Desire Lines Space, Memory And & Identity in the Post-apartheid City

The inscription of memory through architecture and heritage practice in cities and public spaces has acquired an unusual salience and topicality in contemporary South Africa. Attempts to alter the spatial and visual landscapes of the past have been accompanied by contests over relevance, meaning and the nature of what constitutes communities and their histories. The issue of heritage practice elicits daily debates and discussions about what the practice of defining, identifying and developing heritage sites involves and the problems that emanate from that process.This collection investigates cities as sites of memory and desire (and of fear and forgetting); as contested spaces given to plays of power and privilege, identity and difference. How have the profound social and political transformations and the release of energies in South Africa post-1994 been written into its cities and public spaces?Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City addresses the innovative strategies that have emerged in the sphere of public culture in post-apartheid South Africa. The case studies pay particular attention to how these strategies relate to contests over heritage practices in community museums, tourism and other memory projects. The book explores attempts to recast heritage in contemporary South Africa as well as the conditions of constraint under which newer cultural practices and representations have emerged.This selection of papers draws together work by architects and planners, historians, archaeologists, social anthropologists and other scholars working inthe fields of African Studies, Literary Studies, Heritage and Public Culture Studies and from the spatial disciplines. It offers insight into thedebates that have reconfigured the shape of city spaces, and of heritage and public culture, while posing new questions in the direction of scholarship.SHEPHERD is the author of 'Desire Lines Space, Memory And & Identity in the Post-apartheid City', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415701310 and ISBN 0415701317.