BREAKING: Amazon data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025

Another week, another retail centre - Waterfall's newest R600 million shopping centre has just thrown open its doors🍄 • Name: Mushroom Farm • Size: 27 000m2 • Retail stores: 50 • Taxi bays: 96 • Parking bays: 1150 • Architect: BAR architects • Construction started: September 2024 • Construction ended: October 2025 • Construction: Archstone Construction • Developer & centre owner: Century Property Developments • Location: corner of Allandale Road and President Drive, Kyalami, Midrand • Tenants include: Checkers Hyper (9000m2), Mr Price Home, Mambo’s, Dis-chem (1300m2), @Home, Bootlegger, Volpes, Mr Price, Baglios Porchinis, Whippet, Bargain Books, Sorbet, Pnp Clothing, Miladys, PEP Home, Seattle Coffee, Pet Science, BOA Beauty, Specsavers, Checkers Liquor, Wimpy, Crazy Store and DIal-A-Bed, PNA • Commercial offices and medical suites on the 1st floor Fun facts about the Shopping Centre’s construction: • 31 671 m2 of roofing sheets – enough to cover 13 private jet hangars • 44 805 m3 of concrete – enough to pave a road from Pretoria to Midrand • 3 900 m2 of tiles – sufficient to cover nine full-size basketball courts • 1 191 905 bricks – enough for over 130 RDP homes • 437 tons of steel – equal to 170 full-grown African elephants • 105 000 m3 of earth moved – more than one million wheelbarrow loads • 930 m2 of retaining walls – enough to wrap six double-decker buses vertically side by side The site used to be a working mushroom farm right next to the original Waterval Farm - hence the centre name. One of the tenants is Kiddies Aqua Swimming Academy - I can really appreciate a tenant like this in the mix. How cool (and convenient) to drop your daughter off for an extra swimming lesson and get your errands done at the same place. Parents spend hours in the car after school to and from extra murals - more tenants like this seem an essential in pulling that sort of foot traffic to your site. This will also be the home of Johannesburg’s first Mambos Storage and Home. Such a valuable tenant to have in a convenience centre. They are already planning phase 2 for the centre for 2026.

African cities need to build if they’re going to accommodate the ~900 million people moving in btw now and 2050. 🌆 But an African YIMBY mvt will have to go beyond just upzoning & reforming land use regulations. It must address underlying factor markets: land, capital, & labor

The Hawks seized devices belonging to senior executives of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa during an operation on Wednesday afternoon. | @vercingetorics brnw.ch/21wUnQJ

🆕 One Laptop per Child: Lessons from a long-term follow up Today on VoxDev, Santiago Cueto (@GRADEPeru), Diether Beuermann (@the_IDB), Julian Cristia (@the_IDB), Ofer Malamud (@sesp_nu) & @franciscopardop (@UTAustinEcon) outline research on Peru: voxdev.org/topic/education/o…