VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

Cities in post settler-colonial nations are integral sites for decolonisation – they are built on usurped Indigenous land, but at the same time work to conceal their (often violent) origins by locating Indigeneity ‘out there’ or ‘back then’. My PhD research was motivated by the lack of visible Indigenous cultural footprint in many (post) settler-colonial cities. In Wellington, Aotearoa’s capital, there are only two statues commemorating Māori, while in Cape Town, Khoe and San heritage is largely non-existent – as Zenzile Khoisan highlights, there is not one place “that one can point to that memorializes us in a way that speaks to our essence, our aspirations, that captures the intensity of the weight and pain of history that has been thrust upon us.” When embarking on research into Indigenous Urban Heritage I found that neither the Cultural Landscape or the Historic Urban Landscape categories could adequately contend with management of Indigenous heritage sites. My research identified four main reasons for this: Assumptions around continued physical occupation, unified, static ‘community’ identity, tangible archaeological traces, and a division between nature and culture. These assumptions are deeply embedded in state- sanctioned heritage practice in many post settler-colonial cities, including Cape Town and Wellington. I will discuss the legacy of these assumptions in the context of two Indigenous-led protests against private building developments in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) and //hui !gaeb (Cape Town). The addition of Indigenous Urban Landscapes to our heritage lexicon, I will explain, can open up new avenues for research, heritage management and sustainable urban design.