This presentation offers  a preliminary overview of the evolving trajectory of cultural heritage-making in South Africa, with a particular focus on the urban context of Johannesburg. It outlines the emergence of heritage as both a discipline and an industry in response to South Africa's broader socio-political transformation, highlighting the diverse categories of heritage that have surfaced in public spaces.It includes a case study of the Fietas Mural Project, which foregrounds collective memory as a form of living heritage. The project exemplifies how city authorities and communities co-contribute to nation-building by activating public art as a medium of remembrance, resistance, and re-imagination.

The presentation further reflects critically on the layered and translocal strategies adopted by various state and non-state actors in response to increasing urban decay and high mobility within a postcolonial city in the Global South. Through examples such as the Blue Plaque programme, grassroots heritage art projects, and the contested legacy of mining heritage, particularly in the case of Johannesburg’s historic mining house, it examines how migration and civil society continue to shape heritage discourses through incremental, everyday acts intertwined with colonial histories. Ultimately, the South African context is presented as a valuable site for understanding bottom-up approaches to heritage-making. These approaches challenge the often flattened and reductive processes of “heritagization,” offering instead a vision of heritage as a dynamic, relational process—one that moves with people, objects, and spaces, rather than for them. This is especially vital in contexts where the notion of “community” itself is in flux—evolving and transforming—thereby prompting us to rethink not only how heritage is made, but also for whom the past is being made.