ABSTRACT
Globally significant sites of oppression and injustice that persist in our landscapes as dark repositories of collective memory can be opened to the light of interpretation and design to activate new civic life and justice. These sites have potency and poignancy for connecting past struggles for human rights to contemporary human rights movements. Truth-telling and reconciliation are activated through the transformative role of art, design and urban planning to accomplish an inversion of meaning, a healing of the deep lingering pain literally earthed in these places and communities. The re-appropriation and re-design of such sites can, through empathetic processes and landscape interventions, reconcile not only past human conflicts but the past and future city. The case study presented in this chapter, the transformation of the Old Fort Prison in Johannesburg South Africa into the Constitutional Court precinct, examines sites of conscience as active agents of socio-political conflict resolution, urban reconciliation and the imagination of new civic possibilities.
