A refusal to include affordable housing led Johannesburg to reject glossy plans for high-end housing, offices, a rail station and entertainment district. It seems the city will get disconnected car-centric gated communities instead

The Gautrain rushes through the green rolling hills and grasslands of Modderfontein, the commuter rail’s gold livery recalling Johannesburg’s reason for existence as a mining town, and speeds past the platforms of the commuter station that never got finished.

Four lanes of smooth tarmac lead over the horizon. Streetlights evenly spaced and dropdowns from the kerbs make it easier for pedestrians to cross than in much of South Africa’s biggest city – except there are no pedestrians. The paint still looks fresh and the markings clear, but these roads to nowhere end in concrete and steel barriers.

Millions of ounces of unmined gold are still believed to lie below the surface, fuelling a booming – but frequently deadly – illicit industry

As he prepares to descend an abandoned mineshaft in the Johannesburg suburb of Roodepoort, Fix, a sinewy informal goldminer from Lesotho, recounts stories of subterranean gun battles and unearthing the scattered bones of those who came before him.

“This is very dangerous work,” he says, draining a quart of beer for courage. “But there’s a lot of money down there.”

Farmers fear development of Cape Town’s Philippi urban farmlands could cost them their livelihoods and worsen the city’s already extreme food inequality

Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?

“Losing the Philippi Horticultural Area to development would be catastrophic,” says farmer Nazeer Sonday who has been fighting to protect this farmland in the heart of Cape Town for nearly a decade.“The area is key to the city’s climate resilience and resolution of its food crisis.”

The coming months are critical. Last week, a court battle began which Sonday fears may determine not only his own future, but that of the most fertile agricultural land in South Africa.

A quarter of Johannesburg’s population live in this modern and sophisticated township that is also blighted by poverty, drug addiction and crime

My mother tells me the house where I was born in the Chiawelo section of Soweto in 1973 didn’t have windows, doors or a paved floor when they moved in. My father earned very little as a cleaner at the post office and had no money to fix it.

So my mother and her friends would go to a nearby farm to steal cow dung to make the floor. One day she got bitten by the farmer’s dog. That scar of poverty is still engraved on her hand like an ugly tattoo.

We would like to speak to people about their views and experiences of city life in the country since the demise of the brutal political regime

This year marks 25 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, a brutal political system that enforced the segregation of people of different races.

From 1948 to 1994 the division was formalised by law, ensuring the minority white population controlled wealth and power, while black people were oppressed and stripped of basic rights, such as the right to vote.

After 1994, the architecture of apartheid – the separation of rich and poor, black and white – was to be eradicated with creative and determined urban planning. It has not quite happened

Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?

It doesn’t take long after I drive out of the sleek OR Tambo international airport for the penny to drop. Again. Johannesburg is the bastard child of the worst aspects of capitalist greed and 20th-century racism. Nearly 150 years after its formation, this sprawling metropolis is still scarred by the sins of its genesis.

Even with the explosive rise of the black middle class, the presence of blacks in formerly white suburbs remains low

After almost a thousand murders in the first six months of this year on the Cape Flats, national authorities sent in the army, and armoured convoys have patrolled the rutted streets of the worst neighbourhoods

Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?

• Photography by James Oatway

Marcelliano Reitz, lean and toothless, rolls up his sleeve. The sun is setting behind the world-famous silhouette of Table Mountain. A plane on its way to Cape Town’s international airport flies low overhead. Children play on a rusting climbing frame, jumping on an abandoned mattress.

Reitz has only just returned to his home in the poor and violent neighbourhood of Bonteheuwel after five years in jail for a firearms offence. He is a member of the Americans, one of the area’s biggest and most violent criminal gangs. On his wrist is the tattoo that marks him out as also being a member of one of South Africa’s major prison gangs. Yards away, police search a line of teenagers turned to a wall.