The chapter will detail how housing providers in inner-city Johannesburg have adapted their spatial imaginations and practices to suit the realities they are confronted with, leading them to pursue incremental change, rather than grand plans. Working building by building, and city block by city block, housing providers pay careful attention to general maintenance and upkeep, provide improved policing and security and work to foster communal relations and new forms of sociality in a foreboding and fraught environment. This is not ‘sexy stuff’, but the hard labour through which seeds of urban change are planted and cultivated.