In early 2010, when we embarked on the Yeoville Stories project, one of the four legs of the Yeoville Studio, we had only a vague idea of where this would take us, but a keen desire to tell the extraordinary tale of an ordinary neighbourhood of Johannesburg. We wanted to contribute to the creation of what could be a truly public history of Johannesburg, not necessarily backed by grand memorials or focused on heroic figures, but a public history telling the continuities in the ways that urban residents make sense of a city that often seems to be characterised by fragmentation and contestation. There are multiple possible approaches to the telling of such ‘smaller’ or ‘ordinary’ histories, via the media of visual arts, oral history, mapping, performance and many others. In the case of Yeoville Stories, we adopted multiple strategies as an exploratory approach to uncovering and detailing some of the neighbourhood's multiple and layered histories and associations. Specifically, we were interested in the ways in which individual memories and life histories coalesce to inform a sense of neighbourhood, and in the place of that neighbourhood within the city's social history.

This research drew on the work of urban theorists who have written on the idea of neighbourhood histories and local memory as vital elements in the way city space is appropriated and experienced. In particular, we were inspired by the work of Dolores Hayden (Hayden 1995), and her exploration of the fragmented and hidden histories of ‘ethnic’neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in the 1990s as expressions of the city's public history, and often unacknowledged in the grand narrative of the city. Hayden made the case for the recognition of ‘hidden’ or everyday memories of the city and vital elements of urban life, and of people's experiences of the city, arguing that ‘identity is intimately tied to memory: both our personal memories (where we have come from and where we have dwelt) and the collective or social memories interconnected with the histories of our families, neighbours, fellow workers, and ethnic communities. Urban landscapes are storehouses for these social memories’ (Hayden 1995: 9).