This chapter outlines the history of the Red Location Museum of Struggle and the ‘cultural precinct’ in which it is located, a major piece of post-apartheid public architecture and a flagship heritage and arts project initiated by the city council in 1997. The Red Location Cultural Precinct is located in the oldest portion of New Brighton township, an informal settlement dating to 1902, as both a ‘developmental’ and a memory project. It proved enormously contentious from the outset. Delays in delivering promised state-subsidised formal housing alongside the museum, and lack of transparency in the allocation of these houses to residents once built, were the catalyst for protests on the museum’s doorstep between 2003 and 2005. In 2009, two new buildings were added to the precinct: an art gallery and a state-of-the-art digital library – although neither building has ever been staffed or operationalised. Further protests broke out in the course of 2013, eventually resulting in the closure of the museum. Through this history, the chapter introduces issues related to heritage, memory and the politics of post-apartheid urban transformation that structure the remainder of the book. In particular, it considers the limitations of the concepts of ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘development’ as they have been used in this and other urban contexts, and some of the ironies and inherent contradictions in these rhetorics of development.