I am still not sure how I feel about the website, Main Street Life, which is both a kind of video diary as well as a blog about a residential redevelopment in downtown Johannesburg called Main Street Life. Hotels, apartments, shops, galleries. We get to see how the place changes through the eyes of a middle class young man, Russell Grant, who is the first person to move into Main Street Life. Some people would call it gentrification (you hear the word “lifestyle” a lot). And the people are all beautiful and middle class. (Yes, they’re multiracial.) In the video above, Russell walks around his new neighborhood with his computer. Via Skype he is showing the neighborhood to Mpho, who lives in London, and “can’t wait to come back to Africa.”

For some context, parts of inner city Johannesburg have been the subject of aggressive gentrification. The city’s young and mobile, black and white, party, and increasingly want to live there.

The site, which is still new, also contains short video reports on life in the inner city, like this visit Russell (and a friend) takes to an Ethiopian restaurant.