Will cities of the future be filled with vertical slums?
November 4, 2012
Torre David (credit: Fast Company Co.EXIST)
After a skyscraper in Caracas was abandoned, it quickly became home to 750 families. As cities develop, will slums build up instead of out? Fast Company Co.EXIST explores.
The 45-story Torre David office tower in Caracas, Venezuela, was nearly complete in the early 1990s when a pair of events changed the building’s trajectory forever: First, the project’s developer, David Brillembourg, died in 1993.
Then, the next year, Venezuela’s economy cratered. Torre David, about 90% finished at the time, was abandoned–as both a project and a property.
Looters, not surprisingly, picked over the remains. Then came the families: More than 750 of them who moved in anyway over the years, occupying the skeletal office tower like a kind of vertical slum.
The world’s resourceful poor have for years manufactured makeshift communities on the edges of mega-cities. But this was a notably different model, a one-time high-end high-rise turning the sprawling shantytown on its ear. After all, why should such a formidable structure, designed by Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez, sit vacant?
If a luxury hotel won’t move in, why can’t the poor? . …
Comments (18)
by NakedApe
Everybody seems to have forgotten about elevators. How do semi-starving, possibly ill, people make it up and down 20 floors several times a day?
by steve
Shy scrapers for the poor, hum… Takes me back a few years & makes me remember all those Great Society programs from the 1960′s I used to live across the street from the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects in Detroit. They were prison camps to say the least.
by Dirk Bruere
It works in Megacity 1
by Christian Gehman
Clearly, creating giant high rises without amenities could be the answer to the world’s problem with adequate housing for the poorest humans. A coup;le of vast cloacas could take care of the night soil and trudging up 90 flights of tairs might keep them very fit.
by omran al-kandari
how come no body claimed the building , where is the original owner ?
by Editor
deceased
by David
this example may be unique by other comments but vertical slums are nothing new. Badly maintained low income towers are somewhat infamous.
by Arctic Poppy
If you had no utilities would you rather live in a secure room or a cardboard and tin roofed hovel. Utilities or not, I suspect these families are counting their blessings.
by Dennis
Trash? Sewer? What do you think windows and stairwells are for? Look out below!
by MatthewQ
It’s like something out of a William Gibson novel.
by Roland
What running water? Sewer? Shit in a bucket. Put through hole where window is supposed to be. Empty bucket. No need for electricity if you don’t own appliances that need electricity. Trash disposal? No need for trash disposal if you’re too poor to generate trash.
by asiwel
Maybe I am missing something here? How does this work out for families? In particular, how are utilities provided? Running water, sewer services, heat – or at least airflow, electricity, trash disposal, etc. Lack of such services in “ordinary” tenement “slums” where everything is more or less “open” and only maybe one or two floors high is one thing (at least people can get out easily), but in a high-rise structure like this, quite another. I think there are many “high-rise” buildings being used for social housing … but at least a government is (supposed to be) providing essential services there.
by Jimmy 31
I have a friend who works in a neighbor bank’s headquarter, and his office view is that infamous building. What you see from there is really amazing. people who live there lack of any service, though the venezuelan is a very creative people and in some way they get their electricity stealing it from the street. But the water has to be carried upstairs anyway. I left the rest to your imagination.
It is a very dangerous place and it is in the middle of a business and clinical downtown, where banks hgeadquarters are situated, like the neighbor Banco Mercantil and BBVA, which is across the street. So you can imagine the risk that all these peopple, who works or live close to there , take in their daily lives.
As is easy to see this happens only under a demagogic goverment hidden behind the socialist facade. It happens in a country where the law is for the fool peopple and nobody follows it. This people who lives there are invaders who came from the country, people acostum to that kind of life where running water and electricity is not their first concern, and the letrines and septic wells are the common rule. For them, just being in Caracas, where they can find a job, no matter the salary, worth the endevour. Of course, latter on the usual problems is the outcome of it:the never ending criminals issues like robbery, drugs and murders. But they are thankfull with a “socialist” goverment which provide them with housing and penssions for any thing like as compensation for live in that conditions, or to be older than 55 or 60, or for having children, etc, etc…Their hope is that someday this goverment will provide them with a decent house, and for the goverment their hope is its insurance policy.
It does not exits something like a vertical slum, just a decent and cheap vertical housing with all its services.Dot.
by MatthewQ
Actually, I just did some reading up on it. It is surprising well run actually. They have water delivered and it is rationed. There are small corner shops on half the floors. The residents have organised quite a few things like child care facilities, barber shops and a church for example and also have security. Each floor has a manager who oversees its basic operations. The residents contribute a small monthly fee towards community improvement.
I couldn’t find a lot on electricity and sewerage but I did see electrical appliances being used in some of the photos I came across so there must be electricity at some level. It sounds like the people there are organised so I would assume they have worked something out-it’s in the city centre after all. One resident remarked that the opponents of the squat/building were concerned about basic services but she pointed out that when they lived in shanties they also lacked those things and nobody cared…
I find the whole thing intriguing. I lived in Johannesburg, SA for a short while. There was a building people called ‘the Coca Cola Tower’ (because it had a prominent Coca Cola sign on top), it was a round high rise that squatters and criminals had basically taken over. The police would not enter it and gunfire was heard coming from that direction every night I was there. Compared to that, this Torre de David things sounds almost idyllic.
by MatthewQ
The Coca Cola Tower I referred to in that post is now called the Ponte City Apartments and has its own wikipedia article. I was there in the 90s so I must have caught the area at its nadir point.
by Cybernettr
This is why I wondered why they tore down Cabrini-Green and other highrises in Chicago, when there is supposedly such a homeless problem there.
Okay, no running water, heat, electricity, etc. but surely this is better than living in a cardboard box? As for the crime problem, again, it must be better than living in the street.
This is why I believe the homeless problem is little more than leftist propaganda. Sure, people do lose their homes all the time and its terrible, but no one is forced to live on the streets unless they want to. The word “homelessness” was shamelessly commandeered for cruel political purposes.
by Gorden Russell
Continued urbanization of rural peoples will continue to be a great problem until sometime near or after the year 2046. By the time of the coming Singularity there will be photovoltaic self-assembling carbon nanocells that can replicate the way that the cells of green plants do now. Taking carbon dioxide from the air the same way that photosynthetic plants do, these nanocells will assemble atoms of carbon into graphene and nanotubes just as leaves now build cellulose out of water, carbon dioxide, and a few minerals taken out of the soil.
This will allow designers to program computers of graphene to use blueprints stored in organic memristors to cause buildings to grow like plants.
Desalinization plants will spring up like mushrooms along seacoasts and pipelines of carbon nanotubes will grow up over the mountains to the deserts of the interior. There nanocells will grow homes with solar arrays.
Deserts will be homesteaded in plots large enough that every householder will have solar arrays large enough to grow mansions. These new settlements will sprawl across the deserts even more so than the suburban sprawl of today.
But it won’t matter. People will have everything they need grown by their nanocells. They won’t need to go into the cities unless they want to for cultural events. But even then, somebody living in the Atacama Desert will be able to experience a performance of Lucia de Lamamour performed by the Metropolitan Opera via Virtual Reality. All these desert manses will have their own holodecks.
Of course, the nanocells can be programed to assemble themselves into anything. People will be able to grow a garage and then grow a car to put in it. They will also grow a hydrolysis unit to split water into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel these cars.
by asiwel
I suspect you may be right in some particulars here .. but honestly this prose and this future reminds me of some favorite old but supposedly far future science fiction themes — Jack Vance, The Dying Earth, I believe. And castles in the desert – ultimate cocooning behavior, I suspect. Will we really each try to get as far away from the other as possible? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocooning