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Inside Caracas' Tower of David, the World's Tallest Slum

You needn't look to fiction to find such a strikingly modern version of a slum. In Venezuela's capital city, as many as 2,500 people have taken residence in the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, an unfinished skyscraper that's also known as the Tower of...
Derek Mead
Κείμενο Derek Mead

William Gibson's Bridge trilogy is incredible because of the portrait it paints of post-decline life: Thousands of people living in an outcast society extra-legally built within and upon the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.

But you needn't look to fiction to find such a strikingly modern version of a slum. In the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, a city which has seen a couple decades of economic turmoil, as many as 2,500 people have taken residence in the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, an unfinished skyscraper that's also known as the Tower of David.

The 45-story building was original funded in the early 90s by financier David Brillembourg, for whom the tower is named. He died in 1993, and when Venezuela's banking crisis hit in 1994, the building—which was half-finished, lacking elevators, installed utilities, and guard rails—the government took it over. Thus it sat until 2007, when a former gang member turned pastor led its first occupants into the building.

As Vocativ's killer doc shows, the building has turned into its own community since then, with jury-rigged electricity, plumbing, and even satellite dishes installed by its many squatters. People live as high as the 28th story, with bodegas and even an unlicensed dentist servicing the community.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.