"They never take tours to the real Cape Town," the woman was saying. "They only go to the nice parts like Rondebosch and Grassy Park."

Her choice of "nice parts" seemed incongruous. Rondebosch, like most of the southern suburbs, is an expensive dormitory, the money behind its high walls and hedges a stark contrast to the bankruptcy of its urban life. Grassy Park, hunched against the wind, is neither grassy nor park-like, but instead is a curious interspace between bourgeois aspiration and the ganglands beyond; where Greco-Roman nymphs stand on alabaster water features surrounded by dead yellow grass and monumental shits left by pit bulls.

The specifics were debatable but her point was clear: middle-class Cape Town, whether it features white soccer moms hooked on diet pills or coloured grannies addicted to 7de Laan, is not the essential, authentic Cape Town.

The New York Times and The Guardian agree. Recent articles have punted the city as the destination for discerning travellers, but Rondebosch and Grassy Park have somehow not been mentioned. The real Cape Town, it seems, is an artists' colony somewhere between Havana, Stockholm and the forests of Endor, where great design and sizzling creativity meet affirming humanity around a giant bonfire stoked with burning euros.

The real Cape Town sounds awesome and makes me wish I didn't live in the fake Cape Town. In my city, the design involves segregationist town planning and the humanity is - well, I don't know, because it lives on the other side of the M5 from me and we never hang out. Certainly there is some creativity, clinging on despite the best efforts of Cape Town's self-appointed Creatives to obliterate it. (To give these vivacious trust fund babies their due, they do have their fingers on the pulse of all things creative, but perhaps that's inevitable when you have your hands around something's throat.) What remains is an officially sanctioned creativity, strictly policed by a hipster politburo to ensure that it remains accessibly quirky, affirming rather than upsetting the sleepwalking aesthetics of the people who buy it.

But the fact remains that that woman spoke from a place of strongly held conviction: that the more comfortable your home, the less authentic your experience of living in it is. It is a deeply seductive instinct, perhaps because it feels both objectively true and morally righteous: we feel we are seeing the world as it is and at the same time foregrounding the forgotten and the sidelined. But of course it's self-defeating nonsense: if the rich aren't an authentic part of an authentic city, then surely the inequality they represent is no longer an authentic problem either?

Likewise, if you decree that millions of middle-class people are no longer "real" citizens by virtue of their income, you are guilty of doing to them exactly what you accuse them of doing to you: denying their humanity, perhaps even their existence. I have seen the effects of this thinking on some of my peers; well-meaning young people who are embarrassed by their privilege but unable to give it up, and so retreat from active citizenship like exiled European aristocrats, rejecting the past, frozen into a contingent present, surrendering any claims on the future. They are ghosts.

Whenever I am a passenger in a car in Johannesburg I am mortified by an inevitable exchange at a traffic light: the white driver of an expensive car calling the black man at his window "my brother". I blush puce, appalled by the dishonesty of a word that pretends that we are economic equals, that the driver's "brother" inherited the same goods from the same parents.

And yet is this response in me symptomatic of being born into Cape Town's brittle apartness? Is this not how human contact is made - by ignoring difference and focusing on shared personhood?

Pretending to be brothers might be dishonest but is it more destructive than an instinctive retreat to difference? On the one hand, yes: it is the cheerful manifestation of that pernicious white mindset that urges blacks to "get over apartheid", which believes that "all we need is a fresh start". On the other hand ... I don't know.

Perhaps the middle way is to use fantasy and denial to create something real and inclusive. Johannesburg is doing this superbly well. While Cape Town pokes at difficult and complex histories and realities, Johannesburg gallops into a brave new world of constructive denial, creating a real city by believing in an imaginary one. It has convinced itself that chaos is energy, that dysfunction is the freedom of the frontier, that rudeness is honesty and that ugliness is progress. What is the real Johannesburg? None of it and all of it. Can the creative city reinvent itself with a new myth? Get real.