Race, Space, and Architectures of Apartheid in South Africa, Past and Present

In the two decades following South Africa’s first democratic election, the nation has undergone numerous physical transformations as part of its struggle to create a unified national identity in the face of the lingering remnants of Apartheid. New conciliatory spaces including museums, commemorative monuments, heritage sites, and public memorials have attempted to combine the diverse narratives of South Africa’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ and shape a new national consciousness by facilitating necessary discussions and confrontations with the traumatic elements of South Africa’s past. Yet recent events including the #RhodesMustFall movement and the creation of radical new heritage spaces like the District 6 Museum reveal that the racial tensions, hierarchies, and infrastructures that have shaped South African reality both before and during the Apartheid period are still far from resolved. This lecture interrogates race, space, and architecture in South Africa from past to present, and in doing so, unpacks the role of space and architecture in South Africa as key players in the generation of hierarchies of racial power as well as conditions of disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and race-based segregation over the course of the nation’s long history. Yet it also underscores how the built environment is being increasingly operationalized in the contemporary period as a tool of affirmation and resistance in response to the persistent presence of racial bias and intolerance in South African society which has continued to impact the shape of reality and the built environment for numerous non-white South Africans today.

Beyond the introduction, this lecture briefly outlines these case studies…(list the regions of relevance to the lecture)

1. Slave Lodge, Cape Town, South Africa (established 1670)

2. Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, South Africa (completed 1934)

3. Robben Island Maximum Security Prison, South Africa (established 1961)

4. Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa (completed 2001)

5. District 6 Museum, Cape Town, South Africa (established 1994)

6. Statue of Cecil Rhodes, University of Cape Town, South Africa (completed 1934, removed 2015)