Rhodesia. Rhodes subscribed to the false narrative of the time—that its mortarless-stone structures had been built by non-Africans who had subjugated much of southern Africa in the distant past. He would have found the concept that the Shona had created the structure, since established by archaeologists, inconceivable. Rhodes had originally wanted to be buried at Great Zimbabwe, but settled for bringing part of it back to Groote Schuur. His bedroom, whose window looked out at the house’s Devil’s Mountain backdrop, still includes a glass front case filled with milk jugs, headrests, soapstone bowls, and other African objects. A stone bird sits at its top; this is one of the eight soapstone birds that stood at Great Zimbabwe, and was snatched by the hunter Willie Posselt, who had separated the bird (about 13 inches high) from its column, which was just under five feet tall. He sold it to Rhodes. A number of similar sculptures were taken from the site, but all have been returned to Zimbabwe except for the Groote Schuur example. The wooden staircase Baker built at the house features comer posts carved in its likeness, and Baker used its form for doorplates and several waterspouts still visibly protruding from the wall under parts of the building’s roofline. Rhodes also had it reproduced and aggrandized for the dome finials at Oxford University's Rhodes House, which Baker also designed, and its replicas stand on the staircase there as well. It acted as his personal emblem and remains incorporated in the Rhodes Trust logo. During Rhode’s occupation of the estate, he used it as much as a home as a political headquarters. He frequently opened his gates to the public and allowed them to play and picnic amid the flowers and foliage of the garden and grounds, where he demanded masses of colors. He kept a menagerie closer to the slopes near Devil’s Peak, where visitors were also welcome. In 1930, decades after Rhodes's death, the Groote Schuur Zoo was constructed, full of antelopes, zebra, wildebeest, and ostriches. It has been vacant since 1975.   In choosing the Cape Dutch style and even reverting to the property’s Dutch name, Rhodes gave a nod to the Afrikaaners who had lived in Cape Town before their Great Trek to Natal. Coetzer suggests that Rhodes’ promotion of Cape Dutch style—at first derided by the English who had taken possession of Cape Town—was the cornerstone of the creation of a fictional common white South African identity, devoid of the very real conflicts that took place between the English and the Boers before their 1910 union. A partner in Baker’s architectural firm wrote an 8-part series on Cape Dutch architecture in 1909, and the would-be architectural joint heritage took on symbolic significance. Cape Dutch Revival became popular in the Cape Town for several decades; first associated with the elite, then the middle class. Rhodes left his estate to the nation. From 1911 to 1994, the Groote Schuur was the official Cape residence to eleven members of the Prime Ministers of South Africa and then functioned as a presidential residence. P. W. Botha, Nelson Mandela, and subsequent heads of state declined to live there. It is now a museum, known as Rhodes Memorial, but is only open to the public by appointment, unless public charity events are scheduled. 

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The Braamfontein Gate in Johannesburg's Braamfontein Business District is just one of the city’s many repurposed buildings. Built in 1976, it began as Total House, the South African headquarters for Total Elf Fina, the French-owned corporation that is one of six "super-oil" companies in the world. The steel and concrete skyscraper was designed in the Brutalist style, like the majority of buildings in this skyscraper-filled district. When the company moved to Rosebank, a suburb of Johannesburg, in 2011, it then served as headquarters for the UCS Group, as well as other commercial tenants, its name changing to the UCS Building and then to Lucs building. In 2014, a fire ruined the electrical system. The structure remained vacant for two years, when it was earmarked for conversion to middle-income residences.

Urban Task Force, a Johannesburg corporation that has been involved in urban renewal projects for over a decade—and also acts as landlord for numerous buildings--allocated a budget of R100 million ($7,268,402 USD) to Local Studio to complete the project. Trust for Urban Housing Finance (TUHF) also provided funding. Local Studio stated they envisioned a structure inspired by author and myth-specialist Joseph Campbell: "If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to." They saw their efforts as contributing to the city’s direction “away from soulless capitalism.”

To keep costs low, many existing building elements were repurposed. Balconies made of chromadek panels and glass were added to each residential unit, and office layouts were restructured, as was the ground floor. Leasing began in August 2016, and, when completed, the building will have 410 units. In 2017, rents ranged from $305 USD for one-bedroom apartments to $458 USD for two bedrooms; executive apartments had monthly rents of $534 USD, and several penthouses were planned. The ground floor includes a coffee shop and juice bar, as well as a business center, playground, pool, fitness center and other amenities. Solar roof panels and a hot water heat pump system add newer technologies to the structure

The 30-floor building, the tallest in the Braamfontein district, has some of the best views in downtown Johannesburg. Pitched to a young, multi-ethnic demographic, it exemplifies efforts to lure citizens to areas that emptied out after post-apartheid white flight to the suburbs by both residents and corporations. The University of the Witwatersrand is located in Braamfontein, and student presence helps ensure a trendy neighborhood, further increased by an influx of young professionals and additional shops and restaurants. A three-minute walk to the Gautrain, the high-speed light rail that connects Johannesburg to the airport and Pretoria, also makes the building attractive.

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One of Cape Town’s most stunning works of architecture is Mutual Heights, formerly called the Old Mutual Building and the Mutual Building, Located in Cape Town Central, it is a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture. Since its opening in 1940, its structural majesty has retained its architectural magic.

The architects were Capetown native Frederick McIntosh Glennie and the firm Louw & Louw. Glennie and Louw & Louw’s lead architect, Wynand Henry Louw, travelled to Paris and America from 1933-34 to learn how to design and construct a skyscraper that would successfully represent the dignity and strength the South African Mutual Life Assurance Society (now Old Mutual) desired for their company’s new headquarters. After this international research, the architects decided the Art Deco style best suited the company’s needs. The skylines of New York and Los Angeles--successful cities that had adopted Art Deco earlier—were particular inspirations. The commission began in 1936.

The skyscraper is made of reinforced concrete faced with granite and marble, with bricks, plaster, and stainless steel used as well. Its ziggurat-style exterior and prismoid windows were both architecturally intriguing and functional features for the time. When it first opened in 1940, it was the tallest building in Africa at eighteen stories high. Each floor was separated by an average of 16.4 feet, creating extremely high ceilings. Water-cooled air conditioning and extremely fast elevators were both innovations.

Old Mutual, founded in Cape Town in 1845, was the country’s first life insurance company. Its values and outlook at the time the building was created were unsurprisingly conservative and colonial in nature. Evidence of these attitudes clearly appears in the carved stoned frieze that lines the exterior of the building. This frieze, one of the longest in the world at 386 feet, was designed by Ivan Mitford-Barberton and sculpted by Italian immigrant Adolfo Lorenzi and four of his brothers. Its fifteen sections feature a timeline of Cape Town’s colonization, wars, and emancipation of slaves, as well as the colonization of other parts of South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), missionary activities in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Tanganyika (Tanzania), and Arab resistance to Turkish attack in Kenya. Old Mutual worked in all of these British colonies. As Freschi observed, the scenes show “conflation of South African history with corporate policy,” and also stress the white male colonists as actors, while the Africans are acted upon, and female colonists are primarily observers.

All the exterior ornamentation emphasizes the luxury and status of this Art Deco structure. Nine granite figures stand above the Parliament Street building frieze, representing the upper torsos of men from nine southern and east African ethnic groups. If some of their distinctive hairstyles or hats are ambiguous, they are clearly labeled: Xosa (sic), Pedi, Maasai, Matabele, Basuto, Barotse, Kikuyu, Zulu, and Bushman (sic). These granite sculptures were included to accentuate and represent African heritage, yet the Khoi who occupied the Cape area are not included. Pairs of elephant and baboon heads, again designed by Mitford-Barberton and executed by Lorenzi and his brothers, decorate the 6th and 12th floor inner edges of the Darling Street façade respectively, while four “native masks” flank the 18th floor tower’s edges. These “masks” are an odd inclusion in the architectural program, for masquerades are not performed by any South African groups, nor do they occur in the other British colonies then part of Old Mutual’s purview--with the exception of a limited number in then-Tanganyika, which look nothing like those on the building.

The internal decorations include marble columns, white-veined onyx marble, gold leaf ceilings, distinctive door knobs, African animal etchings, paneled frescoes, and carved wooden friezes that feature African animals. Many of these elaborate elements illustrate the dedication to Art Deco throughout the building, but some rooms seem more traditional, meant to represent the values and stability of the company. The banking hall is lined with marble columns and has often been described as Neoclassical in style, stressing Old Mutual’s prevailing theme of tradition despite their Art Deco light fixtures. The capitals, however, follow no Classical order; they too are topped by metal rings that echo those of the lamps, suggesting a mere nod to Neoclassism via the fluting on the columns.

Old Mutual moved its headquarters to the Pinelands suburb not even two decades after the opening of the Mutual Building. By the 1990s, only a limited number of other commercial tenants used the building. In 2002, Old Mutual planned to mothball the structure due to white flight from the CBD, but Louis Karol Associates proposed to repurpose the structure into apartments in order to “seed” the district with new residents. They did so from 2003-05, with financing from Old Mutual Properties. Old Mutual retained ownership of the Director’s Suite and Assembly and Banking Halls, using the latter as an event venue, but finally divested them in 2015.

The building and its 180-plus units, now referred to as Mutual Heights, was one of the first conversions to jumpstart a residential return to downtown Cape Town, though some apartments were purchased as vacation rentals rather than primary homes. Much of the building has kept its original design and decorative elements without falling victim to over-renovation, winning Louis Karol Associates three refurbishment awards. Mutual Heights remains one of the most profound and aesthetically beautiful buildings in Cape Town, albeit with now-archaic colonialist visual declarations. Security anxieties led to the installation of a skywalk connecting tenants to an existing parking garage diagonally across an intersection. Concerns arose that residents might fortress themselves from the neighborhood, rather than resuscitate it.

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