Tommy Trenchard/Panos Pictures

A light shines in a window of Ahmed Kathrada House, a former nursing home in inner-city Cape Town that is now home to a community of several hundred families. The building lacks electricity or running water, but residents say it is preferable to living on the edge of the city without access to jobs. In the background is the city's main stadium.

Since 2017, the Reclaim the City movement has been supporting the occupation of various abandoned buildings in central Cape Town in order to protest against gentrification and the lack of affordable housing near the city centre, and to provide a refuge for those being evicted from their homes. During the apartheid era non-white residents were forcibly removed from much of central Cape Town. Nearly three decades later the city remains chronically divided along ethnic and socio-economic lines, while South Africa remains the world's most unequal country, according to the World Bank.