Torre de David

The Venezuelan government started the evacuation of hundreds of families out of a half-built 45-story skyscraper Torre de David, thought to be the world’s tallest slum.

Torre de David
During Monday night the Venezuelan government started the evacuation of thousands of squatters living in the Torre de David, in Caracas.
Torre David is a 45-storey skyscraper erected in the financial district of Caracas during the oil boom of the early 1990s. Abandoned after the death of the businessman David Brillembourg in 1993 and following the subsequent collapse of the Venezuelan economy, the skyscraper was occupied, 20 years later, by a community of more than 750 families, becoming the world’s tallest squat (on Domus Web we published an interview to Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría, Venezuelan artists who documented the story of this contemporary heterotopia, the pavilion presented by Urban-Think Tank, Iwan Baan and Justin McGuirk at the Venice Biennale 2012 dedicated to the Tower and the reviews of the book Torre David written by Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, Urban-Think Tank and ETH Zürich).

Ernesto Villegas, Minister of State for the Revolutionary Transformation of Greater Caracas, told that “It’s a co-ordinated operation, in harmony with the community in the tower,”, adding that those leaving were being ‘voluntarily’ resettled in government housing in Ciudad Zamora, outside Caracas.

The operation comes five days after the announcement that the Venezuelan government is in negotiations with Chinese banks interested in purchasing the building. The negotiations involve the relocation of the tower’s inhabitants to Cúa, a city 53 kilometres outside of the capital, possibly in December of this year.

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