Dutch photographer Iwan Baan’s work focuses on the way city residents interact with the urban environment and its nuanced architecture. One of his ongoing themes is how people sometimes carve out informal housing for themselves and their families. Exploring this subject has taken him from Caracas, Venezuela to a floating slum in Nigeria.

In a TED Talk released on Wednesday, Baan discusses four makeshift cities he has photographed: The Torre David (“Tower of David”), an unfinished 45-story skyscraper in Caracas; Zabaleen, a village built on a garbage landfill in Cairo; the aforementioned slum city, Makoko, in Nigeria; and Chinese villages made up of underground dwellings known as yaodongs.

You’ve heard it before that humans are resilient. But Baan’s work explores how people can not only build homes with few resources, but also create fully functional makeshift neighborhoods as well — many of which work as their own ecosystems.

In the slideshow below, find 10 of Bann’s photos from four of these informal communities:

Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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