POWER AND PUBLIC SPACE IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Speaker: Melinda Silverman, Urban Designer/Strategist, South Africa

In 2005, the South African government embarked on an ambitious building project to commemorate an important event in the history of apartheid resistance. Two vast structures, each half a mile long, were erected at great expense to define a new square in Kliptown, Soweto.

The project had two aims:

• To commemorate a gathering in Kliptown in 1955, when tens of thousands of South Africans converged to sign a non-racial “constitution” for a post-apartheid South Africa.
• To attract tourists to Soweto and to catalyze economic development initiatives in this historically deprived area.

The government ensured that the building project went through all the appropriate steps, establishing a public competition, inviting an international panel of judges and encouraging local participation throughout the construction process. But the resulting buildings have failed to live up to the project’s honorable intentions. The buildings are over-scaled, the land use is inappropriate and fine-grained pedestrian networks have been disrupted. The local economy has been damaged, the neighborhood fragmented, and there has been intense local resistance. The Kliptown project raises important questions about memory, about the way in which political power is inscribed in space, and about national agendas that ignore local conditions.