Memorialisation practices involving public memory and history are usually located in public space. Such practices and their impact are therefore tied up with key public space dynamics and tend, as a result, to respond to a wider variety of imperatives than simply heritage preservation and representation. A crucial part of this is how memorialisation practices presume things about the nature and trajectory of the public or publics being planned for. Relatedly, the way public space shapes who counts as part of the public acquires further salience in heritage discourses. Those who are or feel excluded from intendedly publicly accessible heritage sites are thus excluded from spaces and discourses of public memory, culture and identity, which is ‘an explicit form of denial and assertion of power’. This itself is linked to how memorialisation practices are tied to political processes or motivations.

The histories of contestation over how to remember heritage sites display both arbitrariness and contingency in how we remember. These histories also remind us of the political importance of how memorialisation practices are carried out. These practices may thus obscure as much as they reveal. They can be devices of forgetting and obliteration as much as remembering and conservation, often intentional as part of nation-building projects, ‘an ongoing tension between collective memory and selective amnesia’ in the words of Martin J. Murray. While memory is certainly built into architecture, it also exists in many other places, practices and cultures. As such, this chapter seeks to explore current and historical contestation over two spaces in central Johannesburg, in the context of how the spaces are used in South Africa's largest city, itself located in Gauteng (place of gold), a province that was renamed in the democratic era. The two spaces are Constitution Hill, a former colonial and apartheid prison-complex since transformed into a museum and human-rights precinct, and Gandhi Square, the main central bus terminus in Johannesburg's Central Business District (CBD).

Constitution Hill and Gandhi Square represent two early transformations of public places in the post-apartheid era – important sites in the narratives of the downtown ‘regeneration’ of Johannesburg and the elaboration of a new national identity in South Africa. Thus, they are also bound up in discourses and representations of public memory and identity. Constitution Hill aims at confronting and situating colonial and apartheid history by juxtaposing it with a vision for the future.