Hubert Klumpner – författare

Torre David is an incomplete skyscraper in the center of the Venezuelan capital Caracas that has been occupied and reconstructed by local residents. Work on the building, named after the financial investor David Brillembourg, who died in 1993, was suspended during the Venezuelan financial crisis of 1994. After the office tower - the third highest in Venezuela - had stood empty for many years, it was taken over by the local population in 2008. The occupants made the building their own with improvisation and skill - it is a "vertical favela," now containing not just housing but also other everyday facilities such as an improvised doctor's office, shops, and more. Photographer Iwan Baan has documented Torre David and its occupants, creating a portrait that captures the contradictions of the place while at the same time revealing urban structures that have emerged dynamically and without planning.

Urban pilot projects from the informal city! Urban-Think Tank (UTT), an interdisciplinary design practice emerging from the turbulent political environment of Chávez-era Caracas, has pursued projects in Latin America, Europe, and Africa for almost twenty years. Their diverse work positioned the firm at the forefront of a social turn in architecture in the late 1990's, with concrete urban interventions encouraging social cohesion in the megacities of the Global South and Europe’s evolving metropoles. U-TT has also produced numerous media projects that harness film, theatre, exhibitions, and print to create new discursive spaces and question how our cities are shaped, and for whom. Most notable is its work on the squatted skyscraper for which the firm shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. This book looks forward as well as back, imagining new spaces for a hyper-urbanized world and gaining insight from informal settlements, spatial play, and artistic interventions in public space.