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Inside Caracas' Tower of David, the World's Tallest Slum
- brianbreslin 13y agoVice has really been killing it lately with their reporting. This story though was covered by mainstream press 3-4 years ago.
- pmorici 13y agoInternationally? I watch and read a lot of news and I'd never heard of this before. I agree Vice is phenomenal. It's what the NYT, CNN, etc... should be doing instead of screwing around with more artful ways of presenting puff pieces ie: "snow fall".
- vanderZwan 13y agoThe linked movie was released 1st of August 2013, so if nothing else it's a recent view into what's going on.
- brianbreslin 13y agoHere is the NYTimes coverage from 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/americas/01venezuela.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/americas/01venezuela...
- mng2 13y agoIt's interesting to compare the New Yorker coverage from January (paywall, but there's a summary): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_anderson http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_...
- NelsonMinar 13y agoOne of JG Ballards best novels is High-Rise, a sort of Lord of the Flies in an apartment tower. It's a lovely skewering of the social mores of proper English people, as well as a musing on the thin veneer of polite society. Only tangentially related, but it's a good read. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70256.High_Rise http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70256.High_Rise
- platz 13y agoI read super-cannes from him. It was quirky and definitely interesting.
- petercooper 13y agoBallard is awesome, though most of his real gold is in his short stories (a rare writer who really got into the format rather than treated it as a side line). A lot of interesting "ideas" related to science and society get explored, such as overpopulation, the psychology of insomnia, medical experiments, etc.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoYoutube direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1p9jlQUW0k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1p9jlQUW0k So the Broad Group continues to claim [1] they are going to build their 225 story building in 3 months. (well erect it would be more accurate). One wonders if this sort of construction would be a better solution than occupying partially constructed buildings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City
- ToothlessJake 13y agoIt took me a moment to figure out why your comment didn't read right, then it clicked. You are wondering if building more towers would be a solution for people, due to high housing costs, occupying a tower that never finished construction.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSorry yes, there are two economic outcomes, one being an unproductive asset (the abandoned building, and although one of the tenants mentioned paying 'rent' it was entirely unclear who was collecting the rent and by what right other than perhaps force majeur) and the other being housing built which is economically viable to rent 'legally' and thus providing some GDP in the city. Creating affordable housing allows the capture of that economic activity which can be used to enhance and support public services supporting people using it.
- seivan 13y agoReminds me of Judge Dredd.
- hahame 13y agoseen it. what a violent film, all i could think while watching the video were scenes from Dredd. this building's real life.
- paraiuspau 13y agoTotally my first impression, too. That these poor people might have to endure even a fraction of the 'block war' life portrayed in Dredd, albeit sans the sci-fi elements, is probably not too far fetched.
- Shivetya 13y agoDredd's future or Deckard's, dystopian futures tend to have a lot of common elements. From reading about this tower on WikiPedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_Financiero_Confinanzas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_Financiero_Confinanzas I'd say more towards the Blade Runner style
- damian2000 13y agoOr Raid: Redemption.
- fsckin 13y agoThis is what I thought of. Incredible stunts.
- geoka9 13y agoUnfortunately, the story didn't cover the most interesting parts: where the residents get their electricity from, whether they pay for it, what about fresh water pipes. Are they treated by the utility companies as any other customers by taking their money and providing the service in return, or they have to hook into utilities without paying for them (in that case, why they are not being cut off).
- zelliot 13y agoI had the opportunity to visit two months ago. Amazing place. The residents pay about $6 per month towards the community fund. Electricity is stolen. There is no fresh water. All water is walked up. We got up to the 24 floor and watched them take up some lemonade for some workers pouring concrete.
- X4 13y agoWow, do you have pictures or videos? how do you think, can WE improve their situation, politically, technically and technologically? ____________ Such sad irony, that a tower build for Banks, that theoretically exist to serve people, now actually and really serves people, directly. Sad, because those banks and the politicians running that government were the cause for their pain. Unfortunately I hear about a lot of corruption and that it's normality in Brazil from a friend who moved from Norway to Brazil. And I with my idealogical green glasses would not live for long, if I were to protest against the Government for hot-pots like the Rainforest, according to him and other Brazillians.
- zelliot 13y agoYes, lots of photos and videos. We are working on a 15 min story for TV in Australia. Talking with the Caracas locals (not living in the tower) it is seen as a bit of an embarrassment. The government there has no good solution for housing, so the people took it into their own hands. Some of the apartments are amazing. $1 million+ views but without proper fitouts or running water.
- andrewcooke 13y ago
- hahame 13y agonot as bad as it seems. Gathering of people from different slums to a place with a roof sums it up.
- morpher 13y agoThe video is definitely worth watching. However, it feels like its only an introduction. For a building housing 2500 people, it seemed surprisingly empty. I can only assume that most of the adults were elsewhere trying to earn a living. I'd love to see more footage or read more interviews.
- e3pi 13y agoIncarcerated in monolithic interstitial dreck, that forlorn inquisitive youngster in a long empty corridor may grow into a seasoned coder to escape Caracas' concrete war-zone of dread, and this is why here in the states, the preterites get free roam bugged `Obama Phones', with 250 minutes/month, as one of Kieth Alexander's many new worries is that lone savvy `Tuttle' in Brazil, that drones can't even target, and who later retired as 'Jack Burns', ex-florist, in a pleasant home and family circle of trust, recently augmented by a suspicious new pothead son in law, who, unbeknownst to Kieth, Tuttle/Burns has a back story as a NSA-hated CIA field agent to foment global terror to justify US surveillance agencies ever escalating budgets and security cleared retirees' revolving-door golden-parachutes. So the NSA, CIA, and FBI uber-state independent silos all become a patch-quilt of allied targets.
- newsmaster 13y agoWell I hope the community pulls it off and makes it the most awesome place to live in Caracas, then go on to become a model solution and case study for future housing, I hope.
- molmalo 13y agoNot likely. Most probably, it will end up being something like the White Elephant, a squattered building at the edge of Buenos Aires [1][2]. It was going to be the largest hospital in Latin America, but then after the 1955 coup, the construction stopped, the building was abandoned and it was squattered. It has become a very dangerous place, and even the police and gendarmery (an intermediate between police and military) are afraid to enter there. I have worked for a security company that had to place security cameras there, and the workers had to be protected by gendarmery officials. While they were installing the cameras, some bullets where shot from windows. Luckily, nobody was injured. [1] http://www.oddee.com/contrib_17194.aspx http://www.oddee.com/contrib_17194.aspx [2] http://www.argentinaindependent.com/socialissues/urbanlife/reviving-a-white-elephant/ http://www.argentinaindependent.com/socialissues/urbanlife/r... PS: Relevant to the second link, the project "Sueños Compartidos" or "shared dreams" was closed soon after the article was written, because of a high profile corruption scandal involving the project.
- unhe 13y agolol... now, tell me there are no ghettos in the united states as well :)
- kalleboo 13y agoAnother interesting slum-settlement was the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
- onosendai 13y agoYou don't find too many details about Kowloon floating around, which is a shame since it was quite a unique settlement. The best source of information about it is probably a photo essay called "City of Darkness" (http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon-Walled/dp/1873200137 http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon-Walled/dp/1...) which is frequently out of print, but which I highly recommend if you can snag a copy. It's a fascinating historical document in its own right, and one of the few reliable sources of information about the walled city, which is why it's referenced so heavily in the Wikipedia article.
- cma 13y agoThis is the best footage I've seen. It has interviews, commentary, and english subtitles. http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/12/20/video-kowloon-walled-city-documentary/ http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/12/20/video-kowloon-wal...
- jzwinck 13y agoI thought this was going to be about the Parque Central East Tower that burned in 2004 (http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/741 http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/741). As far as I know that one still hasn't been fully repaired, but I guess no one lives in it (yet).
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoThis is also interesting building, which is (currently?) occupied by slum people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_City
- cjfont 13y agoThis tower draws interest because of its unusual case of being a skyscraper exclusively inhabited by squatters, but in the end it is really nothing more than a vertical shantytown, much like the millions that are sprawled out over the rest of Caracas and in other major South American cities like Rio. I assume daily life for the unfortunate people living in the tower isn't much different than the rest of the population living on or below the poverty line.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoWell for one they've got a million dollar view.
- dhughes 13y agoThis place is a disaster waiting to happen. On reddit someone from Caracas posted pictures of a different skyscraper on fire for days because the fire department didn't have the equipment to fight it. It was a business building but I can only imagine what would happen to a building full of families and no water for fire system sprinklers.
- bluedino 13y agoThe people they interviewed didn't look like they were terribly down on their luck. One couple just looked like young couple who might have moved in there because it's trendy, and the older guy looked like he lived there just because it was cheap. Remodeling the place, watching football on TV... They really don't seem like the poorer people you could see from the shots outside the building. I'd like to see them talking to people who gave the place the reputation it has. Is there some 'rule' there, like don't go above the 20th floor to stay in the 'good' part of the building?
- Theodores 13y agoTelevision sets and clothing is 'empty gifts of capitalism', not necessarily expensive. Take a look at benefit claimants in the UK - typically they have a bigger TV than you do and clothes with 'better' branding than you do. Once you take market rate prices for housing out of the work-bills equation you find 'empty gifts of capitalism' can be afforded. I would say that as well as 'cheap' being a reason to live there, there is also the matter of community. You are probably better able to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbours there than if you lived in a gated community. People are much more likely to know each other's business so there is security that guns/police/CCTV can't buy. So long as you don't mind the stairs and fire hazards (which can't be that much worse than the Twin Towers), all is good.
- rafaelm 13y agoThis tower was on the news two days ago. The police were chasing a commando group that tried to rob some jewelry stores in Caracas. The chase ended near this tower and the people that live there started throwing rocks and garbage at the cops, injuring some of them. Also this place is used by kidnappers to keep their victims. It's pretty lawless. There's another tower like this one that was a invaded too. It used to belong to an insurance company I think. My mother worked right next to it and said sometimes you could hear gunshots inside. There's mire than one building like this one in Caracas, but this is the tallest one.
- doktrin 13y agoThis feels like a very surface-area preview. They didn't have too much footage of the interior, and didn't really have a chance to dive deep on any of the interior mechanisms of the tower. For instance, they mention an economy and internal policing - but don't elaborate on either. Who are authority figures inside the tower? What kind of ad-hoc governance do the residents have? As another comment mentioned - how are the basic utilities actually handled? All of these are unanswered questions, and I would really want to learn more before I take at face value the 3 interviewed residents statements that everything is sunshine and roses inside the tower. There's no way they were going to give negative testimony, after all.