Inside Caracas' Tower of David, the World's Tallest Slum
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We got up to the 24 floor and watched them take up some lemonade for some workers pouring concrete.
You could jury rig some 40 horse power combustion engine from the auto morgue (almost free) as a power plant and you need 2 platforms to counter balance each other. It will not be safe for humans but workable for heavy loads.
We had a driver for one day and he had to fill up the car. I bought him a can of Coke which cost twice as much as the tank of gas.
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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.
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.
In the Netherlands (admittedly a place with few slums, if any), it's completely common for squatters to smply sign up and pay for electricity, internet, TV, running water (assuming the squatted building is hooked up to these services already). The services companies don't care who uses the services as long as the bills are paid.
Let me explain how they do it in Brazil. Someone with a long pole shuts down a switch in the utilities pole. Then climb it and wire their house to it, no meters.
This is what it starts to look like (at least in the slums) http://i.imgur.com/vmjmJmp.jpg
I decided to check up on the statistics when I read this comment. It seems like 32% is stolen nationwide, making it the highest world-wide [1], with reports of 42% in New Delhi [2].
[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-31/world-s-greatest-po...
This is true for most of the slums were most people don't pay for electricity or water. But I had a teacher that worked in Electricidad de Caracas that said that it was a point of honor for residents of these slums to actually get a power meter. She said they saw it as something that set them. Apart from the rest of the residents.
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.
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.
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.
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/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.
http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/12/20/video-kowloon-wal...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Creating affordable housing allows the capture of that economic activity which can be used to enhance and support public services supporting people using it.
[1] http://www.oddee.com/contrib_17194.aspx
[2] 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.
k: karma