Daniel Schwartz and Urban-Think Tank

Text: Csilla Herbszt, Bence Komlósi
Photos: Daniel Schwartz – U-TT

The report below has been inspired by a friendshop of professionals with a past of many years now. One of the partners is Daniel Schwartz, the maker, photographer and researcher of Urban-Think Tank (U-TT). As he had studied anthropology and photography, his images typically show our man-made environment through the daily life of people. He works in cooperation with architects, but even so, a building or a city for him becomes meaningful in the context of people living there only. The structure itself is nothing more than a skeleton suited to the appearance of life in it. Walking in the slums of Cape Town and shooting a film, he realized that there were two-storey huts everywhere, which was not typical of this location at all. Dwellers told him that they had built the upper storeys themselves in order to extend the area of their homes. This tiny germ of idea actually launched the U-TT Empower Shack project, which specializes in the simple and inexpensive development of existing huts. Films shot by Daniel actually function as channels of communication between architects and local residents, facilitating the information flow.