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Designing for the Next Wave of Urban Poverty

Venezuelan architect Alfredo Brillembourg says that places like the hillside slums of Caracas have lessons about how to build the cities of the future.

The Caracas Metrocable provides transportation and mobility in the San Agustin slum.

The Caracas Metrocable provides transportation and mobility in the San Agustin slum.

Photographer: Daniel Schwartz/Courtesy of Urban-Think Tank.

More than 1 billion people around the world live in urban slums, and that figure is only expected to increase as more people migrate to cities.

Alfredo Brillembourg, a Venezuelan architect, has built a career around improving living conditions in these informal settlements and integrating them into the more established structure of cities. His interdisciplinary design organization, Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), came up with the Caracas Metrocable, a cable car that connects the city’s hillside slums to downtown; helped implement low-cost housing coupled with a sanitation system in South Africa; and produced a documentary on the  Dharavi slum in Mumbai.