China is building so many large cities and skyscrapers that it's too fast for people to even move in. The Tower of David in Caracas, Venezuela suffered a similar fate.

The what was supposed to be a 45 story skyscraper went unfinished and uninhabited after an economic collapse and the death of the man who commissioned it in the 1990s.

Since then, it has been an incomplete shell. until 2007, when the city's homeless began moving in.

The tower has frequently been called the world's tallest slum.



Photographer Iwan Baan, whose portrait of Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy became one of the most iconic images of the storm, gave a TED Talk last month on "ingenious homes in unexpected places."

The talk is fascinating and Baan concludes that the tower is a story of people surmounting the odds and coming together to make something out of what they have. Check it out below: