Remaking the Urban: Heritage and Transformation in Nelson Mandela Bay

After the end of apartheid in the 1990s, South Africa experienced a boom in new heritage and commemorative projects, from huge new museums and monuments to small community museums and grassroots memory work. Urban space itself is an important repository of memory, but South African cities remain in need for far-reaching and radical spatial transformation.

Remaking the Urban examines the intersections between post-apartheid urban transformation and the politics of heritage-making in divided cities, using the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro in South Africa’s Eastern Cape as a case study. This book examines how the twin processes of memory-making and change have played out in Nelson Mandela Bay, in sites that range from spectacular new museum precincts in historically marginalised townships, to embodied practices of memory for former activists whose stories have been largely excluded from post-apartheid public history. – .