In Brixton, Mayfair and Vrededorp, water cuts are so routine they barely register. Streetlights lie in scrapyards, while water from tankers never reaches the elderly. Residents pay top rates but get serial failure in return.

The urban development sophists say you can’t say that parts of Johannesburg represent a “failed” city — they are perhaps “fragile”, say the sophists, or in an “urban trajectory” still being defined. I usually check my journalistic instincts, then stop using the adjective.

Then I go home. For a few weeks now, with my mom in hospital at Garden City, I’ve been driving through Mayfair, Brixton and Vrededorp at night more often than usual.

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The weather’s still cool, so at night, the only lights are from the flames of fires lit by the homeless people who have moved into an open space after the Phineas McIntosh Park, their previous home, was fenced off when it became unsafe.

With the city’s community development department mostly awol for homeless people for decades, civil society organised by Jozi My Jozi, the urban social movement supported by business, has taken a census of people without homes and is designing a plan.

Read more: Over 200 volunteers unite for Joburg’s groundbreaking homelessness point-in-time count

In the meantime, at the park, a community has settled in because they regularly receive hot food from organisations in the area.

Across the area, young men, eyes reddened by nyaope and bodies ravaged by living rough, lie around, sometimes shooting up, oblivious to anything or anyone.