Vertigo: For a vertical turn in critical urban research

Steve Graham & Lucy Hewitt University of Newcastle

• Cities as places of particular relational intensity and juxtaposition, combined with uniquely vertical built form•Only skyscrapers and subterranean burrowings only found in cities (Massey, Allen and Pile, 1999)•And yet critical urban research has neglected such productions and performances of space•Such research is resurgent based on debates about cities and rescaling, ‘flat’ ontologies, relational space-times, ‘global urban’ networks. ANT etc. But such relational analyses and imaginaries are dominated by an overwhelmingly horizontal imagination of the politics and production of space•Paradoxical impact of normalisation of top-down cartographic gaze?•‘Vertical’ used to refer to nesting of spatial scales of governance and analysis

Critical Urban Social Science: A Flat Discourse?

In short, does critical urban research, with a few exceptions, suffer the same ‘flatness’ as classical and critical geopolitics, as diagnosed by Eyal Weizman

“Geopolitics is a flat discourse. It largely ignores the vertical dimension and tends to look across rather than to cut through the landscape. This was the cartographic imagination

inherited from the military and political spatialities of the modern state” Eyal Weizmann (2002, 3)

Urban verticality project seeks to re-imagine critical urban research from a vertical or volumetric perspective, to bring it more in to line with radical vertical and subterranean

extensions of built space as well as broader cultural politics and geopolitics of aeriality and verticality.

Four main themes:1. Cultural Politics of the Aerial View .

2. Building Up and Building Down3. The New Military Urbanism

4. Vertical Counterpolitics

1. Cultural Politics of the Aerial View Central to Modern Urbanism:“Aviator as Moralist Planner” (Christine Boyer)

“More than ever before, we now deal in aerial images as a method of remediating the urban landscape”. Mark Dorrian

Thinning of the ethical relationship engendered by distance (Dorrian): “with the exquisite impression of a marvelous, ravishing cleanliness! No squalor or blots on the landscape. There is nothing like distance to remove us from all ugliness.” 1858 by Félix Nadar (quoted in Frizot, )

Le Corbusier’s aerial gaze was ‘not simply a surveying eyePost-1945 ‘the aerial view became institutionalized as a central tool of planning’ – ‘the vision of modernity.’ Anthony Vidler

Building for the Skies: Google Earth Urbanism?

2. Building Up and Building Down Politics of Vertical Transportation, Secession, Surveillance

‘Vertical Gated Communities’: Luxury+’Security’+Verticality

“Roughlux” in Manhattan“Pin-drop quiet”“Luxification” (Sharon Zukin)

Splintered, solipsistic urbanism

“Capsules on networks” Lieven de Cauter

Francoise Hall on Vertical Secession:‘We commonly think of secession as a horizontal, territorial phenomenon – The secession of the United States from Britain (1776), Belgium from the Netherlands (1831), Pakistan from India (1947), Bangladesh from Pakistan (1971). But secession can also have a vertical dimension, as when a tiny, upper layer of the population stops belonging to the planet which most of us inhabit. They are embedded in their own world, within gated communities and private schools, using filtered water and filtered ideas.’

Paolo Soleri :One-building, vertical, mega-technical cities (plus Archigram etc.)

Favelas in the Sky: The Beggar’s Banquet, by Léopold Lambert

Building Down: Urban Subterranean ‘Root Systems’

“Imagine grabbing Manhattan by the Empire State Building and pulling the entire island up by its roots. Imagine shaking it.

Imagine millions of wires and hundreds of thousands of cables freeing themselves from the great hunks of rock and

tons of musty and polluted dirt. Imagine a sewer system and a et of water lines three times as long as the Hudson River. Picture mysterious little vaults just beneath the crust of the

sidewalk, a sweaty grid of steam pipes 103 miles long, a turn-of-the-eighteenth-century merchant ship bureau under Front Street, rusty old gas lines that could be wrapped twenty-three

times around Manhattan, and huge, bomb-proof concrete tubes that descend almost eighty storeys into the ground”

• Robert Sullivan’s introduction to

Harry Granick, Underneath New York (1947)

New rationalisations of urban space linking subterranean, surface and aerial architectures of

inhabitation, circulation, consumption:

China planning 90 million m3 of underground urban complexes

3. “Don’t Shoot the Drone”: The New Military Urbanism Dominated by Vertical Dreams of Omniscience

“The orbital weapons currently in play possess the traditional attributes of the divine: Omnivoyance and omnipresence” Paul Virilio, (2002, 53)

Vertical urban order, military visioning technologies, global city networks (Ryan Bishop)

Complex Foucauldian Boomerangs Between Colonial Urban Frontier and Metropole

New extremes of distanciated targeting and killing

Preoccupation with Unveiling Subterranean Space

4. Vertical CounterpoliticsDemocratising vertical urbanism?

System 77 ‘civil counter-reconnaissance group’: Austria

Conclusion: A Vertical Turn in Urban Research?

•What about extending relational urbanism to three dimensions?• At the same time, need to connect the deepening and extension of vertical urbanism with deep technoscientific, governmental, biopolitical and cultural geneologies•Go beyond segregating city ‘levels’ to focus on their complex imaginative, social, political and ecological inter-dependencies within broader situated practices and processes of urban life: proliferation of horizontal surfaces, vertically distanciated and connected, a la Weizmann’s politics of verticality ‘...a city is a layered environment...everyday we negotiate often complex routes up, down and through a series of architectural and geographical layers...However, although we may all be well versed in the up-and-down rules of urban life, it is a challenge to rethink our perspective on the significance of the vertical zones they index as contexts for specific patterns of architectural design, or types of interaction between people, or people and the city itself. City Levels proposes to take an interest in verticality, but only as an axis along which to view the city in a different way. Taking slices through the urban fabric in cross-section, the book treats it as a stack of interconnected horizontal levels...’ A. Ireson, ‘Introduction,’ in A. Ireson and N. Barley, eds., City Levels, London and Berlin: August/Birkhauser, 2000, pp 7, 9