Decolonising Urban Heritage: Statues, Streets and Memory

Decolonising urban heritage is the process by which cities review which monuments, street names, buildings and narratives inherited from colonialism still occupy their public space, and decide to remove them, recontextualise them or replace them with the memory of those who were colonised. The question erupted in 2015, when students at the University of Cape Town brought down the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and went global in 2020, when protesters in Bristol threw the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the harbour. Two authors help to understand it: the sociologist Sharon Zukin, who explained how heritage serves to control the meaning of space, and the philosopher Achille Mbembe, who has thought decolonisation as a task for cities and universities.

Sharon Zukin: heritage as the elites' selection

Zukin showed in The Cultures of Cities (1995) that heritage is not a neutral legacy but a selection: elites decide what is preserved, what is celebrated and what is demolished, and use monuments and historic buildings to fix a version of the past that legitimises their present power. The statues of conquistadors in Latin American squares, the names of generals and viceroys on streets, the colonial buildings turned into luxury hotels are, in her reading, instruments of a symbolic economy that decides to whom the city belongs. Decolonising heritage means contesting that selection.

Achille Mbembe: necropolitics and decolonisation beyond the gesture

Mbembe supplies the political horizon. In Necropolitics (2003) he described how colonial power was exercised by deciding who could live and who must die, and how that logic was inscribed in space, in the city divided between settlers and colonised. In his interventions after Rhodes Must Fall he argued that decolonising is not only removing statues but dismantling the hierarchies of knowledge, property and memory that sustain them, and warned against a decolonisation reduced to gesture. The statue that falls must open a conversation about who decides the city's memory and with what rights.

Remove, recontextualise, rename: practices from Bristol to Mexico City

Practices have multiplied and differ. Removal: Bristol, Cape Town, the Confederate statues of the United States after 2017 and 2020, the Columbus statue in Mexico City, replaced in 2021 by a sculpture dedicated to Indigenous women. Recontextualisation: plaques and counter-monuments that explain who the figure was and at whose expense, as in Brussels with Leopold II or in Lisbon with the debate over the memorial to the victims of slavery. Renaming: streets dedicated to resisters, women and colonised communities in Berlin, Madrid or Bogotá. And new heritage: the protection of neighbourhoods, markets and popular uses that official conservation ignored.

Limits, critics and who decides urban memory

The debate has limits and critics. Those who defend preservation argue that erasing is forgetting and that history must be explained, not eliminated; those who call for removal reply that a statue in a square does not explain but honours, and that the museum is the place for explanation. Zukin also warns of the risk that decolonisation becomes another product of city marketing, with tours and plaques that do not change who owns the space. And Mbembe insists that decolonised memory without redistribution of land, housing and power is a façade.

For planning, decolonising heritage poses an operational question: who takes part in deciding what is preserved and what is celebrated in public space. Commissions with historians and affected communities, open renaming processes, budgets for memorials to victims and protection of the living heritage of neighbourhoods are the tools cities on three continents have begun to use. The statue is the symptom; ownership of urban memory is the underlying question.