It capitalizes wealth that was otherwise hidden under the dirty shacks of slum dwellers.
So he needs to build hair-cutting shacks in backyards where another barber has already built one.
Their compound is down a narrow alleyway lined with makeshift concrete shacks for migrant workers.
Many live in the most basic of shacks - without water, electricity or sanitation.
"Shacks are becoming the new norm, " explains Andreas Keller, one of the developers of iShack.
In a dip between two hills, tens of thousands of people were living in mostly makeshift shacks.
But the majority of Mozambicans still live in huts or shacks, and depend on buses for their transport.
Despite opposition, it's pressing ahead with plans to demolish existing shacks and replace them with modern, high-rise blocks.
But counterfeit operations are often small fly-by-night firms that operate out of shacks.
At El Mogote, a small, bumpy hill overlooking a middle-class Tegucigalpa suburb, 260 families have put up their shacks.
There, shacks sit beside rusted cotton gins on the outskirts of town, and once-grand mansions are slowly falling down.
Residents pay rent, most houses have kitchens and electricity, and building materials range from flimsy corrugated-iron shacks to permanent, multistorey concrete structures.
Outside of lift shacks, seven yurts are the only structures on the mountain.
After a storm, they cast about in a makeshift boat, looking to see who steps out of the flooded shacks.
The Acra camp shelters some 20, 000 people in makeshift tents and shacks on Delmas Avenue, a main thoroughfare in Port-au-Prince.
But 2.1m were on the streets, or living in flimsy shacks, with improvised walls made of cardboard or plastic sheeting.
In one Abidjan slum, all that remains of the shacks where 2, 500 immigrants once lived is a swathe of grassy wasteland.
On Monday, hundreds of wooden shacks in a wealthy Abidjan suburb were torched by troops, uprooting scores of poor immigrant workers.
After their sneak attack on the capital's main airport was repelled, the insurgents dispersed, hiding in Kinshasa's ditches, shacks and bushes.
In Luanda, swanky office buildings are going up and informal shacks gradually being demolished as residents are relocated to new houses.
Southerners are now more likely to live in suburbs than in shacks, to pick stocks instead of cotton, and to wear shoes.
On the outskirts of a Cairo neighborhood called Maadi is a collection of cardboard and metal shacks housing hundreds of poor families.
Even brand new barbecue places in major cities are furnished via garage sales and usually built to look like roadside fishing shacks.
Up to 100 shacks will either be built or retrofitted to determine whether the system can be applied on a larger scale.
The category also includes apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or filled with coffin-sized wood and metal sleeping compartments as well as rooftop shacks.
The few small shacks along the shore were closed the morning I was there, but advertised low rental prices for paddleboats, kayaks and no-frills fibreglass motorboats.
Blocks of Victorian-style homes with painted shutters on large pieces of property abruptly give way to boarded up shacks, convenience stores and tattoo parlors.
They tend to grow mealies (maize), which need lots of rain, in little plots around the village or in the gaps between their shacks.
But wedged between the shiny offices and apartments that line this new waterfront, Angolans often struggle to survive in a shacks and ramshackle houses.
CNN: Oil-rich Angola bids to secure future with $5bn wealth fund
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