Is there a link between urban planning and poverty alleviation? 

In the SLUM LAB project, Urban-Think Tank founders Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, brings planners, architects, and students from all areas of the globe to converge and to work towards an understanding of the link between urban planning and poverty alleviation.

Using Urban Think Tank, their architecture firm located in Caracas, Venezuela, as its catalyst, they seek to expand the role of the poltically engaged architect in areas of slum upgrading; With Caracas and its dichotomy of informal city (barrios) and formal city (the greater metropolis) continuously being built in opposition of each other, it is getting harder to ignore the problems that exist in these regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty, and disease, that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. The SLUM LAB hopes to stage an explroration of the intersection between social/political and environmental activism to come up with the notion of a collective territory, and also a territory of collaboration that transgresses hemispheric boundaries.

The projects provides new ideas as to how we can understand informal settlements, and new ideas of upgrading and design solutions. Check out the SLUM LAB webpage and magazines for more information here.