Urban Space in Transformation: The Imagined City's Response to Change in Vladislavi's Johannesburg

Our cultural values and socio-political perspectives are reflected in our material environment; when this environment is subjected to drastic change, the effects on these values and perspectives is profound. This article considers the wide-ranging socio-cultural effects of material change, and their implications for an ethics of memory and forgetting, in a post-apartheid urban environment through a close reading of Ivan Vladislavi's Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. In my analysis, I draw on architectural theorist Fred Scott's three possible approaches to existing material and cultural infrastructure, namely demolition, preservation and re-appropriation. Using this framework, and extending it in several ways, I discuss the ways in which processes of demolition/destruction, preservation, and adaptation/re-appropriation are inscribed in Vladislavi's Johannesburg.