Abstract
This dissertation emerges from a personal sense of
displacement and disconnection from history, shaped
by the ongoing spatial legacies of apartheid and colonial
extraction. Situated within the Tswaing Crater and its
surrounding communities of Soshanguve, the research
positions architecture as an act of self-archiving — a
process of re-membering what has been fragmented
through displacement and systemic erasure.
The project begins by questioning boundaries —
not only physical ones such as fences and zoning
lines, and conservation limits, but also the epistemic
boundaries that determine what is preserved,
whose knowledge is valued, and who is allowed
to access heritage. Through Qualitative Research
methodologies it challenges the assumption that
heritage preservaton is neutral, arguing instead that
it often protects colonial narratives and architectures
while continuing to exclude Black communities from
the landscapes that hold their histories.
By drawing from Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black
Anthropocenes or None, the research situates Tswaing
within a broader discourse on Black geologies —
understanding the site not only as a geological
formation, but as a body marked by extraction, labour
and loss. The ruins of the salt factory at Tswaing
become a material metaphor for this violence, a site
where cosmology, ecology, and economy were once
reduced to resource. Yet, these same ruins also hold
the potential for reactivation, for memory, ritual and
collective healing to emerge new.
The architectural intervention introduces a new spatial
typology I have termed “The Black Lab” conceived
as both a Living Archive and an experimental ground
for reimaging contested landscapes. This typology
reimagines heritage sites as open, adaptive, and
participatory systems rather than static monuments,
Extending from the crater, a promenade with
Through this framework, the dissertation argues
that architecture can function as a form of repair
and return — mediating the relationship between
people and place, between memory and material. By
transforming Tswaing from a site of exclusion into one
of participation and dialogue, the project redefines
heritage as a living practice, one that evolves through
ritual, ecological care, and the continuous rewriting of
collective memory.