How South African activists hope to integrate cities built to divide

The last night Sophie Rubins spent in her rusted tin shack, the first rain of spring spattered against her roof. From her bed, she watched it slide between the gaps in the walls. The holes were so big “you could see the stars,” she says, and when the water came in, it pooled on the floor, just as it had every time it rained here for the last 30 years.

For nearly all of her life, Ms. Rubins had lived here, in a  – a sheet-metal shack – in a backyard in Eldorado Park. The township on Johannesburg’s southern edge was built for a mixed-race and Indigenous community known in apartheid’s racial hierarchy as “coloureds.” It had few jobs or services. Most