Tommy Trenchard/Panos Pictures

School clothes belonging to 14-year-old Akisha Arendse hang from a shelf in the room she shares with her father in Cissie Gool House, formerly the Woodstock Hospital, which has been occupied by housing activists and evictees since 2017. Akisha's father, Denver, hopes that she may one day become a scientist.

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.