Vertical Cities

Urban Geography
GEOG0028

Andrew Harris
andrew.harris@ucl.ac.uk
1. Vertical urban geography
2. Vertical trajectories of contemporary urbanization

3. Vertical fix, escape, status and control

4. Approaching urban verticalities

 1. Vertical urban geography

Flat geographic thinking of cartographic gaze….

Horizontalism, two-dimensional….
‘Whilst vast libraries and many disciplines
are devoted to exploring and
understanding the structuring and
patterning of the horizontal aspects of
cities stretched across the earth’s surface,
the attention to the vertical structuring of
cities and urban life in the social sciences
remains patchy and limited.’

Stephen Graham (2016)

Verticality has always been an important part
of the unique relational intensity, juxtaposition
and imagination of urban life.
what physical attributes might be exclusive to cities:
‘skyscrapers, underground railways, street lighting
(maybe), and not much else’
Steve Pile (1999: 5)

‘We think of cities as lateral but of course they are also

vertical. Cities extend upwards into the air by means of
buildings, elevators and controlled airspace, and they
extend downwards by means of tunnels, escalators,
basements, graveyards, wells, buried cabling and mine
workings.’
Robert McFarlane (2019: 148)
Building upwards has been a consistent feature of
what defines the city: from Egyptian obelisks, Chinese
pagodas, medieval cathedrals to corporate
skyscrapers and high-rise housing….
‘a vertical city… which will pile up
the cells which have for so long
been crushed on the ground, and
set them high above the earth,
bathed in light and air’

Le Corbusier (1929)
Traffic in Towns (1963)
But vertical urbanism not assumed….
‘In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-
urban . . . The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have
disappeared, New York is the final fling of this baroque verticality, this
centrifugal excentricity, before the horizontal dismantling arrives‘

(Baudrillard, 2010 [1986]: 22)

‘The age of skyscrapers is at an end. It must now be considered an
experimental building typology that has failed. We predict that no
new mega-towers will be built and existing ones are destined to be
dismantled’

Kunstler and Salingaros (2001)

 2. Vertical trajectories of
contemporary urbanisation

a) New vertical
buildings

Burj Khalifa, Dubai

84 percent of all buildings 200 meters or taller currently
in existence were built after 2001 (CTHUB, 2021)
‘Asian cities are not only outdoing the West in terms
of height but reinventing models and forms of urban
verticality.’
Chen and Shih (2009: 317)

Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

Shanghai had less than 300 buildings over 10 storeys
high in 2000 but has now become a city with nearly
3000 buildings over 10 storeys high.
Buenos Aires
 b) New vertical
forms

Beijing, China

Zhuzhou, China
The Tulip, London
 Paris

Madrid

See: Gandy, M. 2010 The ecological façades of Patrick Blanc

Dubai
Jerusalem, 2017
c) New vertical mobility

Boston USA
Chonggyechon Seoul
Highline New York
The architectural writer Owen Hatherley (2010) on a
visit to Shanghai in 2010 described the flyovers he saw
as ‘monstrous, dominant and utterly unforgettable.’
Gurgaon,Delhi
Medellin, Colombia

See: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/development/research/projects/metrocables
Bristol
Vertical urbanisation in contemporary Mumbai….
Sheth Beaumonde, Prabhadevi, 2006
Sheth Beaumonde, Prabhadevi, 2009
a) New vertical buildings

World One, Lower Parel

India Tower, Marine Lines
Palm Beach Marg, Navi Mumbai
Behrampada,
Mumbai
Mankhurd, Mumbai
b) New vertical forms

Deonar, Mumbai
Imperial Towers in Mumbai through smog, Jan 2016
 c) New vertical mobility

Flyovers
Skywalks

Skywalks
 Dahisar (E)
Borivili(w)

Kandivili

Thane

Mulund
Goregaon
Bhandup

Kanjur Marg
Malad
Andheri
Vile
Parle Ghatkopar
Santacruz (w) Santacruz (E)
Vidyavihar
Kurla
Bandra- BDTS
Bandra
Chembur
(W) Bandra- Kalanagr
Mankhurd

Wadala
Dadar
Road
Sewri
Parel

Lower Parel Reay Road

Chinchpokli
Grant Road
Sand Hurst Road
Masjid
CST to Church
Gate
CST Sky walks by MSRDC
Sky walks by MMRDA
….how do we account for these vertical
processes of urbanisation?

‘the notion of upward, or vertical movement offers

significant possibilities for densification, a prerequisite
for increasing a city's efficiency and enhancing its
response to population growth’
(MVRDV, 2007: 97)
 3. Vertical fix, escape, status and
control

i) Fix
ii) Escape
iii) Status
iv) Control
 i) Vertical fix

Manhattan 2018
the more recent epoch of urban verticalisation has been
an effect of
•new globalised flows of investment capital
•new forms of financial instruments
•and – perhaps most significantly – the increasing
centrality in urban asset-building of massive speculative,
debt-fuelled investment in property development.

David Harvey (2011) talks of the ‘capital-surplus disposal

problem’
See: https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
Craggs, D. 2018: Skyscraper Development and the Dynamics of
Crisis: The New London Skyline and Spatial Recapitalization Built
Environment 43 (4)
See also: Lauermann, J. 2022: ‘Vertical Gentrification: A 3D Analysis of Luxury Housing
Development in New York City’. Annals of the American Association of Geographers
 Paris
The Empire State Building in New York made $60
million in profits from visits to its observation deck in
2010, while the owners made little if any returns on the
building’s office space.
ii) vertical escape

• Cut off from perceived risks and security threats

• Flee issues of congestion and disruption
• Cosset with more reliable infrastructure and carefully
regulated environmental conditions.
“street level . . . will remain fairly gritty. But behind
doors and up on the rooftops it is a different
story. It's a real treasure box and really fun”

Huntingdon Estate London

Manhattan, 2018
Chicago Pedway
Martin Boddy: ‘analogue city’ (1993)
Bangkok Skytrain

it exists in ‘an almost unreal and separate

world, occupying the same spatial location as
the streets below, yet operating serenely
above them’.
Jenks (2003: 553)
‘ordinary people swarming through the dangerous
streets down below while the rich float around on a
higher level, up in the air.’

Slavoj Žižek (2009: 5) on São Paulo

Antilia Tower, Altamount Rd

At the building’s opening celebrity party in November

2010, the film director Shekhar Kapur suggested ‘it’s
great to breathe fresh air at this height and leave
Mumbai’s pollution down below’ (quoted in De, 2010).
 The massive high rise tower is now being used by
some Asian countries as a magic wand, stuck
iii) vertical status metaphorically into the terrestrial globe, to transform
what used to be known . . . as the Third World into
the First World.’

Anthony King (1996: 105)

Casa Grande del Pueblo (2018) in La Paz, Bolivia
‘From their residences the rich are reassured of their position in life
each time they look out the window and see the world at their feet’

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977: 38)

‘Marketing materials for
many developments show
empty interiors looking out
over the city. Prospective
buyers are able to project
their presence as the city’s
triumphant captains without
having to witness community
life or troublesome social
difference.’

Rowland Atkinson (London,

whose city?, Le Monde
diplomatique, July 2017)
Vertical status in Mumbai
iv) Vertical control

Plan Obus for Algiers (1933)

Graham S and Hewitt L (2013)
Getting off the ground: On the
politics of urban verticality. Progress
in Human Geography 37: 72-92.

Elden S (2013) Secure the volume:

Vertical geopolitics and the depth of
power. Political Geography 34: 35-51.
4. Approaching urban verticalities
i) Beyond archetypical/superlative
ii) Verticality as socio-technical event
iii) Volumetric urbanisms
iv) Vertical relationalities
v) Comparative verticalities
vi) Power complexities
vii) 3D ethnographies
viii) More than human verticalities
ix) Towards vertical interdisciplinarity
i) beyond archetypical or superlative
examples of vertical urbanism

Examples of vertical urbanism do not

necessarily need to be explicitly 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.
 Paris,
Felix
Nadar

Balham London

Uzbekistan
Byculla, Mumbai
Kinshasa

'Plans also exist, so the city’s rumor mill has it, to build a new viaduct connecting an
upgraded Ndjili International airport with La Ville (and more precisely with its Grand
Hotel, one of the two international hotels of downtown Kinshasa). The viaduct will
follow the Congo River, and run over and above the heads of the hundreds of
thousands of impoverished inhabitants of the municipality of Masina, commonly
referred to as “Chine Populaire,” the People’s Republic of China, because it is so
overpopulated.’

Filip De Boeck (2011: 274)

https://vimeo.com/80787092
Monument to the Third International (1919–20)
ii) Verticality as socio-technical event

Prague

London
 Jacobs, J.M., 2006. A geography of
big things. Cultural Geographies
13, 1.

Jacobs, J.M., Cairns, S.R., Strebel,

I., 2008. Windows: Re-viewing Red
Road. Scottish Geographical
Journal 124, 165–184.

Jacobs, J.M., Cairns, S., Strebel, I.,

2007. “A Tall Storey... but, a Fact
Just the Same”: The Red Road
High-rise as a Black Box. Urban
Studies 44, 609.

www.highrise.eca.ed.ac.uk/
iii) Volumetric urbanisms

Brussels
Dubai
iv) Vertical relationalities
‘Helical space’ (Appadurai, 2007, Liquid City)
Gaza
Wallasea Island
 v) Comparative verticalities
(and volumes)

• 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?
• why some urban skies are filled with transportation
networks and helicopters but not others?
Helen, of course, was thinking in terms of
social advancement, of moving in effect to a
“better neighbourhood”, away from this
lower-class suburb to those smarter
residential districts somewhere between the
15th and 30th floors, where the corridors
were clean and the children would not have
to play in the streets, where tolerance and
sophistication civilized the air. (p.47)
 vi) Power complexities
‘Landscapes of the powerful understood in terms of
verticality – cathedrals, factories, skyscrapers – and the
subordinate, resistant, or expressive vernacular of the
powerless – the “ordinary” urban fabric of shantytowns and
tenements etc’.
Sharon Zukin (1991: 186)

‘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’.

Neil Brenner and Roger Keil (2006: 4, original emphasis)

… the vertical, especially in terms of
height, should not necessarily be seen
as offering and representing a strongly
dominant and exclusive position over
the more everyday and marginalised
world of the horizontal below.
a) vertical height often equates not to the powerful but to the poor.

‘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 windows and
fewer stairs to climb’.

Richard Dennis (2008: 226)

‘Cut Britain up horizontally rather than by
neighbourhood, and you . . . find minority-
majority areas. For example above the fifth
floor of all housing in England and Wales a
minority of children are white. Most children
growing up in the tower blocks of London and
Birmingham – the majority of children “living in
the sky” in Britain – are black.’

Danny Dorling (2005)

b) the position from above has been co-opted by the less
powerful in a counter-politics of verticality.

Copenhagen Harbour
 ‘volume-with-a-purpose’

Zuccotti Park in New York,

University of California at Berkeley

‘a potent symbol of how direct action can turn vertical exclusivity into
horizontal distribution’.
Justin McGuirk (2012: 276)
People are overworked, overtired, bored and apathetic. They are
frustrated with the government, corporations, banks and their jobs. Our
explorations pull them out of that banal capitalist horizontality (even for
a few moments) and elevate them into a vertical urban realm where
the impossible is made possible.

Bradley Garrett (2012)

 vii) 3D Ethnographies

It is not possible to assume how people necessarily act or respond in

relation to urban verticality
• how urban views – looking up, down and across – are experienced
and interpreted
• whether elevated transport structures are treated as impositions or
welcomed as providing shelter and shade
• whether underground spaces are considered scary, boring or exciting
recognise some of the blurred, messy and
ambivalent aspects of vertical urbanism

…Otherwise can inadvertently adopt the ‘god

trick’ of an objective, masculinised, all-seeing
gaze
Documentary films
• The Tower (2007)
• In el Hoyo (2006)
• Dark Days (2000)
• Vertical City (2010)
• Um Lugar ao Sol (2009)
• City of Cranes (2007)
• The Lift (2001)
• Africa Shafted (2011)
viii) More than human verticalities
 ix) Towards interdisciplinary urban verticality

Need urban geography, architecture, planning….

theology, hydrology, geology, acoustics, land economy, civil

engineering, ecology….
https://www.mixcloud.com/harrisssment/vertical-city/
Paul Klee City of Towers (1916)
Harris, A. 2020:‘‘“When I get up it just goes to shit”: unearthing the everyday
vertical landscapes of Detectorists’. In Keighren, I. and Norcup, J.
(eds.) Landscapes of Detectorists. Uniformbook