The ninth issue of SLUM Lab explores the diverse and dynamic new urban systems evolving across the African continent, though with a special focus on the important social, political, and economic challenges of settlement upgrading in the contemporary townships of South Africa. Including contributions from Edgar Pieterse, J. M. Legard, Kéré Architecture, Dirk Hebel, Peter Rich, Charlotte Lemanski, Kilian Doherty, Michael Subotzky, Patrick Waterhouse, and Beyond Entropy, this edition also functions as a catalogue accompanying the Empower Shack exhibition held in February 2014 at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, and as documentation of the 2013 Swisspearl Summer School, which developed the initial Empower Shack prototype in partnership with Ikhayalami.

The sixth issue of SLUM Lab is the first to have a global scope, presenting an array of projects from around the world that reveal facets of the destructive capacity of contemporary city-making and ideas for alternative futures. Produced as a free newspaper bringing together studio material or directed projects from Columbia University GSAPP, the City College of New York’s landscape architecture program, and ETH Zürich, as well as invited essays, the publication was launched during New York’s Urban Design Week and includes contributions from Charlie Koolhaas, Michael Sorkin, SUPERFRONT, Lydia Kallipoliti, Michael Young, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Interboro Partners, and David Grahame Shane.

SLUM Lab 6: Last Round Ecology

Publications

The São Paulo Architecture Experiment documents a collaboration between the São Paulo State Housing Secretariat (SEHAB), Urban-Think Tank, and various international partners focused on a reconsideration of minimal habitation in dense urban space. The project proposes that architects eschew their conventional role in traditional hierarchies and instead act as an enabling connection between the opposing forces of top-down planning and bottom-up initiatives. The book focuses on issues related to São Paulo’s urban development, covering topics such as water management, waste recycling, slum morphology, and economic development.

São Paulo Architecture Experiment

Torre David, a 45-story skyscraper in Caracas, has remained uncompleted since the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home to more than 750 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous squat, that some have called a ‘vertical slum’. Urban-Think Tank spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-become home. Richly illustrated with photographs by Iwan Baan, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities documents the residents’ occupation of the tower and how, in the absence of formal infrastructure, they organize themselves to provide for daily needs, with a hair salon, a gym, grocery shops, and more. Including contributions from Andres Lepik, André Kitagawa, Arno Schlueter, and Christian Schmid, this thought-provoking work not only investigates informal vertical communities and the architecture that supports them, but also issues a call for action: to see in informal settlements a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in service to a more equitable and sustainable future.

Release	February 2014
Directors	Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
Guest Editor	Alexis Kalagas
Design	Floyd E. Schulze (W–THM)
Photography	Daniel Schwartz
Sponsors	ETH Zürich D-ARCH, Swisspearl
Pages	196

SLUM Lab 9: Made In Africa