District Six has been the site for imprinting new South African imaginaries onto real estate development, through new forms of compromise and accommodation. As attachments to inner city land have been asserted through land restitution or declarations of its historic significance, these claims have been contained through planning agendas that have prioritised mixed-use development, speculation and gentrification. As the state tries to imprint a development framework fragmented between themed environments of land restitution, commerce and the business of property, the District Six Museum has contested the field of memory, with new approaches to redefining citizenship in the post-apartheid city. Alongside civic forums, the museum has challenged the projects of urban regeneration, renewal and orderly citizenship that the state has inaugurated, demonstrating that social cohesion and urban reconstruction need to be based upon memory work, especially about the social experience of those whose material traces apartheid sought to destroy.