This ground breaking new work draws together a cross-section of South African scholars to provide a lively and comprehensive review of the under-researched area of heritage practice following the introduction of the National Heritage Resources Act. Looking at the daily heritage debates, from naming streets to projects such as the Gateway to Robben Island, Desire Lines addresses the innovative strategies that have emerged in the practice of defining, identifying and developing heritage sites. In a unique multi-disciplinary approach, contributions are featured from a broad spectrum of fields, including the built environment and public culture and education. Showcasing work from tour operators and museum curators alongside that of university-based scholars, this book is a comprehensive and singularly authoritative volume that charts the development of new and emergent public cultures in post-apartheid South Africa through the making and unmaking of its urban spaces. This pioneering collection of essays and case studies is an indispensable guide for those working within or studying heritage practice.

Planning and Transformation provides a comprehensive view of planning under political transition in South Africa, offering an accessible resource for both students and researchers in an international and a local audience. In the years after the 1994 transition to democracy in South Africa, planners believed they would be able to successfully promote a vision of integrated, equitable and sustainable cities, and counter the spatial distortions created by apartheid. This book covers the experience of the planning community, the extent to which their aims were achieved, and the hindering factors. Although some of the factors affecting planning have been context-specific, the nature of South Africa’s transition and its relationship to global dynamics have meant that many of the issues confronting planners in other parts of the world are echoed here. Issues of governance, integration, market competitiveness, sustainability, democracy and values are significant, and the particular nature of the South African experience lends new insights to thinking on these questions, exploring the possibilities of achievement in the planning field.

In this engaging book, Amber Reed provides a new perspective on South Africa’s democracy by exploring Black residents’ nostalgia for life during apartheid in the rural Eastern Cape. Reed looks at a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of “white” values. These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own “African culture”—whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands. In the Eastern Cape, Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who were most disenfranchised by the late racist, authoritarian regime. Examining a rural town in the former Transkei homeland and the urban offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town, Reed argues that nostalgic memories of a time when African culture was not under attack, combined with the socioeconomic failures of the post-apartheid state, set the stage for the current political ambivalence in South Africa. Beyond simply being a case study, however, Nostalgia after Apartheid shows how, in a global context in which nationalism and authoritarianism continue to rise, the threat posed to democracy in South Africa has far wider implications for thinking about enactments of democracy. Nostalgia after Apartheid offers a unique approach to understanding how the attempted post-apartheid reforms have failed rural Black South Africans, and how this failure has led to a nostalgia for the very conditions that once oppressed them. It will interest scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and education, as well as general readers interested in South African history and politics.

Evolving Public Space in South Africa discusses the transformation of public space highlighted in the country. Drawing on examples from major cities, the author demonstrates that these spaces are not only becoming wasted space, but are also adapting and evolving to accommodate new users and uses in various parts of the city. This process of evolution tends to challenge the more traditional visions and general global views of declining public space in cities and argues that it rather resembles the resilience of these spaces and the potential for regeneration through continuously emerging and mutating forms, functions and meanings. Including over 20 black-and-white images, this book would be beneficial to academics and students of urban planning and design and those interested in the regeneration of cities.

Reveals how liberal democracy and free-market economics reproduce the inequalities of apartheid in Cape Town, South Africa.

This study analyses the representation of Durbanite and Capetonian urban spaces in the following selection of post-apartheid works: Mariam Akabor's ''Flat 9'', Rozena Maart's ''Rosa's District Six'', Johan van Wyk's ''Man Bitch'', K. Sello Duiker's ''Thirteen Cents'', Bridget McNulty's ''Strange Nervous Laughter'', and Lauren Beukes' ''Moxyland''. The focus lies on the interrelatedness of shifting post-apartheid subjectivities and urban space (and place) in these literary works. The analysis not only grants access to different 'new voices` of post-apartheid literature, it also sheds light on the perception of South African history, urban geography, and cultural topography - essentially, on real as well as imagined South African urban spaces - as the literary representations of city-spaces become archives of cultural transformation processes; a gateway to the understanding of the developments and changes of, and within, the two cities in question.

This book explains how apartheid changed South Africa's cities, how people responded to regain some control over urban life, and how the forces of urbanization held back under apartheid will affect the post-apartheid era.