Maponya Mall

Maponya Mall is the heartbeat of Soweto, South Africa. It is the hub where fashion and style meets choice and function. South Africa's vibrant and trendy Sowetan community gather here to shop, socialise, eat, and to ‘see and be seen’. Today this elegant, contemporary building with its enormous 65,000m² of retail delights attracts an average 1.5 million people a month. It boasts world-class design aesthetics and exciting features not previously found in regional shopping centres in South Africa.

Pre-existing situation & UTCFS’s role

Maponya Mall, Soweto's first upmarket regional shopping mega-centre, was opened in September 2007. With more than 180 tenants and thousands of staff and shoppers passing through the mall every day, safety and security is a key concern. The local UTCFS installer, Integrated Fire Security, was tasked with designing and installing a fully-integrated smoke detection system. The requirement for this system was that it should interface with all of the mall's other building management systems to ensure not only that security personnel are immediately informed when smoke is detected, but that the smoke is then extracted while the public is evacuated, if necessary, and the building protected.

UTCFS’s solution

Maponya Mall is protected by more than 500 sensing devices from UTCFS’s Apollo range. These are linked to two FP1200 addressable control panels located in the central management office. This ensures that operators are given an accurate picture of exactly which detector or device has triggered an alarm, greatly improving response times and the effectiveness of any reaction: a crucial consideration when every second counts. The control panels can also be used retrospectively to record the precise time and location of an event and to store this information for analysis, if necessary. Maponya Mall’s Operations Manager is delighted with the peace of mind that comes with the sophisticated and reliable fire system now installed at the shopping centre.