Nature of project: The official opening of the new Constitutional Court building was scheduled for Human Rights Day, 21 March 2004. With just eight months to go, the Heritage Education and Tourism (HET) team that had written the business plan for Constitution Hill, was appointed to create a visitor experience on the site in time for the opening of the Court. The plan for the rollout of the visitor experience became known as STIP – the short-term implementation plan. The immediate priorities of STIP were to create a visitors’ centre, develop the initial exhibitions in the old prison buildings, establish a website, write visitor brochures, develop educational materials for schools, train tour guides and staff to run the facility and provide comprehensive visitor amenities (toilets, food services, shops, retail goods, parking). Money also needed to be raised to put the plan into action.

With just six months to go, the Ford, Mott and Kellogg Foundations committed $2,5 million to the project and this kick-started the implementation of STIP. The key challenge for the team was working with multiple stakeholders: the judges of the Constitutional Court had final approvals of all interventions on site; the Johannesburg Development Agency was in charge of the overall project; the site architects had developed the urban design framework for the Hill and were involved in the restoration process of the old buildings; the ex-prisoners had to be consulted as to how the prisons were to be developed. Deadlines were extremely tight and the HET team worked under immense pressure to ensure that the different elements of STIP were delivered in the given timeframe.

In the first eight months that the site was open, over 80 000 visitors passed through the visitor centre. The current visitor numbers are between 10,000 and 12,000 visitors each month and this number is growing steadily.

The site was recently accepted into the International Sites of Conscience – a coalition of museums from around the world that open spaces for public dialogue and discussion and engage citizens in human rights issues.

Key responsibilities:
Project management and fundraising
Concept development
Curation
Interpretive planning
Oral history and archival research
Collections
Stakeholder consultation
Liaison with justices of the Constitutional Court, heritage specialists, liaison with architects

trace personnel involved:
Lauren Segal – Project manager
Mark Gevisser – Director of content
Nabeel Essa – Part of design team