Memory Justice in Ordinary Urban Spaces: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in a Post-Apartheid Neighbourhood

Abstract

From 1950 onwards, under the apartheid regime’s Group Areas Act, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes across South Africa’s cities. While the removals from some areas, notably District Six in Cape Town, are well documented and memorialised, many others have largely been erased from public memory. In a context of burgeoning research into issues of spatial justice in Southern cities, this paper puts forward the argument that the concepts and practice of memory and memorialising in urban spaces deserve more attention. Specifically, we suggest that the relationships between space and memory, shaped by collective, public acts of remembering and forgetting, can expand our understanding of what constitutes spatial justice in our cities. Reflecting on a research project conducted in Lower Claremont, a racially mixed, middle-class suburb in Cape Town that was declared White in 1969 and subsequently dubbed Harfield Village, we explore some of the ways in which remembering and forgetting take place on the urban scale, and their implications for imagining just cities. We ask, too, what possibilities exist for active remembering in this place and in similarly ordinary city spaces. Analysing oral histories from former residents and interviews with current occupants of the neighbourhood, we open up some of the complications in surfacing forgotten stories and creating landscapes of memory. In the final section of the paper we reflect on an art installation that formed part of the research project, and suggest some possibilities for active memory work in our urban spaces.