inner city

Last month, as part of a "clean-up" campaign across Johannesburg, the city council said the inner city had been "targeted... for the systemic removal of pervasive lawlessness, illegal activities, hijacked properties, and critical by-law infringements".

Handsworth and other inner city areas have been worst affected in recent years by a lack of investment, Mr Connell says, "disproportionately hitting the areas which already had problems around poverty and housing stock".

Maverick Carter, a longtime friend and business partner of both James and Schottenstein who runs an entertainment company, describes meeting Schottenstein as “a young African-American kid from the inner city of Akron, Ohio.”

The military, he declared, should be used to fight “the enemy within” — and America’s “inner cities” should be used for “training grounds.”

Visiting just hours after the blaze, President Cyril Ramaphosa called it "a wake-up call to begin to address the situation of housing in the inner city".