Informal urban settlements and trade zones represent an increasingly pressing issue for
urban heritage developers. In light of the recent revisitation of the UNESCO
Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this article explores the current
challenges faced at the intersection of heritage practice, urban planning, and informal
communities. Heritage recommendations operate within the domain of soft law and
their implementation relies on the voluntarism of public parties and the private sector.
Such heritage recommendations are thus rarely taken up outside of city improvement
districts with recognizable property-owning stakeholders, commercial infrastructures
for security, maintenance, and investor marketing. In South Africa, the particular circumstances
of the post-apartheid landscape render urban planning frameworks prone
to reinforcing the marginalization of informal stakeholder engagement, ultimately perpetuating
a socio-spatial inequality such programs set out to mitigate. The civic practices
of new social movements and historical knowledge that emerges from the context of
informal and neglected urban environments illustrate emergent answers to the exclusionary
dynamics of urban heritage planning.