Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.
The slums of the world are either celebrated as centers of innovation or bemoaned as intractable urban problems. But when it comes to serious critical consideration and intervention, one firm’s work goes beyond those two extremes to bring real and relevant solutions to these underserved areas. Urban-Think Tank, an interdisciplinary design firm founded in Caracas, Venezuela in 1998, has been focusing on the unique urban conditions of slum life and actually building the sort of projects that can make life in slums better. The firm’s work includes the creation of community centers, dry sanitation facilities and an expansive cable car network now serving tens of thousands of slum dwellers in Caracas every day. The firm specializes in working with communities to define what would make life easier and then building it.
In 2012, Urban-Think Tank, architecture writer Justin McGuirk and photographer Iwan Baan collectively won the Venice Biennale’s top prize for their project focusing on the “informal vertical community” of squatters who’ve taken over an unfinished high-rise office building in Caracas. The prize underscores the importance of understanding these increasingly expanding elements of modern urban life. It also recognizes formally the immense body of work Urban-Think Tank has performed to grow that understanding.
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.