This paper examines two high-profile commemorative spaces in Namibia’s national capital, Windhoek, designed and constructed by North Korean state-owned enterprise Mansudae Overseas Projects. These commemorative projects illustrate the complex and evolving intersections between public art, architecture and urban form in this post-colonial context. They show how sites designed around heritage and collective identity intersect with urban space’s physical development and everyday use. The projects also illustrate the intersecting histories of three aesthetic lineages: German, South African and North Korean. This paper will show how these commemorative spaces embody North Korean urban space ideas while also developing new national symbols, historical narratives and identities within Windhoek’s urban landscape as part of independent Namibia’s nation-building. The monument’s ‘Socialist Realist’ aesthetic signals a conscious departure from the colonial and apartheid eras by the now-independent Namibian government. This paper extends prior research focused on the symbolism of Mansudae’s monumental schemes by analysing these monuments’ design, placement, public reception and use within Windhoek as they relate to the city’s overall development since Namibia’s independence in 1990. By documenting the form, location and decision-making processes for the Mansudae-designed memorials in Windhoek and historical changes in their spatial and political context, the paper explores the interaction between North Korean political ideology and design approaches and Namibia’s democratic ambitions for city-making. The paper’s mapping analysis spatially compares the sculptural, architectural and urban design strategies of Mansudae’s additions to Windhoek’s City Crown (2010-14) to Pyongyang’s Mansu Hill Grand Monument (1972-2011), and Windhoek’s Heroes’ Acre (2002) to Mansudae’s earlier National Martyrs Cemetery outside Pyongyang (1975-85).

This paper has traced the historic spatial development of Windhoek through five distinct socio-political epochs. These different periods’ spatial, aesthetic, and representational effects on the city’s urban landscape are presented in original maps, allowing a spatial-to-scale comparison and analysis of the city’s development. Rather than the discrete chapters in Windhoek’s urban development, successive occupations’ spatial compositions are shown to have been assembled from and grounded in the geomorphological, spatial, social, and administrative conditions preceding them. The paper expands the concept of the uncanny, the colonial drive to recreate home in foreign lands and local resistance to this, from the architectural to the urban. It describes how infrastructure, residential typologies and neighbourhood morphologies, memorials, places of memory, and public space were designed to segregate and subjugate Windhoek’s population and how this spatial legacy continues to inform city-making in Windhoek today. In doing so, the paper challenges the notion that the city’s spatial structure, layout, and urban planning are neutral quantitative entities.