Naomi Roux. Remaking the Urban: Heritage and Transformation in Nelson Mandela Bay.

Abstract

Naomi Roux’s Remaking the Urban: Heritage and Transformation in Nelson Mandela Bay is a thoughtful text that shifts the focus of heritage studies in South Africa to the geographical site of the Eastern Cape. By grappling with the politics and processes of memory making in the urban landscape of Nelson Mandela Bay, Roux expands upon recent scholarship, such as Minkley, Rassool, and Wits’s Unsettled Histories (2017). Like Unsettled Histories, which takes the reader through various sites of historical production between 1990 and 2010, Roux explores the memory-making practices that took place at various sites in Port Elizabeth and surrounding areas between 2006 and 2016. Remaking the Urban, however, does make a different contribution by examining both government and community-driven processes of memory making while also drawing attention to the ways that architecture and design have often led—and failed at—these processes. Roux focuses on four different sites of memory production in Nelson Mandela Bay, all of which either represent activist histories, have evoked activist responses, or have been established through activist processes. These sites include the Red Location Museum, a government initiative to honor the history of anti-apartheid activism in the Port Elizabeth township of New Brighton; the South End Museum, established largely through the mobilization the formerly displaced residents of this neighborhood; and a series of urban public arts projects initiated by the Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA). In each of these sites, Roux reads the urban landscape and the design of exhibition spaces but also draws from personal archives of photographs, drawings, maps, letters, and documents to think through urban space’s ability to act as a record and representation of the past and as a site of struggle over the ownership and legacy of that past.