27 Boxes

This guide to 27 Boxes in Johannesburg opens with a puzzle: the shopping centre is built from well over a hundred stacked shipping containers, yet its sign says only twenty seven. It traces the site back to Faan Smit Park, a neglected Melville city park handed to a property company in the late 1990s, and the developer Citiq who won approval in 2014 to build South Africa's first shipping container mall here. It also follows the small traders who cycled through the boxes in the years after it opened. Count the containers yourself as you walk past the bright stacks.