Collective slums. Caracas case

It is the fact that world population is growing every day and with that also the demands for the housing units are increasing. Another fact is that all the people tend to move to cities. It is proven that people are better off in cities nowdays. But from that emerge multiple problems. Alejandro Aravena once explained the problem of 3S which is scale speed and scarcity of means with which should be responded to this phenomenon. Out of three billion people today living in cites, one bilion is under the line of poverty. By 2030 out of 5 billion people that would be living in cities, two billion are going to be under the line of poverty. It means that there have to be built a one million person city per week with ten thousand dollars per family during the next fifteen years. If this equation is not solved it doesn’t mean that people would stop coming to cities. They will still come but they will live in slums, favelas and informal settlements. South America has already faced this problem of growing number of informal settlements maybe even more than some other parts of the world. Caracas is a special case. With a very harsh topography it was a perfect ground for development of a new typology of informal settlements-vertical slums. With the never stopping growth of population and scarcity of the housing in the cities, is this maybe the way how we can approach the problem? With the abandoned buildings of different typologies waiting for the possible new function all over the world, is it the instead of demolishing them time for a different strategy for sovling the growing demand for housing. Sambil la Candelaria is an abandoned shopping mall, in Caracas now empty and expropriated, that became home for the thousands of people that lost their homes during the big floods due to bad quality of units in which they were living. Sambil la Candelaria is not the first case that something like this happened. Dozens of structures have been illegally invaded in the city of Caracas. Altagracia , Sabana Grande, La Candelaria and San Bernardino are among the areas that have suffered the most this situation. In the city like Caracas spreading horizontaly is almmost impossible due to the very steap terrain. That’s why the expansion in cities like this should and could only work verticaly. However, informal settlements have their own rules and ways of functioning so it is important understanding well how those communities operate inside before trying to transform them on the new level.