Heritage: the management of the past and future

We need to strike a balance between development and preservation

The Gautrain project has been a success for Gauteng, a project that marks a concerted effort to take the province into a future that will, of necessity, rely more and more on public transport. The questions of its future, its role in South African heritage and its role in society were raised at the Gautrain Public Transport Heritage Critical Thinking Forum, which was held at Liliesleaf, Rivonia on September 22 2016. The Critical Thinking Forum was hosted by the Mail & Guardian and moderated by Nozipho Mbanjwa, chief executive of The Talent Firm.

“T h e r e ’ s o f t e n a mi s c o n c e p - tion around heritage and what it is. And the definition that I prefer is actually that heritage is the management of change,” said Jacques Stoltz, independent consultant at Place Matters, and a cofounding member of The Heritage Monitoring Project.

“We’re not trying to preserve everything because we can’t”, said Stoltz. “So it’s about people with knowledge, like archaeologists, making the call to say, ‘Yes, this site is so special and so significant that development should not occur.’

“Unfortunately the reality is that communities may become defensive when they see development coming, and they often use ‘heritage’ as the lever to try to stop development, and for me that’s not heritage management,” he said.

“Heritage management is about saying, ‘Development can do good, but it can also do bad.’ I think the approach that I prefer is what the City of Johannesburg is currently doing around the Corridors of Freedom. And it’s about saying, ‘Well, let’s do a survey of all of the suburbs in the Corridors of Freedom and understand what heritage is there.’“

Heritage as an opportunity

The idea was raised that heritage is more than something to preserve from the past; it is something that is created as the country is developed. According to Stoltz, “We must actually understand not just the potential impacts but also how we can incorporate heritage and local place identity into the new systems and spaces we are creating, and start thinking ‘how can we use heritage as an opportunity?’

“As a good example, we’ve been doing work in Noordgesig, where there’s this old, disused rail- way bridge, but the two parts of Noordgesig are cut off from each other by a wetlands system and the pedestrians are forced to walk along quite a dangerous highway section. Why not repurpose the historic rail bridge as a pedestrian bridge? If we use opportunities like