[check ua 7) Progress in Human Geography 2015, Val 39(5) 601-620 (© The Authors) 2014 Reprints and permsor sagepuhcoukjouralPermissions.nay DO! 10.117710309132514554223 Phe sagepub.com @SAGE Article Vertical urbanisms: Opening up geographies of the three-dimensional city Andrew Harris University College London, UK Abstract This paper develops a more diverse and multi-dimensional agenda for understanding and researching urban verticality. In particular, it argues for vertical geographies that encompass more than issues of security and segregation and are not necessarily framed by the three-dimensional politics of Israel/Palestine identified by some commentators. In opening up a wider world of vertical urbanisms, the paper outlines three key approaches: close attention to where urban verticalty is theorised and the relationship between power and height, the importance of ethnographic detail to emphasise more everyday verticalities and disrupt top-down analytical perspectives, and geographical imaginations that carefully attend to the myriad spatial entanglements of the three-dimensional city. Keywords verticality, ordinary cities, volume, mobile urbanisms, | Introduction Urban geography has recently been increasingly inflected by ups and downs. In particular a paper in this joumnal by Stephen Graham and Lucy Hewitt (2013) has sought to get critical research on urban verticality ‘off the ground” (see also MeNeill, 2005). Graham and Hewitt (2013: 74) identify an embedded horizontalism in urban research; as they suggest, ‘very few books or papers in Anglophone urban social science or ctitical urban geography explicitly problematize or analyze the vertical qualities of cities and urban life’.' This vertical blindspot seems espe- cially surprising given ‘the extraordinary vertical extension of built space both upwards and down- wards within the last few decades’ (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 74). The 2000s have been identi- fied as the single greatest decade of skyscraper construction in history (Lamster, 2011), with , topology heights surpassing 800m (Jaffe, 201 La), and the widespread building of high-rise residential com- munities (¢.g. Fincher, 2007; Brumann, 2012: 56). The ‘urban age” has stimulated and necessi- tated three-dimensional urban growth with the construction of new overhead and underground infrastructure (e.g. Harris, 2011; Jaffe, 201 1b: Hebbert, 2012), new forms of geospatial, digital and cadastral modelling (e.g. Thill et al. 2011; Harvey, 2009; Benhamu and Doytsher, 2003), and new visions and aspirations of multi-levelled cities (e.g. MVRDV, 2007; Buchanan, 2012). Rather than simply adding a new vertical focus onto the existing horizontalism of urban, Corresponding auth ‘Andrew Harris, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WCIH OAP, UK. Email: andrew harris@uclac.uk602 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) research, Graham and Hewitt (2013: 74, origi- nal emphasis) crucially argue that ‘a fully volu- metric urbanism is required which addresses the ways in which horizontal and vertical exten- sions, imaginaries, materialities and lived prac es intersect and mutually construct each other’. They detail the relationship between ver- tical visualities and the horizontality of contem- porary urban sprawl, new vertical enclaves and a residualized surface city, and the close links between verticalized surveillance and urban burrowing. In emphasizing this “fully volu- metric urbanism’, they bring work on urban ver- ticality into productive dialogue with recent attempts in political geography to recognize volumetric spatialities and political-legal tech- niques (Elden, 2013), whether in securing acrial life (Adey, 2010a), subterranean natural resources (Bridge, 2013) or the depths of the ocean (Lin and Schofield, 2014). This paper, however, argues that Graham and Hewitt (2013) have been overly dependent on the incisive analyses of the verticalized territor- ial violence of Israel/Palestine by the architec tural theorist Eyal Weizman. Although not wishing to downplay the importance of critical perspectives on issues of surveillance, segrega- tion and targeting, nor the central role of con= temporary Israel in forging and disseminating what Graham (2010) terms a ‘new military urbanism’, this paper suggests there are a myr- iad of additional conceptual wellsprings, meth- odological approaches, and geographical and historical perspectives that can be pursued in exploring the ‘vertical qualities of contempo- rary processes of urbanization’ (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 74). As Graham and Hewitt (2013: 75-6) themselves suggest in ‘Getting off the Ground’, *much...remains to be done’, with their ideas acting only as ‘a preliminary exploration’ This paper seeks to show how urban vertical ity and a ‘political register’ of the *volumet (Elden, 2013: 35) can be framed through more than security, secession and control. In so doing, the paper develops a dialogue not only between urban geography and critical geopolitics, but with existing and emerging debates on urban verticality in cultural studies, urban planning, anthropology and architectural history. It aims to open up a wider world of more ordinary ver- tical urbanisms that do not necessarily directly map onto the contexts of contemporary Israel/ Palestine. Gaza may well be a laboratory for ‘new control technologies, munitions, legal and humanitarian tools, and warfare techniques’ (Weizman, 2011: 96), which are then marketed internationally, but this does not mean it should also be the predominant laboratory and feeding- ground for new theories of urban verticality. ‘The paper begins by highlighting the central- ity of Eyal Weizman’s work and the three- dimensional politics of Israel/Palestine in an incipient vertical turn in human geography. Although this has been a crucial move in devel- oping critical perspectives on the spatial relations of verticality, the paper seeks to open up a more diverse array of vertical urbanisms, albeit one where historical and geographical continuities can be identified and mapped between archetypal landscapes of urban verticality. This wider world of vertical urbanisms is then used to outline three key approaches to exploring geographies of the three-dimensional city. First, the paper urges careful attention to how certain locations, con- texts and understandings can be uncritically deployed in theorizing and analysing the diffue sion and power relations of urban verticality. Secondly, it emphasizes the importance of pursu- ing ethnographic detail to open up the variety of experiences, imaginaries and practices of vertical urban life, and to disrupt unintentionally adopt- ing top-down, cartographic analytical perspec- tives. Lastly, it seeks to open up geographical imaginations that critically attend to the topogra- phical configurations and topological entangle- ments that coordinate and comprise the three- dimensional city. Throughout, the paper empha- sizes how the vertical and horizontal are mutually implicated and produced; how in someHarris 603 respects vertical urbanism can be understood as never getting off the ground. Il The hollow land of vertical geography One of the main conceptual and critical ground- springs for an emergent exploration of vertical- ity and volume across both urban and political geography is the work of Eyal Weizman, In a series of short articles in 2002 on the ‘politics of verticality’ and a 2007 book, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, Weizman details how Israeli territorial control of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip has been imposed and maintained through the design of discontinuous spatial strata across three-dimen- sions and the stacking of sovereign volumes above and below the surface. In opening up this ‘vertical axis’ of Israeli power and control, Weizman (2007: 253) ranges widely in his anal- yses, considering bedrock, aquifers and archa ology, transport infrastructure and landscape views, and drones, aerial surveying and the elec~ tromagnetic spectrum. This work on the fractured spaces and com- plex terrain of contemporary Israel/Palestine provides an important springboard for develop- ing vertical and volumetric critical imaginations in human geography. Weizman carefully exca- vates a contemporary three-dimensional space par excellence, complete with panoptic views, overhead roadways, aerial sovereignties, gent tunnelling and biblical archaeology which create ‘patterns of segregation’ that ‘take on a dizzying verticality’ (Roy, 2006: 13). Weiz~ man’s work is also significant as f vertical omniscience connected with the latest innovations in military techno-science in Israel have proved increasingly influential in urban capitalist heartlands (Graham, 2010). Israeli expertise in drones, population control, ‘non- lethal weapons’ and ‘sectarian enclaves’ — the ‘ultimate source of “combat-proven” tech niques and technology’ — has been transferred, insur- tasies of often via the battlespaces and counterinsur- gency strategies of Iraq and Afghanistan/Paki- stan, to police and security operations in Europe and North America (Graham, 2010: xxii). The 2012 Olympic Games in London, for example, were notable for being the biggest mobilization of military and security forces in Britain since the Second World War, with unmanned drones and surface-to-air missiles installed on several high-rise towers around the Olympic Park (Graham, 2012). Graham and Hewitt (2013: 73) begin their Progress paper ~ subtitled ‘on the politics of urban verticality’ — with a call to apply Weiz~ man’s (2002) ‘politics of verticality’ project to critical urbanism. They then outline three ‘cru- cial areas where vertically orientated research across the urban social sciences is fast emer- ging’ (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 76). Each of these three contains connections to the Israel/ Palestine context from and through which Weizman develops his critical insights. This is ‘most apparent in Graham and Hewitt’s (2013: 86-90) third section, furnished with quotes from Hollow Land,” examining aerial targeting, verti- cal orientalism and the politics of burrowing (see also Graham, 2004). But Graham and Hewitt’s 2013: 77) exploration of Google Earth urbanism emphasizes the same ‘Imperial infra- structure’ of US military technoscience used in the Israeli aerial surveying and three-dimen- sional modelling of Palestinian settlements (Weizman, 2007: 196). And their focus on the “perpendicular splintering’ and ‘vertical eapsu- larization’ of contemporary cities (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 80-1) also equates, albeit without the same religious and historical contexts, with the ‘vertical separation’ (Weizman, 2007: 117) established by Israeli dormitory suburbs and traffic arteries above densely populated Arab towns in the West Bank. In a similarly ground-breaking paper on the volumetric spatiality of territory, Stuart Elden (2013), writing from a perspective situated more in political geography than critical urban604 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) research, also quotes at length from Weizman’s 2002 essays. Alongside ideas on battlespaces and bunkerology from the French cultural theor- ist and urbanist Paul Virilio, Elden (2013: 37) identifies Weizman as ‘the key thinker of the vertical dimer in’. Elden (2013: 49) likewise places the ‘dimensional complexity’ of Israel/ Palestine centrally in his analyses. He deploys examples from old borders along. Jerusalem roads, empty proto-urban spaces designated for Jewish settlement, and tunnel complexes on the Israeli border with Lebanon to think through ‘the two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements of geopolitical space’ (Elden, 2013: 38). Elden extensively illustrates his paper with photographs exclusively from Israel/Palestine, including one of transport sovercigntics in the West Bank that directly reprises the cover to Weizman’s Hollow Land (Elden, 2013: 37). Ill Towards vertical urbanisms Graham and Hewitt’s (2013) and Elden’s (2013) papers offer a crucial critical starting point for an emerging vertical agenda in human geography. Nevertheless, it is also important to recognize forms, landscapes and experiences, as well as their associated rationales and logies, that are not necessarily a fall-out from warfare doctrines and military technoscience (such as those connected with Google Earth), or explicitly part of pro- cesses of splintering (such as vertical gated com- munities), or shaped by the targeting and surveillance tactics of state and security forces (cg. through drones and police helicopters) In the urban context, these can be found in buildings and structures such as multi-storey car parks, billboards and underground basements built to maximize ait-space or land plots; and in elevated and underground road, rail and pedestrian systems, constructed to facilitate greater public movement through cities. They can be found in high-rise hotels, giant wheels, observation galleries and advertising airships, designed around the production, marketing and commodification of urban views (e.g. Dorrian, 2008; Yap, 2012; Héweler, 2003: 156). Vertical urbanism encompasses rooftop gardens, green walls and multi-storey greenhouses, as part of new verticalized forms of urban horticulture and agriculture (c.g. Gandy, 2010; Despommier, 2009; Ehrenberg, 2008). It can be located in the vertical thrills of rollercoasters, helter-skelters, fountains, trapeze artists and remote-controlled toys; and in industrial, civic and technological landscapes of silos, chimneys, radio-masts, util- ities piping, communication towers, pylons and. data ‘clouds’. Vertical urbanism can also be opened out in more religious framings of ascen- sion and the subterranean in the symbolic and ceremonial roles of steeples, spires, belities, minarets and domes, and cemeteries, “towers of silence’, mausoleums, catacombs and graves (c.g. Leshem, 2014; Vevaina, 2013). And it can extend to imaginative worlds, not only the spec- ulative and fantastical —three-dimensional visions of architects, film-makers and novelists (Williams, 2008 [1990]; Gold, 2001; Hewitt, 2012), but also popular forms of mass culture iconography, such as adverts, promotional post- cards and posters, music videos, websites and computer games, that help conjure the “dream- worlds’ of urban verticality (Wigoder, 2002; Hatherley, 2011). As well as exploring a wider (real and ima- gined) geography of vertical sites and phenom- ena beyond aerial power and social stratification, it is important to disrupt assump- tions that these are new or novel. Although not necessarily reaching the extreme dimensions of the present era, verticality has always been an important part of the unique intensity, juxta- position and tangle of cities (Wiles, 2014). Building up and down has been a consistent fea~ ture of what defines urban life, from Egyptian obelisks, Chinese pagodas, Italian campaniles and urban cave-complexes to skyscrapers, transport interchanges and high-rise housing (e.g. Daneshmir and Spiridonoff, 2012; Mana- ugh, 2012; Belanger, 2007). Often new formsHarris 605 of vertical urbanism have been accompanied by, if not preceded, innovations in representational technologies, such as Felix Nadar’s photo- graphs in the 1860s of clean, well-lit and tech- nologically advanced Parisian sewers (Gandy, 1999) and depictions of skyscrapers in early New York film-making (Lindner, 2013). Impor- tant continuities can be traced across these his- tories; for example, there are clear precedents for processes of verticalized secession in medi- eval city fortresses and Le Corbusier’s 1932 Plan Obus in Algiers. Historical legacies of ver- tical urbanism have also become increasingly important tourist experiences, such as the “lost” underground districts of Seattle and Manchester (Warrender, 2007), and often feature centrally in city branding and heritage exercises (c.g Merrill, 2013). Within this geographical and historical diver sity, it is possible to identify four particularly influential and emblematic, if interconnected, landscape modes and models of urban vertical- ity, all closely connected to certain territories, building typologies and socio-spatial ideolo- gies. This is in addition to the recent “conceptual system’ (Weizman, 2007: 10) offered by Israel/ Palestine in understanding processes of vertical security and splintering.’ First, verticality has been sought as part of spiritual or cosmological ambitions. The pyre, pyramid, steeple, temple or minaret has been built not only to assert worldly power but to reach skywards to the hea- vens. These religious landscapes of verticality are not simply legacies of the past but are a key, often highly contested, feature of the post-secu- lar or neoliberal city (e.g. Guggenheim, 2010; Batuman, 2013). Another enduring landscape of urban verticality is that associated with the skyscrapers and skylines iécle North America, especially Chic: which helped establish the vert and iconography of corporate capitalism (Gie- dion, 1941; Domosh, 1987). A third model is the modernist landscapes of high-rise building blocks and multi-levelled urban circulation connected to influential 20th-century visions such as Le Corbusier's 1924 Ville Radieuse and 1952 Unité d’ Habitation in Marseilles. A newer, archetypal landscape of urban verticality is one associated with the rise of global urban Asia and the Middle East over the last 20 years. The “mega-tall’ towers and three-dimensional com- plexity of cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Singapore and Shanghai have challenged an assumed Eurocentric locus of urban verticality (King, 1996; Bunnell, 1999; Chen and Shih, 2009; Wainwright, 2014). As with the ‘diffusion’ of vertical compo- nents of a new military urbanism (Graham, 2010: xviii), these landscapes of urban vertical- ity, especially their tall buildings and structures, have travelled and been replicated. Minarct towers have spread from Abbasid Mesopotamia in the ninth century to become a universal archi tectural marker of Islam (Bloom, 1989). The skyscraping landscapes of Manhattan have been, for the architect Rem Koolhaas (1994 [1978): 9), the 20th-century’s ‘Rosetta Stone’. The high= rise tower has spread from its avant-garde mod- emist forebears to cities worldwide, facilitated by state building programmes, standardized pro- cesses of production and a ‘machine aesthetic’ The vertical orientation of recent East Asian and Middle Eastem urbanism has been emulated in India (Nair, 2005: 124), Vancouver (Lowry and McCann, 2011), and finds increasing prevalence in African cities such as Kinshasa (Watson, 2013). In London it is possible to identify clearly all four landscape models: the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, North American-influenced build- ings such as Adelaide House, modemist tower- blocks such as the Barbican, and a rush of 2ist-century iconic landmarks, often funded through capital from Southeast Asia and the Middle East (Werdigier, 2008). IV Unsettling vertical urbanisms Opening up this world of circulating vertical urbanisms requires careful engagement with606 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) recent debates in geography on the tracks and travel of urban theories, plans and policies (c.g. Robinson, 2006; Harris and Moore, 2013; McCann and Ward, 2011). It is important to recognize that dominant models of the three- dimensional city, complete with particular glo- bal images, built forms and desires, do not emerge or diffuse straightforwardly. Attempts at borrowing, mimicking or emulating vertical ideals from elsewhere create mutations and gen- erate unintended consequences. The early 20th- century American skyscraper, complete with its accompanying dreams of technological futurity, ‘undergoes a series of metamorphoses as it moves from Chicago and New York, via Berlin, to Moscow’, with greater emphasis on human reasoning than property speculation, and the use of party-political iconography rather than images from the commodity world (Hatherley, 2011: 113). The modemist residential high-rise undergoes a play of difference and repetition, rather than a simplistic convergence, as its sys- tems, rules, materials, technologies and institu- tions are enrolled across the globe (Jacobs, 2006). Contemporary models of Asian vertica ity, such as those of Singapore, when disem- bedded and adopted elsewhere can privilege different social groups and political motivations to their original formulation (Chua, 2011; Roy, 2011: 331-2). Similarly, it is not always possible to assume that certain ideas of urban verticality, even if they challenge the prevailing horizontalism of urban studies, can be applied directly in contexts beyond their original theorization. The dominant role of certain locations, such as North America and Israel/Palestine, needs to be unsettled in pro- ducing generalizable knowledge about vertical urbanism, A revealing example can be found in Graham and Hewitt’s (2013: 83) discussion of elevated pedestrian walkways, known a walks, in contemporary Mumbai: It is unclear, as yet... whether the Mumbai sky- walks are working as surveilled, securitized and access-controlled systems which work to suck urban middle-classes from traditional street sys- tems, which, consequently, become residualized and criminalize, Graham and Hewitt’s, admittedly uncertain, frame of reference is that of the raised pedes- trian walkways of post-war North American cit- ies, and the work of Trevor Boddy (1992) on how these ensure middle-class groups enjoy a ealed realm’ (p. 125) and a ‘virtual spatial apartheid’ (p. 140) away from marginalized social groups shut out on the streets below. In contrast, although skywalks in Mumbai can help to bypass the city’s crowds and poverty, the pre~ mium spaces are below with skywalks built to try to ‘suck’ hawkers and pedestrians up from traditional street systems, and allow more unen- cumbered passage for elite private vehicles (Harris, 2013a). This reversal of the North American context illustrates the necessity of developing more cosmopolitan theories of verti- cal urbanisms that are able to encompass the dif fering street cultures, social relations and planning systems of Southern cities such as Mumbai (Harris, 2012a).. In investigating the vertical experiences of a much wider range of cities, itis important not to resort only to contexts or imaginative sources that map easily onto existing ideas and under- standings of urban verticality. Locations for research do not nee: territorial conflicts or obviously securitized zones analogous to Israel/Palestine. Nor do they need to be cities with the tallest, deepest or most spectacular vertical components. For example, exploring ‘high-rise residential, corporate and hotel skyscrapers’, Graham and Hewitt (2013: 80) tend to focus on archetypical and superlative vertical landscapes: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, skyscrapers in the City of London, Manhattan condominiums, and the 27-storey building in South Mumbai known as Antilia, completed in 2010 for one family of five people. By focusing on these extreme and eliteHarris 607 examples of recently built vertical offices and residences within ‘neoliberalizing cities’ (Gra- ham and Hewitt, 2013: 81), itis perhaps not sur- prising that vertical secession and urban splintering are identified and fore-grounded. Exploring tall buildings in less heralded cit such as Tel Aviv, Caracas, Ramallah and Guate- mala City (Margalit, 2013; McGuirk, 2014; Harker, 2014; O°Neill and Fogarty, 2013), or public housing in Singapore and Hong Kong (Yuen et al., 2006), or what Ireson (2000: 7) calls “more anonymous zones’ within Dubai, London, New York and Jerusalem can reveal additional social and political rationales and trajectories to processes of urban verticality. There is also a speculative and materially consequential world of vertical urbanisms that have yet to be built (de Boeck, 2011), have largely failed (Hebert, 1993), or never were constructed (Lynton, 2009; Harris, 2008; Hatherley, 2010). As well as disrupting assumptions around suitable sites and locations for developing the- ories of vertical urbanism, the vertical, espe~ ially in terms of height, should not necessarily be seen as offering and representing a strongly dominant and exclusive position over the more everyday and marginalized world of the horizontal below. This is the assumption made by the urban sociologist Sharon Zukin (1991; 186) who draws a distinetion between the ‘landscapes of the powerful understood in terms of verticality — cathedrals, factories, sky- serapers — and the subordinate, resistant, or expressive vernacular of the powerless — the “ordinary” urban fabric of shantytowns and tenements etc’. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil (2006: 4, original emphasis) similarly talk of how ‘processes of economic globalization are expressed in the verticality of the downtown central business district’, whereas ‘people’s everyday lives are expressed in the horizontality of the sprawling urban region” Moreover, there can be an assumption that the internal social differences of vertical forms directly map onto hierarchical class relations, This can be clearly discerned in many influen- tial science-fiction imaginations of urban verti- cality such as H.G. Wells’ 1899 novel, When the Sleeper Awakes (Williams, 2008 [1990]: 175— 9), and Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis.* In 4G. Ballard’s (2006: 14) 1975 novel about the social implosion of a self-enclosed world of 2000 residents in a 40-storey block, the ‘natural social order of the building’ is divided into the ‘proletariat’ on floors 1-9, the ‘middle-class’ on floors 10-35 and the ‘upper class’ on the top five levels. More sociological accounts of verti- cal urbanism also adopt this ed hierar- chy. Max Horkheimer, in a fragment written between 1926 and 1931, equates a skyscraper with verticalized capitalist society, with “the feuding tycoons of the various capitalist power constellations’ at the top and ‘the unskilled and the permanently unemployed’ below (quoted in Hatherley, 2011: 99). Although the spatial equation of height with authority and status has an important cosmolo- gical geneology and symbolic history (Pike, 2005), and shapes many aspects of the contem- porary splintered vertical city (Harris, 2012b; Graham and Hewitt, 2013), the relationship between a powerful above and less powerful below does not always map in this straightfor- ward fashion, First, vertical height often equates not to the powerfull but to the poor. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, prior to technological advances in lifts, ventilation and water supply, the top floor of high-rise flats or apartments did not have the widespread penthouse appeal of today and was generally reserved for servants. As the historical geographer Richard Dennis (2008a: 226) details, ‘the poor lived in the attic, farthest from the street-level toilets and water supply; the rich occupied flats on ground and first floors, with higher ceilings, larger windor and fewer stairs to climb’ (see also, Den 2008b: 243).° Even with the invention of eleva- tors, there was sustained urban bias towards hor- izontalism in New York until the 1930s, with rooms on higher floors deemed at best the equal608 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) rather than superior to those lower down (Bender, 2002: 34-48). More recently, survey data collected by Yuen et al. (2006) from resi dents in high-rise housing in Singapore suggests the most valued floors are neither at the top or the bottom, while the analysis by Garmendia et al, (2012: 2663-4) of ‘vertical studentifica- tion’ in Ciudad Real, Spain, reveals contrasting pattems of social segregation across different configurations of vertical communication cores. Despite the growth of high-rise luxury living in many countries, a post-war legacy of construct- ing modemist-inspired tower blocks for social housing means residential tall buildings, at least in the UK, continue to have strong associations with social marginalization and stigmatization (Dorling, 2005; ings, 2004), As identified above in relation to skywalks in Mumbai, the contemporary _ relationship between verticality and power, particularly in cities of the ‘Global South’, can also often be reversed. In the ‘rehabilitation’ of squatter set- tlements, it is generally only the people living on the ground floor that are officially re-housed; being high-up in one of the improvised lofts on the top of shacks can be a distinct disadvantage. The security seemingly provided by contempo- rary high-rise life can also. suddenly break down. During the 1993 communal riots in Bom- bay, gangs from the Hindu fundamentalist party the Shiv Sena, “armed with voter lists identify- ing the apartments where Muslims lived stalked the high-rise buildings in upse: neighbourhoods’ (Prakash, 2010: 299). Other urban examples that complicate a straightforward equation of verticality with power include those where the position fom above has been co-opted by the less powerful in a counter-politics of verticality. For instance, an activist group in Copenhagen Harbour pro- testing against a new luxury high-rise housing project raised a flag in 2002 saying ‘no’ in Dan- ish to the same height as the proposed building (Brandt et al., 2008: 175). Following the evic~ tions in 2011 of Occupy protesters at the University of California at Berkeley and Zuc~ cotti Park in New York, tents were raised into the sky or onto the side of tall buildings in what the blogger “Territorial Masquerades’ (2011) called ‘volume-with-a-purpose”. This critical occupation of symbolic high-points has also involved a human presence. In a discussion of a 1991 Australian documentary called 4 Spire, featuring the film-maker Chris Hilton surrepti- tiously scaling the outside of the 250m-high Sydney Tower, Meaghan Morris (1992: 50) Hilton “brought down the Tower not only by renouncing the heights but by reaching them instead’.° Likewise, the recent activities of ‘urban explorers’ have also challenged and reimagined the corporate vertical. For the geo- grapher-cum-explorer Bradley Garrett (2012a), who in November 2011 evaded security and scaled the 308m-high Shard tower in London: People are overworked, overtired, bored and apa- thetic, They are frustrated with the government, corporations, banks and their jobs. Our explora- tions pull them out of that banal capitalist hori- zontality (even for a few moments) and clevate them intoa vertical urban realm where the impos- sible is made possible. Seven hundred families elevated themselves into this vertical urban realm by squatting a 45-storey unfinished banking tower called Torre David in Caracas, Venezuela, between 2007 and 2014 (Fuenmayor, 2011). This ha become, according to architectural writer Justin MeGuirk (2012: 276), ‘a potent symbol of how direct action can tum vertical exclusivity into (see also MeGuirk, 2014: 175-206). V 3D ethnographies As well as unsettling ideas around the transfer, location and power relations of vertical urban- ism, the experiences, practices and textures of vertical life also need to be opened up. It is not possible to assume how people necessarily actHarris 609 or respond in relation to urban verticalit urban views — looking up, down and acros experienced and interpreted; how different social groups respond, or not, to the iconogra- phy of high-rise architecture and attempts by urban designers at assuaging what Bender and Taylor (1992: 51-67) refer to as the ‘corporate verticality’ of skyscrapers by incorporating the ‘civic horizontalism’ of the traditional, ground-level urban square, street, park or gar- den (see, for instance, Maas, 2011; Wallraff, 2012). It is similarly not possible to assume whether elevated transport structures are treated as impositions or welcomed as providing shelter and shade; whether underground spaces are considered scary, boring or exciting; and how specific types of vertical space, such as observa~ tion decks, helipads, penthouses, underpasses, balconies, tunnels, cranes and window-cleaning gantries, generate different understandings and negotiations of vertical urbanism. ‘The emerging focus on verticality across urban and political geography has tended to lack an engagement with these multiple everyday worlds. Although admittedly ‘wide-ranging and synthetical” rather than empirically framed, Graham and Hewitt’s (2013: 72) paper is cur- iously lacking in details around the inhabited landscapes of vertical urbanism. There is little, for instance, on how Google Earth brandscapes, might have different resonances acro suming, publics, how spaces of vertical seces sion are actually experienced, and on the ‘lived socialities’ of not only targeted urban places but those doing the targeting and surveil- lance (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 85). Elden’s (2013) paper similarly lacks nuance around how volumes are experienced, embodied and inhabited (Adey, 2013). In part, this evasion of the everyday and the bodily emerges from a reliance on Weizman’s (2002, 2007) work. In focusing on the vertical dimensions of Israeli occupation and control, Weizman analytically underplays the socio-cultural experiences and active role of Palestinians. As Christopher con- Harker (2011: 307-8) argues, ‘in exploring how Israel creates a land hollowed out of its Palestinian inhabitants, Weizman docs much the same thing himself rhetorically’ (see also Harker, 2014: 322). This ‘hollowing out’ of the specific practices and experiences of vertical urban life not only removes some of the blurred, messy and ambivalent aspects of vertical urbanism, but can inadvertently adopt the “god trick’ of an objec tive, masculinized, all-seeing gaze (Haraway, 1988; Deutsche, 1991). Research on urban ver- ticality risks replicating the panopticism of the omniscient and heroic downward gaze on the future city embodied by the modernist planner and architect (Morshed, 2004; Hecker, 2010), or the epistemological solar eye on “murky intertwining daily behaviors’ at street-level, famously developed in Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 93) discussion of the view from the top of the World Trade Center in New York. With- out investigating the complex and contradictory worlds of vertical life, analyses can lose their multi-dimensionality, and assert top-down power relations, albeit unintentionally. This “fly-over’ vantage-point and research style reflects, and continues, a limited engage- ment with ethnographic approaches in much recent (horizontal) critical urban research and theorizing (Arabindoo, 2011). Careful ethno- graphic detail — combined with a continued focus on the broader meanings and polities of vertical urbanism — is essential in identifying the different, often unexpected, ways that peo- ple use, move through, experience, refurbish and imagine vertical spaces and perspectives. “Polyvocal’ methodologies are required which investigate how vertical buildings and struc- tures are actively produced, consumed and re- produced not only by architects, planners and other professional groups, but residents, oc pants, amateur enthusiasts and other people below or above (Llewellyn, 2003; Craggs et al., 2013). Meanings of vertical buildings and structures need to be understood as generated610 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) and negotiated as much through the ideas, ima- ginations and memories of their users, dwellers and observers as their original designers. This necessitates oral histories (Parker, 1983), in- depth interviews (Lees and Baxter, 2011), house biographies (Blunt, 2008) and participatory drawings (Michiels and van Helmond, 2005) to open up thicker narratives and alternative stories, voices and experiences, and to assess how vertical understandings and experiences can differ across various audiences and change over time. It can also involve the study of enthu- siast websites such as www.skyscrapercity.com and www.28dayslater.co.uk, or the collection and analysis of material via interactive websites.* But there is also a need to avoid what Garrett (2011) calls ‘shallow excavation’ in the adop- tion of ethnographic approaches by emph: ing the multifaceted embodied practices, materials and encounters that perform, re-per- form and challenge different forms of vertical urbanism. As Jacobs et al. 2011: 129) comment in relation to their research on modernist resi dential high-rises, ‘our approach assumed that what is said by people about the building — be it in media reports, political meetings, inter- views, or informal asides — is only part of what they do with the building’. This necessitates extended observation of the social dynamics of vertical spaces. The sociologist Sudhir Ven- katash (2000: 286), for example, spent almost a decade investigating the (now demolished) Robert Taylor public housing project in Cl cago where he observed how the ‘ever-changing collective culture generally surfaced in events and behavior’. Video-ethnographies have also brought into focus embodied practices and materials of vertical life; documenting how win- dows and residents of multi-storey buildings work together to perform ‘a high rise view’ (Jacobs et al., 2008), how urban explorers “place hack’ tunnels under London Garrett, 2012b) and how block-check routines by concierge workers allow the high-rise to ‘gain momentum asa living building’ (Strebel, 2011: 243). Mate- rials, technologies and infrastructures associ- ated with vertical spaces and forms can also shape people’s memories, feelings, sensations and emotions (Rose et al., 2010). Lees and Bax- ter (2011: 119), for instance, seek to develop a ‘more sensuous architectural geography’ by placing emotions such as fear into the same explanatory frame as a high-rise ‘building event’. Similarly, Fernandez Arrigoitia (2014: 172) explores how deteriorated lifts and stairs in a Puerto Rican public housing high-rise can be understood as building technologies that ‘contain and evoke past and present personal and community struggles’ and co-fabricate “new and old senses of home’ (p. 188). Aligned with video ethnographies, documen- tary film-making can provide an in-depth focus on everyday worlds of urban verticality. Nota- ble examples over the last decade include Jn ef Hoyo (2006) on the construction workers build~ ing a 10-mile elevated expressway through Mexico City; Dark Days (2000) on a group of people living in an abandoned section of the underground railway system in New York City; and Vertical City (2010) on the lives of former slum dwellers in new high-rise building com- plexes in suburban Mumbai. Documentary films also highlight particular sites and spaces of verticality that can otherwise be overlooked or deemed inaccessible. The Brazilian film Um Lugar ao Sol (2009) is instructive in detail- ing the views of elite residents in nine penthouse apartments in Rio de Janeiro, Sio Paulo and Recife, while City of Cranes (2007), directed by Eva Weber, examines the worlds of crane cers in London. Likewise, The Lift (2001), directed by Mare Isaacs, playfully captures mundane experiences in a lift in a London high-rise, an aspect of ‘the social scientific lit- erature ...[that] remains both minuscule and esoteric’ (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 84).° More explicitly dramatized films also offer important insights into the everyday social tensions and aspirations ofien located and negotiated inHarris 6 specific vertical urban landscapes (e.g. Anders- son, 2013; Chow and de Kloet, 2013; Ghosh, 2014). Views of cities from above and below, and their practices and technologies, need in partic- ular to be subject to greater ethnographic rigour and detail. Research on the urban gaze from tall buildings (c.g. de Certeau, 1984) and police helicopters (e.g. Adey, 2010b) has rarely been undertaken through ethnographical approach Yet, reading as well as perceiving particular urban views from above is dependent on embo- died knowledges and memories of the horizon- tal city below and can be disorientated by conditions such as vertigo and acrophobia. As Mark Dorrian (2009: 88) comments, ‘we may be above things, but at the same time we are among them in a new, disconcerting way’ (see also Barthes, 1997: 244). Navigating and experiencing the streets below can also be framed through a cartographic “God’s eye’ per- spective commonly associated with above (Bennett, 2013; see also Williams, 2013). Chri= stop Lindner (2009: 98), for instance, in refer- ence to the British zombie horror film of 28 Days Later (2002), suggests: It is questionable whether... an extreme spatial dichotomy between the vertical and horizontal axes of the city actually holds up under closer scrutiny . .. For what the viewer encounters in the empty London of 28 Days Later. is the visual experience of high-rise voyeurism brought down complete with all its deadening, distancing effects ~ to the level and space of the street There is accordingly a need for more engage- ment with how different people actually respond to and experience aerial (and ground- evel) views, and how different distances from the ground and different planes of vision (verti- cal, oblique, or low-oblique) shape contrasting relationships with cities below. This more extensive ethnographic engagement with urban views can help challenge what Saint-Amour (2011; 241) calls the ‘ossified geometry’ in the opposition between high (seeing/understand- ing) and low (doing/feeling) established by the- orists such de Certeau (see also Morris, 1992: 13). As the architectural historian Anthony Vidler (2000: 43) concludes, ‘perhaps we might have to recast the apparent opposition between the view from above and that from below in a more complementary way’. Developing a greater emphasis on popular, everyday and embodied interpretations of urban verticality, both in built form and views, can also help challenge understandings of a distinct separation between the horizontal city and a vertical world above. Iconic high-rise buildings, for example, are frequently recognized and celebrated as much by people below as those designing or visiting them (Ong, 2011: 221— 2). As well as buttressing the iconic and exclu- sive stature of certain tall buildings, the horizon- tal city can also acknowledge and challenge this. Vyjayanthi Rao (201 1b: 68) details how a resident of a traditional form of Bombay tene- ‘ment housing called a ‘chaw!’ recognized their disruptive role juxtaposed against the city’s new vertical worlds: He looked up at the new high-rise towers and said...“They will have to endure us, our pres- cence, because the problem of the chawls will take a long time to resolve’, In one moment, he reversed the gaze and looked upon the chawls from the hawk’s-eye view of the new neighbour- hood and the real-estate developers. The problem for them is that the ‘we’ of the chawls will take a while to go away and so gazing outside from their perfectly appointed interiors would be a reminder of their ‘problem’, staring out at them, plainly in sight. VI Multiple geographical imaginations of urban verticality Emphasizing through ethnographic detail how different aspects of the three-dimensional city are experienced, embodied and inhabited also reveals some of the limits to how the vertical has612 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) been ontologically conceived in urban studies, The vertical — set perpendicularly against the horizontal — has largely been understood within a three-dimensional (volumetric) space of Euclidean geometry. This means there can be a tendency, particularly in work on ‘vertical gated communities’ and ‘vertical capsulariza- tion’, to assume high-rise buildings and struc~ tures, including self-declared ‘vertical cities’, are necessarily undifferentiated and homoge- neous communities above the horizontal plane (cg. Giiliimser and Baycan-Levent, 2009; Waterhouse-Hayward, 2010; Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 81-2). It also means that analy- e Zukin (1991) and Brenner and Keil (2006) cited above, tend to counterpose the ver- tical against the horizontal rather than actually address how they intersect for instance ‘vertica- lized enclaves’ are set against — rather than entangled with — ‘the wider majority-city of informal settlements’ (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 82). Vertical urbanism has tended to con- form to what Paul Carter (2014: 170) defines as ‘vacuum culture thinking’ where ‘rectilinear connectivity’ and ‘a state of topographical equi- librium’ triumph. Christopher Harker (2014: 321) offers an important response to what he identifies as the “topographic nature of emerging vertical analy- ses’ by emphasizing a more fopological render- ing of the dynamics of urban life. Like Weizman (2007), Harker’s (2014: 322) empirical focus is on the political and spatial dimensions of con- temporary Palestine, but unlike Weizman’s ‘hollow land... devoid of other (non-topogra- phical) spatial relations’, Harker’ s ethnographic explorations of a ‘living Palestine” of apart- ments, services (taxis) and families opens up what he calls ‘ordinary topologies’. By docu- menting the material and intimate geographies of apartment buildings in Ramallah, Harker (2014: 319) highlights the ‘fleshy passionate relations, knowledge and forms of practice through which cities are constructed’. These, he suggests, are details and spatially intensive connections that are otherwise occluded and bypassed in more topographic, Weizman-orien- tated conceptualizations of vertical urbanism. Topological imaginations clearly challenge a tendency to treat verticality and volume through gco-metric relations and de-populated registers. However, the topological does not necessary “exceed” vertical or volumetric framings as Har- ker (2014) argues, but allows the vertical to be conceived as more ontologically diverse. The vertical (or rather verticality) is only an ‘inher- ently topographical approach” (Harker, 2014: 322) if treated epistemologically in a way that fails to acknowledge everyday lived spaces and connections. Harker (2014: 322) himself pro- vides an important example of how a ‘produc- tive tension’ between topographical and topological spatial modalities around vertica- lized worlds can be developed through careful ethnographic research. Disrupting what Martin and Secor (2014: 431) identify as a problematic dichotomization between topographic and topo- logical space in human geography’s recent deployment of topological thinking, Harker not only extends and unmoors ‘the presumed fixity of the structural grid” around the violence of vertical life, but opens up potential qualitative engagements with how topographical space is itself conjured and calculated in everyday life. Pursuing this topographic-topological focus involves conceiving vertical urban landscapes as sustained or disrupted by the co-production of so and technical relations (Farias, 2009). By understanding urban verticality as the provi- sional achievement of (horizontal and vertical) entanglements of people, systems, rules, prac- tices, technologies and things, some of the Car- tesian framing of the vertical against the horizontal can be breached and broadened. For example, high-rise buildings can be seen as not only fixed and potentially secessionary vertical landscapes but also as ‘an achievement of a diverse network of associates and associations? (Jacobs, 2006: 11) involving heterogeneous building technologies and practices (see alsoHarris 613 Jenkins, 2002; Jacobs et al., 2007, 2008). Simi- larly, helicopter travel in Sd0 Paolo not only allows elites to escape crowded and dangerous streetscapes below, but is also crucially embedded, as Saulo Cwemer (2009) docu- in a network of ground-level infrastruc- tures, Subterranean burrowing in Gaza is not only a response to vertical urban surveillance and military targeting, but yields physical mate- rial to be reconfigured into new (above-ground) housing, schools and mosques (Finoki, 2009). Focusing in this way on not only stacked and planar vertical geometries but also on the multi- ple socio-material alliances that make, shape and perform urban verticality does not ‘priv lege horizontally extending relational connec- tions over vertical ones’, as Graham and Hewitt (2013: 73) contend. Pursuing topologies that seek to flatten seales and hierarchi between actors/actants in empirical research does not in itself necessarily equate with hori- zontal imaginations or flatten engagement with vertical relations of power (Harris, 2013b). As Jacobs et al. (2011: 130; original emphasis) argue with regards to their notion of the *high- rise building event’, it is “flat insofar as it opened itself to different agencies, but it is not ignorant of differentiation and how that might reorder (limit and empower) the potentialities of those agencies’. Vertical urbanisms are not only (ontologically flat) socio-technical ensem- bles, but are frequently dependent on, and pro- ductive of, urban margins, residues and unequal labour relations. For instance, building and maintaining elevated roads, metro-lines and mono-rails in Mumbai over the last decade has required a large pool of labour from existing ‘slums’ and from migrant workers who have frequently set up residential settlements (using recycled construction materials) next to con struction sites and casting yards (Figure 1). Thi vertical reliance on the urban subaltern can have complex geographical entanglements, Most upmarket vertical spaces in Mumbai, such as the Antilia tower, are filled, as the anthropologist Figure 1. Settlements for construction workers next to a concrete segment casting-yard for new flyovers, ‘Wadala, Mumbai. Photograph by author, June 2009. Arjun Appadurai (2007) suggests, with people such as ‘servants, chauffeurs, drivers, domes tics, dependents of various kinds’ who are ‘actu- ally denizens of the horizontal or infrastrueture- free city’. This co-presence of slum-dwellers in vertical enclaves creates what Appadurai (2007) calls “helical space’ Accompanying this pursuit of multiple geo graphical imaginations of urban verticality, it is also important to contrast and conneet vertical urbanisms across different sites, spaces and net- works, and across historical periods, engaging with recent calls advocating experimental yet rigorous comparative perspectives and gestures in urban research (Robinson, 2011). The research field of urban verticality can help establish logics of connection between ‘con- junctions or juxtapositions of locations’ in multi-sited ethnographies (Marcus, 1995: 105)614 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) Approaches might be designed that thread together ‘subterranean, surficial and suprasur- face domains’ (Graham and Hewitt, 2013: 75), ensuring that vertical urbanisms are framed through airspaces (Williams, 2011) and subter- ranean worlds (Williams, 2008). Examples might include exploring the relationship between aerial and underground ambitions in 1930s Moscow (Jenks, 2000: 713) or the paths traced between gravels extracted from the Thames Estuary and construction projects in London (Bremner, 2014). Cultural forms and representations canbe instructive in developing ways of bringing together different vertical sites/sights and stories! storeys. The reader or viewer is often taken up and down and in and out of buildings and urban land- scapes (see, for instance, Garfinkel (2003) on the role of elevators in films). In his novel High-Rise, Ballard (2006: 17) is particularly astute at allow- ing the reader to develop a three-dimensional awareness of the building’s ‘inter-floor’ wrangles, with the three (male) protagonists moving up and down the high-rise from their respective apart- ments on the second, 25th and penthouse floors. The BBC documentary The Tower (2007) like- wise helps open up comparisons between the res- idents of two physically similar but socially divergent high-rises in Deptford, London. There also needs to be greater engagement with why tall buildings dominate some urban regions and neighbourhoods but not others, why there is a tendency to build underground rather than upwards in certain urban locations, and why some urban skies are filled with transporta- tion networks and helicopters but not others. Reasons may encompass not only differential traditions of urban planning (see, for instance, Willis (1995) on the variations in the emergence of skyscrapers between Chicago and New York) but also interconnect with issues of religion, geology and physical topography.'° There are likely to be differing cultural philosophies of ascension and elevation, contrasting risks of flooding and earthquakes, and varying altitudes, and slopes. Not all places such as the West Bank, for example, have land that can be hol- lowed, or summits for ‘panoptic fortresses? (Weizman, 2002). This will require venturing beyond the cross-disciplinary contours outlined in this paper and engaging more closely with perspectives from, amongst others, theology, hydrology, geology, acoustics, art practice, psy- chology land economy, creative writing and civil engineering.'' In getting off the ground in explorations of vertical urbanisms, further methodological, geographical and disciplinary experiments will be required that will enable research into the vertical qualities of cities and urban life to delve deeper and float free. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Chris Philo for his careful guidance and patience with this paper, and to three anonymous reviews for their helpful suggestions in sharpening its focus. My thanksalso to Richard Baxter, Rebecca Ross, ‘Noam Leshem, Matthew Gandy, Johan Andersson and ‘Sam Merrill for their comments on earlier drafts Funding The paper emerged from a research project entitled “Vertical Urbanism: Geographies of the Mumbai fly- over’ funded by the ESRC (RES-000-22-3127) Notes 1. Although it is important to recog ‘geographical scholarship on vertical life prior to the last decade (e.g. Gottman, 1966; Suteliffe, 1974; Domosh, 1987; Fenske and Holdsworth, 1992). Also a prescient paper from 1983 by Ellis Hillman (1983: 188) identifies the embedded horizontatism in urban thinking: “It is ‘now all too obvious that our city planning has viewed ‘growth as ifour cities were spread out on a table-cloth’ 2. Although mistakenly referenced as from The Least of All Possible Evils (Weizman, 2011), 3. As Miscelwitz and Weizman (2003) suggest, ‘in many ‘ways, the West Bank is nothing but an extreme model fa territorial and urban conflict that can take place in other places.” 4. In the ‘vertical noir’ off Bladerunner (1982), Deck- ard’s pursuit of replicants across the different strata of Los Angeles in 2019 ~ from street-level to the strands of urbanHarris 615 4. ML. 700th storey of Tyrell's pyramid — allows him to reveal ‘the interlinked comuptions of society torecog- nize the evil that looms above’ (Bullock, n.d.). For example, the depiction by Emile Zola (1999: 6) ia his 1883 novel Pot Lick ofthe vertical differentials of an apartment building in Hawssmann’s new Paris ‘after the third floor, the red carpet came to an end, and was replaced by a simple grey covering’. In July 2013, six female climbers scaled the Shard tower in London as part of protests against drilling in the Arctic by the oil company Shell. 1. Although counter to the argument that Weizman “hol- lows out’ the lives of Palestinians, itis important to recognize his occasional attempts to offer their per- spective and voice in Hollow Land (see, for example, Weizman, 2007: 159, 194-5). Weizman (2002) also ‘quotes the writer Meron Benvenisti on the process of ‘crashing ‘three-dimensional space into six dimensions three Jewish and three Arab’ For example, see www-talltales.org (developed by the author with Dr Andy Hudson-Smith from UCL CASA), which aims to ‘develop more poly-vocal nar- ratives that highlight the way projected meanings, ico- nographies and uses of buildings are often missed, changed and subverted’ (accessed 19 January 2013). ‘The New York Times in 2013 also asked readers to sub- mit ‘your story of Fife in high-rises’ hntp://submit nytimes.comvhigh-rise?smid-—twenytimes (accessed 28 March 2013), Although MeGiuirk (2014: 186) explores the absence of lifts in Torre David in Caracas, which he suggests sti- ‘mulates (ina rather Eurocentric tum of phrase) ‘urban alpinism’, while in his ethnography of the Robert Tay- lor blocks in Chicago, Venkatesh (2000: 26) details how “the elevator provided hours of enjoyment’ for approximately eight hundred children in each of the buildings. See also Bernard’s (2014) in-depth cul- tural history of the elevator prior to the 1930s, On the politics of physical topography, see, for instance, the architectural theorist Daniela Fabricius (2008) on the “topographic apartheid” of Brazilian ies, and the anthropologists O°Neill and Fogarty- Valenzuela (2013) on the vertical vocabulary of amiba and abajo in Guatemala City, while James Scott (2009) suggests that the art of not being gov- ‘ered involves running to the bills, In this, Eyal Weizman and his colleagues’ (2010) ongoing “forensic architecture’ project that brings together architects, artists, legal scholars, archacolo- sists, cultural theorists and palacontologisis: might prove just as influential as Hollow Land. For a good example of experimental literary grapplings with urhan verticality — including from geographers ~ see Mount London: Ascen and Kratz, 2014) ts in the Vertical City (Chivers References Adey P (2010a) Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell ‘Adey P (20108) Vertical security in the megacity. Theory, Culture & Society 27: 51-67. Adey P (2013) Secure the volume/volumen, Political Geo- graphy 34: S254, Andersson J (2013) Variations of an archetypal scene: Th Paris Métro confrontation in Michael Haneke's Code Unknown. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 693-107. Appadurai A (2007) Interview transcript for Liguid City documentary film. Department of Geography, Univer- sity College London Arabindoo P (2011) Rhetorie of the ‘slum’. City 15 636-646, Ballard JG (2006 [1975]) High-Rise. New York: Harper Perennial Barthes R (1997 (1979) The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Belanger P (2007) Underground landscape: ‘The urbanism and infrastructure of Toronto's downtown pedestrian network. Tunneling and Underground Space Technol- ogy 22: 272-292 Bender T (2002) The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: NYU Pres Bender T and Taylor W (1992) Culture and architecture: ‘Some aesthetic tensions in the shaping of mode New York City. In: Taylor M, Jn Pursuit of Gotham: Culture ‘and Commerce in New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 51-68 ‘Benhamu M and Doytsher ¥ (2003) Toward a spatial 3D ceadastre in Israel. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 27: 389-374. Bennett L (2013) Defensive enthusiasm: Anoraks, bunkers and the erotics of knowledge, Presentation at ‘Cultures of Architectural Enthusiasm’, University College Lon- don, 28 June.616 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) Bemard A (2014) Lifted: a Cultural History of the Eleva- tor. New York: New York University Press. Bloom J (1989) Minaret: Symbol of Iam. Oxford: Oxford University Press Blunt A (2008) The ‘skyscraper settlement”: Home and residence at Christodora House. Environment and Planning A 40: 550-571 Boddy T (1992) Underground and overhead: Building the analogous city. In: Sorkin M (ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang, 123-153, Brandl J, Frandsen M and Larsen JL. (2008) Supertanker: In search of urbanity. arg: Architectural Research Quarterly 12: 173-181 Bremner L (2014) Anthropocene processes: Mining sands and gravels from the sea. geoarchitecture. Available at ‘nity: geoarchitecture.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/ nthropocene-processes-mining-sands-and-gravels- from-the-sea/ (accessed 15 July 2014). Brenner Nand Keil R (eds) (2006) The Global Cities Reader. London: Routledge. Bridge G (2013) Territory, now in 3D! Political Geogra- phy 34: $S-S7, Brumann C (2012) Re-uniting a divided city. In: Brumann Cand Schulz E (eds) Urban Spaces in Japan: Cultural and Social Perspectives. London: Routledge. Buchanan R (2012) Boris ponders cycle lane in the sky between stations. The Times (London). Available at hitp:/ www thetimes.co.uk/ttofpublie/eyclesafety/con- tacvarticle3509225 eve (accessed 10 September 2012). Bullock K (n.d.) Vertical apocalypse: altered noir cityscape within Blade Runner's dystopia. Available at:_http://soma sbec.edu/users/davega/FILMST_113) FILMST_113_0ld/FILMS/Bladerunner/Vertical%20 Apocalypse Bullock pdf (accessed 5 March 2013). Bunnell T (1999) Views from above and below: The Pet- ronas Twin Towers and/in contesting visions of devel- ‘opment in contemporary Malaysia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 20: 1-23. (Chen L-W and Shi C-M (2009) The public nature of high- rise buildings in Taiwan, Environment and Planning D, Society and Space 27: 317-330. Chivers T and Kratz M (eds) (2014) Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City. London: Penned in the Margins. (Chow YF and de Kloet J (2013) Flinerie and aerophilia in the postmetropolis: Rooftops in Hong Kong cinema. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7: 139-15. Chua BAH (2011) Singapore as model: Planning innova- tions, knowledge experts. In: Roy A and Ong A (eds) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Chichester: Blackwell, 29-54 Craggs R, Geoghegan Hand Neate 1! (2013) Architectural enthusiasm: Visiting buildings with The Twentieth Century Society. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 819-896. werner $ (2009) Helipads, heliports and urban air space Governing the contested infrastructure of helicopter travel. In: Cwemer S, Kesselring $ and Urry J (eds) Aeromobilities. Abingdon: Routledge, 225-246. Daneshmir R and Spiridonoff C (2012) Subterranean land- scape: The far-reaching influence of the underground Qanat network in ancient and present-day lean. Archi- tectural Design 82: 62-69. de Boeck F (2011) Inhabiting ocular ground: Kinshasa’s future inthe light of Congo's spectral urban polities Cultural Anthropology 26: 263-286. de Certeau M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Bet- keley: University of California Press Dennis R (2008a) Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennis R (2008b) ‘Babylonian fats’ in Edwardian London. The 233-247. Despommier D (2009) The rise of vertical farms. Scientific American 301: 80-81, Deutsche R (1991) Boys town. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9: 5-30. Domosh M (1987) Imagining New York's first skysera- pers, 1875-1910. Journal of Historical Geography 13: 233-248, Dosing D (2005) Why Trevor is wrong about race ghettos. The Observer. bitp:/Avww.guardian.co.ukiuk/2008! sep/25/communities polities (accessed 20. October 2009). DDorrian M (2007) The aerial view: Notes fora cultural his- tory. Strates. Materiaux pour la recherche en sciences ‘sociales 13. Available a: http://strates.revues.ong/5573 (accessed 3 August 2012). DDorrian M (2008) How the world sees London: Thoughts on a millennial urban spectacle. In: Vidler A (ed.) Architecture Between Spectacle and Use. New Haven, oT: Yale University Press, 41-53. Dorrian M (2009) The aerial image: Vertigo transparency and miniaturization. Parallax 15: 83-93. fctorian and London Journal 3Harris 617 Ehrenberg R (2008) Let’s get vertical: City buildings offer ‘opportunities for farms to grow up instead of out. Sci- ence News 174: 16-20, Elden $ (2013) Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics, and the depth of power. Political Geography 34 35-51. Fabricius D (2008) Resisting representation: The informal ‘geographies of Rio de Janeiro, Harvard Design Maga- ine 28: 4-17 Farias 1 (2009) Introduction. In: Farias I and Bender T (eds) Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory ‘Changes Urban Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, 1-24. Fenske G and Holdsworth D (1992) Corporate identity and the New York office building, 1895-1915. In: Ward D and Zunz.O (eds) The Landscape of Modernity: Essays ‘of New York City, 1900-1940. New York: Russell Sage, 129-159, Femandez Arrigoitia M (2014) Unmaking public housing towers: The role of lifts and stars in the demolition of a Puerto Rican project. Home Cultures 11(2) 167-196, Fincher (2007) I hi ‘opers’ contradictory narratives of high-rise housing in Melbourme. Urbun Studies 44: 631-649. Finoki B (2000) Over the siege. Available at: hiip://subto- ise housing innovative? Devel- pia blogspot.com/2000/07/over-siege-himl (accessed 29 July 2009), Fuenmayor J (2011) The Tower of David, Domus. Avail- able al: htip:/www.domusweb.iven/architecture'the- tower-of-david (accessed 12 January 2012), Gandy M (1999) The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24; 23-44, Gandy M (2010) The ecological facades of Patrick Blane. Architectural Design 80: 28-33. Garfinkel $ (2003) Elevator stories: Vertical imagination and the spaces of possibility. In: Goetz A (ed.) Up Down, Across: Blevators, Escalators and Moving Side- walks. London: Merrell, 173-196. Garmendia M, Coronado JM and Ureia JM (2012) Univer- sity. students sharing flats: When studentification becomes vertical. Urban Studies 49: 2651-2668, Garrett B (2011) Shallow excavation, a response to Bun- kerology. Society and Space: Environment and Plan- ning D. Available at: http:!/societyandspace.com! 2011/06/10/shallow-excavation-a-response-to-bunker- ology-by-bradley-Lgarrett/ (accessed 24 September 2014), Garrett B (2012a) Scaling the Shard. Domus. Available at: http://www domusweb.ivenarchitecture/scaling-the- shard (accessed 11 July 2012), Garrett B (20126) Place hacking: Tales of urban explora PRD thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, Ghosh B (2014) The security aesthetic in Bollywood's high-rise horror. Representations 126: 58-84, Giedion $ (1941) Space, Time and Architecture — The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Gottman J (1966) Why the skyscraper? The Geographical Review 56: 190-212. Graham $ (2004) Ver Antipode 36: 12-23, Graham $ (2010) Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso, Graham S (2012) Olympics 2012 security: Welcome to lockdown London, The Guardian. Available at: buip://www guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/mar/12/london- olympies-security-lockdown-london (accessed 13 March 2012). Graham S and Hewitt L (2013) Getting off the ground: On the politics of urban verticality. Progress in Human Geography 37: 72-92. Guggenheim M (2010) The laws of foreign buildings: Flat roofs and minarets. Social & Legal Stulies 19: 441-400. Giilimser A and Baycan-Levent T (2009) Through the sky: Vertical gated developments in Istanbul. The Urban Reinventors 3109: 1-18. Haraway D (1988) The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575-599, Harker C (201 1) Geopolitics and family in Palestine. Geo- forum 42: 306-15. Harker C (2014) The only way is up? Ordinary topologies of Ramallah, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38: 318-335. Harris A (2008) Livingstone versus Serota: ‘The high: battle of Bankside, The London Journal 33: 289-299, Harris A (2011) Vertical urbanism: flyovers and skywalks jin Mumbai. In: Gandy M (ed.) Urban Constellations Berlin: Jovis, 118-123. Harris A (2012a) The metonymie urbanism of twenty-first- stury Mumbai. Urhan Studies 49: 2953-2973, Harris A (2012b) Aerial visions and grounded realities. Seminar, August, 636, 39-42, ion I geopolitics: Baghdad and afer.68 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) Harris A (2013a) Mumbai’s underworld: Life beneath transport infrastructure. Moving Worlds 13: 151-160. Harris A 2013b) Concrete geographies: Assembling glo- bal Mumbai through transport infrastructure. City 17: 343.360, Harris A and Moore $ (2013) Planning histories and prac- tices of circulating urban knowledge. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37: 1499-1509, Harvey P (2009) Between narrative and number: The case of ARUP’s 3D Digital City Model. Cultural Sociology 3: 257-276, Hastings A (2004) Stigma and social housing estates: Beyond pathological explanations, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 19: 233-254. Hatherley O (2010) The almost-skyserapers of Britain, 1829-1944. Available at: _http://nastybrutalistand- short.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/almost-skyscrapersof- britain-1829-1944 himl (accessed 14 August 2013), Hatherley © (2012) The political aesthetics of American- ism, constructivism, ‘America’ and the dreaming col- lective across the Moscow-Berlin axis. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London. Hebbert M (1993) The City of London walkway experi- ment. Journal of the American Planning Association 59: 433-450, Hebbert M (2012) Megaproject as keyhole surgery: Lon- don Crossrail. Built Environment 38: 89-102. Hecker T (2010) The slum pastoral: Helicopter visuality and Koolhaas’s Lagos. Space and Culture 13: 256 269. Hewitt L (2012) Sky-high sci-fi: Vertical urbanism in sci- cence fiction literature. Available at: http://www dnter- disciplinary.net/\wp-content/uploads/201 1/08/hewittsp- paper pdf (accessed 12 July 2012), Hillman B (1983) Cities beneath. The Environmentalist 3: 187-198. Howeler E (2003) Skyscraper: Designs of the Recent Past. and for the Near Future. London: Thames & Hudson. Ireson A (ed,) (2000) City Levels. Basel: Birkhauser, Jacobs J (2006) A geography of big things. Cultural Geo- sgraphies 13: 1-27. Jacobs J, Cais $ and Strebel 1 (2007) *A tall stor ey... but,a fact just the same": The Red Road high-rise asa black box. Urban Studies 44: 609-629 Jacobs J, Cairns S and Strebel I (2008) Windows: Re-view- ing Red Road. Scottish Geographical Journal 124 165-184. Jacobs J, Caims $ and Strebel 1 (2012) Doing building ‘work: Methods atthe interface of geography and archi- tecture. Geographical Research S0(2): 126-140. Jaffe E (201 a) The world’s next 20 tallest skyscrapers The Atlantic Cities. Available a: bitp:/www.theatlan- ticeiies.comdesign/2011/12/worlds-20-tallest-sky- serapersi775/ (acvessed 24 December 2011) Jaffe E (2011b) The death row of urban highways. The Allantic Cities. Available at bitp:/iwww.theatlantice’- ties com/commute/201 1/1 1/death-row-urban ways/411/ (accessed 29 August 2012). Jenkins L (2002) Geography and architecture: 11, Rue du Conservatoire and the permeability of buildings. Space and Culture 5: 222-236. King AD (1996) Worlds inthe city: Manhattan transfer and the ascendance of spectacular space. Planning Per- speetives 11: 97-114. Koolhaas R (199 [1978]) Delirious New York: A Retroac- tive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli Press Jenks A (2000) A metro on the mount: The underground as church of Soviet civilization. Technology and Culture 41: 697-724, Lamster M (2011) Castles in the at. Scientific American 305: 76-83, Lees L and Baxter R (2011) A ‘building event” of fear: ‘Thinking through the geography of architecture, Social & Cultural Geography 12: 107-122. Leshem N (2014) ‘Over our dead bodies’: Placing neero- politcal activism in Israel/Palestine. Political Geogra- phy, forthcoming Lin S and Schofield C (2014) Lessons from the Bay of Bengal ITLOS case: Stepping offshore for a ‘deeper’ ‘maritime political geography. The Geographical Jow- nal 180(3): 260-266. Lindner € 2009) London undead: Screening/beanding the empty ity. In: Donald , Kofman E and Kevin C (eds) Branding Cities: Cosmopolitanism, Parochialism, and Social Change. New York: Routledge, 91-104. Lindner C 2013) Afer-images ofthe highrise city: Visua- lizing urban change in modern New York. The Journal of American Culture 36: 75-81. Llewellyn M (2003) Polyvocalism and the publi: “Doing” 4 critical historical geography of architecture. Area 35: 264-270. Lowry G and McCann B (2011) Asia in the mix: Urban form and global mobilities ~ Hong Kong, Vancouver, Dubai. In: Ong A and Roy A (eds) Worlding CitiesHarris 619 Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Blackwell, 182-204. Lynton N (2009) Tatlin’ Tower: Monument to Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Maas W (2011) The Vertical Village: Individual, Informal, Intense, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers. Manaugh G (2012) Caves of Nottingham, Available at hitp:/bldgblog. blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/caves-of-not- tingham_I html (accessed 16 September 2012). Marcus G (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: the éemenzence of multi-sted ethnography, Annual Reviews in Anthropology 24: 95-117. Margalit T (2013) Land, polities and high-rise planning: Ongoing development practices in Tel Aviv-Yato. Planning Perspectives 28: 373-397. Martin Land Secor A (2014) Towards. post-mathematical topology. Progress in Human Geography 38: 420-438. MeCann E, and Ward K (eds) (2011) Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age. Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press. MeGiuirk J (2012) Gran Horizonte: Torre David. In: Chip- perfield D (e4.) Common Ground: A Critical Reader. ‘Venezia: Archtecturra di Biennale, 274-278, MoGuirk J (2014) Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. London: Verso Books. MeNeill D (2008) Skyscraper geography. Progress in Human Geography 29: 41-55. Merrill S (2013) ‘The London Underground diagram Between patimpsest and eanon. The London Journal 38: 245-264 Michiels S and van Helmond A (2005) Jakarta Mezalopo- lis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations. Amsterdam: Valiz Misselwitz P and Weizman E (2003) Military operations as urban planning. Mute Magazine, August. Available at Intp:/svww metamute.org/editorial/articles‘military- operations-urban-planning (accessed 24 September 2014), Morris M (1992) Great moments in social climbing: King Kong and the human fly. In: Colomina B (ed.) Sexuality, «and Space. Princeton University Press, 1-51. Morshed A (2004) The aesthetics of ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63: 74-99. MYRDV (2007) Skyear City: A Pre-Emptive History. Bar- celona: Actar-D. Nair J (2005) The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century. Delhi: Oxford University Press. O'Neill K and Fogarty-Valenaiela B (2013) Verticality Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 378-389. Ong A (2011) Hyperbuilding: spectacle, speculation, and the hyperspace of sovereignty. In: Roy A and Ong A (dls) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of being Global. Chichester: Blackwell, 205-226. Parker T (1996) People of Providence: A Housing Estate and ‘Some of lis Inhabitants. New York: Eland Publishing Lid Pike D (2008) Subterrancan Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945. London: Comell Uni- versity Press. Prakash G (2010) Mumbai Fables. Princeton: Princeton University Press Rao V Q011a) A new urban type: Gangsters, terrorists, slobal cities. Critique of Anthropology 31: 3-20. Rao V (20116) Mill, market, milieu: redevelopment and rights to the city. In: Adarkar N (ed.) Chaws of Mum- bai: Galleries of Life. Mumbai: ImprintOne Robinson J (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge. Robinson (201) Cities ina world of cities: The compara tive gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25: 1-23, Rose G, Degen M and Basis B (2010) More on *bi things’: Building events and feelings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38: 334-349. Roy A (2006) Praxis in the time of Empire. Planning The- ony 5: 7-29, Roy A 2011) Postcolonial urbanism: speed, hysteria, mass dreams, In; Roy A and Ong A (eds) Worlding Cities Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Chi- chester: Blackwell, 307-335, Saint-Amour PK (2011) Applied modernism: military and civilian uses ofthe aerial photomosaic. Theory, Culture & Society 28: 241-268. Scott J (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anar- chist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Strebel I 2011) The living building: Towards a geography ‘of maintenance work. Social & Cultural Geography 12: 243-262, Sutcliffe A (1974) Multi-storey Living: the British Work- ing-class Experience. London: Croom Helm, Territorial Masquerades (2011) Occupy volume, occupy Verticality. DIY Drone. Available at: hipy/teritoral- ‘masquerades nevoccupy-volume-occupy-verticality/ (accessed $ December 2011).620 Progress in Human Geography 39(5) Thill 1, Dao T and Zhou Y (2011) Traveling in the three- dimensional city: Applications in route planning, accessibility assessment, location analysis and beyond. Journal of Transport Geography, 19: 405-421 Venkatesh S (2000) American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press. ‘Vevaina L (2013) Exeamnation and the city: ‘The Tower of Silence debates in Mumbai. In Becci I, Burchardt M and Casanova J (eds) Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Space. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, B95. Vidler A (2000) Photourbanism: Planning the city from above and from below. In: Bridge Gand Watson S (eds) A Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell, 25-45. Wallraff M (2012) Vertical Public Space. Niinberg: Ver- lag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg. ‘Warrender K (2007) Underground Manchester: Secrets of the City Revealed. Manchester: Willow Publishing. Waterhouse-Hayward A (2010) Vancouver's. vertical ated communities. Available at: http://blog.alexwater- houschayward.com/2010/01/vancouvers-vertical ted-communities.html (accessed 24 September 2014). Watson V (2013) Future A rican cities: The new post-colo- nialism. Lecture at the Development Planning Unit, University College London, 6 March, Wainwright © (2014) China town: Meet the architecture slant with Asian designs on London. The Guardian. 16 July. Weizman FE (2002) The polities of verticality. Open Democracy. Available at: http:/www.opendemoc- racy :nel/ecology-politiesverticality/article_801.jsp (accessed 5 December 2011), Weizman E (2007) Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, Weizman E (2011) The Least of All Possible Evils: Huma- nitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, London: Verso. ‘Weizman E, Tavares P, Schuppli S and Situ Studio (2010) Forensie architecture, Architectural Design 80(5): 58-63 Werdigier J (2008) From the Gulf, money for towers in London. The New York Times. Available at: http:/! ‘wwwwanytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/worldbusi ness/20wealth html (accessed 2 July 2012). Wigoder M (2002) The ‘solar eye’ of vision: Emergence of | the skyscraper-viewer in the discourse on heights in New York City, 1890-1920, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61(2): 152-169. Wiles W (2014) The chaos and tangled energy of living cit- ies. Aeon Magazine. Available at: btip:!/aeon.cohmaga- Zinelliving-together/the-chaos-and-tangled-energy-of- living-cities/ (accessed 20 July 2014), Williams A (2011) Reconceptualising spaces of the air: Performing the multiple spatialities of UK military air- spaces. Trunsactions of the Institute of British Geogra- hers 36: 253-267, Williams A (2013) Re-orientating vertical geopolities Geopolitics 18: 225-246, Williams RH (2008 [1990 Notes on she Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Willis C (1995) Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and ‘Skylines in New York and Chicago. New York: Prince ton Architectural Press. ‘Yap E (2012) Wheels of fame and fortune: The travels of | the Singapore Flyer. Urban Studies 49: 2839-2852. Zola F (1999) Pot Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Zukin S (1991) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit 10 Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press.