During South Africa’s turbulent period of transition, Johannesburg’s inner city underwent a transformation nearly as dramatic as the country itself. As apartheid came apart, the country’s leading companies fled north, disinvesting just as migrants from across the country and the continent arrived in the city center in pursuit of a better life. Ever since the inner city has become a symbol of insecurity and urban decay. In recent decades, its residents have been subjected to evictions and police raids carried out in the name of “urban renewal.”

In his new The Blinded City: Ten years in inner city Johannesburg, writer, and educator Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon explores the consequences of these projects of urban renewal from the vantage point of those who live in the inner city’s “dark” or unlawfully occupied buildings. I spoke with Wilhelm-Solomon about the book’s origins, narrative nonfiction, South Africa’s urban housing crisis, and what the country’s housing movements can learn from their peers elsewhere in the Global South.