Article

Progress in Human Geography

2015, Vol. 39(5) 601–620
Vertical urbanisms: ª The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132514554323
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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 verticality 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, topology

I Introduction heights surpassing 800m (Jaffe, 2011a), and the

widespread building of high-rise residential com-
Urban geography has recently been increasingly
munities (e.g. Fincher, 2007; Brumann, 2012:
inflected by ups and downs. In particular a paper
56). The ‘urban age’ has stimulated and necessi-
in this journal by Stephen Graham and Lucy
tated three-dimensional urban growth with the
Hewitt (2013) has sought to get critical research
construction of new overhead and underground
on urban verticality ‘off the ground’ (see also
infrastructure (e.g. Harris, 2011; Jaffe, 2011b;
McNeill, 2005). Graham and Hewitt (2013: 74)
Hebbert, 2012), new forms of geospatial, digital
identify an embedded horizontalism in urban
and cadastral modelling (e.g. Thill et al. 2011;
research; as they suggest, ‘very few books or
Harvey, 2009; Benhamu and Doytsher, 2003),
papers in Anglophone urban social science or
and new visions and aspirations of multi-levelled
critical urban geography explicitly problematize
cities (e.g. MVRDV, 2007; Buchanan, 2012).
or analyze the vertical qualities of cities and
Rather than simply adding a new vertical
urban life’.1 This vertical blindspot seems espe-
focus onto the existing horizontalism of urban
cially surprising given ‘the extraordinary vertical
extension of built space both upwards and down-
wards within the last few decades’ (Graham and
Corresponding author:
Hewitt, 2013: 74). The 2000s have been identi- Andrew Harris, University College London, 26 Bedford
fied as the single greatest decade of skyscraper Way, London WC1H 0AP, UK.
construction in history (Lamster, 2011), with Email: andrew.harris@ucl.ac.uk
602
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-
tices 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 aerial
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 ‘volumetric’
(Elden, 2013: 35) can be framed through more
than security, secession and control. In so doing,
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
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 diffu-
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
respects vertical urbanism can be understood as
never getting off the ground.
II 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 archae-
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, insur-
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 fantasies of
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,
603
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,2 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 capsu-
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
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 dimension’. 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 sovereignties in the West Bank that
directly reprises the cover to Weizman’s Hollow
Land (Elden, 2013: 37).
III 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 logics, 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
(e.g. 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 air-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
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
commodification of urban views (e.g. Dorrian,
2008; Yap, 2012; Höweler, 2003: 156). Vertical
urbanism encompasses rooftop gardens, green
walls and multi-storey greenhouses, as part of
new verticalized forms of urban horticulture and
agriculture (e.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, belfries,
minarets and domes, and cemeteries, ‘towers
of silence’, mausoleums, catacombs and graves
(e.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
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 (e.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.3 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 of fin-de-siècle North
America, especially Chicago and New York,
which helped establish the vertical symbolism
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
605
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. Minaret
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-
ernist 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 Eastern 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, modernist tower-
blocks such as the Barbican, and a rush of
21st-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
recent debates in geography on the tracks and
travel of urban theories, plans and policies
(e.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 modernist 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 vertical-
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 as sky-
walks, in contemporary Mumbai:
It is unclear, as yet . . . whether the Mumbai sky-
walks are working as surveilled, securitized and
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
access-controlled systems which work to suck
urban middle-classes from traditional street sys-
tems, which, consequently, become residualized
and criminalized.
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
‘sealed 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, it is 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 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. For example,
in 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
examples of recently built vertical offices and
residences within ‘neoliberalizing cities’ (Gra-
ham and Hewitt, 2013: 81), it is perhaps not sur-
prising that vertical secession and urban
splintering are identified and fore-grounded.
Exploring tall buildings in less heralded cities
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 (Hebbert,
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-
cially 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 distinction between
the ‘landscapes of the powerful understood in
terms of verticality – cathedrals, factories, sky-
scrapers – 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.
607
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.4 In
J.G. 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 class-based 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 powerful 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 windows
and fewer stairs to climb’ (see also, Dennis,
2008b: 243).5 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
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
patterns 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 modernist-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; Hastings, 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 upscale
neighbourhoods’ (Prakash, 2010: 299).
Other urban examples that complicate a
straightforward equation of verticality with
power include those where the position from
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
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
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 A Spire,
featuring the film-maker Chris Hilton surrepti-
tiously scaling the outside of the 250m-high
Sydney Tower, Meaghan Morris (1992: 50)
suggests Hilton ‘brought down the Tower not
only by renouncing the heights but by reaching
them instead’.6 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 elevate
them into a 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 has
become, according to architectural writer Justin
McGuirk (2012: 276), ‘a potent symbol of how
direct action can turn vertical exclusivity into
horizontal distribution’ (see also McGuirk,
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
or respond in relation to urban verticality: how
urban views – looking up, down and across – are
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 across con-
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
609
Harker (2011: 307–8) argues, ‘in exploring
how Israel creates a land hollowed out of its
Palestinian inhabitants, Weizman does much
the same thing himself rhetorically’ (see also
Harker, 2014: 322).7
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 politics 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, occu-
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
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.8
But there is also a need to avoid what Garrett
(2011) calls ‘shallow excavation’ in the adop-
tion of ethnographic approaches by emphasiz-
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 Chi-
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
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
as a 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, Fernández 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 In el
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, São Paulo and
Recife, while City of Cranes (2007), directed
by Eva Weber, examines the worlds of crane
drivers in London. Likewise, The Lift (2001),
directed by Marc 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).9 More
explicitly dramatized films also offer important
insights into the everyday social tensions and
aspirations often located and negotiated in
Harris
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 (e.g. de Certeau, 1984) and police
helicopters (e.g. Adey, 2010b) has rarely been
undertaken through ethnographical approaches.
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-
level) 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
611
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 (2011b: 68) details how a
resident of a traditional form of Bombay tene-
ment housing called a ‘chawl’ 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-
ence, 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
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
(e.g. Gülümser and Baycan-Levent, 2009;
Waterhouse-Hayward, 2010; Graham and
Hewitt, 2013: 81–2). It also means that analy-
ses, like 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 topological 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
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
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
geo-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 social and technical relations (Farı́as, 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 São Paolo not only
allows elites to escape crowded and dangerous
streetscapes below, but is also crucially
embedded, as Saulo Cwerner (2009) docu-
ments, 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 ‘privi-
lege horizontally extending relational connec-
tions over vertical ones’, as Graham and
Hewitt (2013: 73) contend. Pursuing topologies
that seek to flatten scales and hierarchies
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 Figure 1. Settlements for construction workers next
Jacobs et al. (2011: 130; original emphasis) to a concrete segment casting-yard for new flyovers,
Wadala, Mumbai. Photograph by author, June 2009.
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 Arjun Appadurai (2007) suggests, with people
ignorant of differentiation and how that might such as ‘servants, chauffeurs, drivers, domes-
reorder (limit and empower) the potentialities tics, dependents of various kinds’ who are ‘actu-
of those agencies’. Vertical urbanisms are not ally denizens of the horizontal or infrastructure-
only (ontologically flat) socio-technical ensem- free city’. This co-presence of slum-dwellers in
bles, but are frequently dependent on, and pro- vertical enclaves creates what Appadurai (2007)
ductive of, urban margins, residues and calls ‘helical space’.
unequal labour relations. For instance, building Accompanying this pursuit of multiple geo-
and maintaining elevated roads, metro-lines and graphical imaginations of urban verticality, it
mono-rails in Mumbai over the last decade has is also important to contrast and connect vertical
required a large pool of labour from existing urbanisms across different sites, spaces and net-
‘slums’ and from migrant workers who have works, and across historical periods, engaging
frequently set up residential settlements (using with recent calls advocating experimental yet
recycled construction materials) next to con- rigorous comparative perspectives and gestures
struction sites and casting yards (Figure 1). This in urban research (Robinson, 2011). The
vertical reliance on the urban subaltern can have research field of urban verticality can help
complex geographical entanglements. Most establish logics of connection between ‘con-
upmarket vertical spaces in Mumbai, such as the junctions or juxtapositions of locations’ in
Antilia tower, are filled, as the anthropologist multi-sited ethnographies (Marcus, 1995: 105).
614
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 can be
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.10 There are
likely to be differing cultural philosophies of
ascension and elevation, contrasting risks of
flooding and earthquakes, and varying altitudes
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
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.11 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 thanks also 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 recognize strands of urban
geographical scholarship on vertical life prior to the last
decade (e.g. Gottman, 1966; Sutcliffe, 1974; Domosh,
1987; Fenske and Holdsworth, 1992). Also a prescient
paper from 1983 by Ellis Hillman (1983: 188) identifies
the embedded horizontalism in urban thinking: ‘It is
now all too obvious that our city planning has viewed
growth as if our cities were spread out on a table-cloth’.
2. Although mistakenly referenced as from The Least of
All Possible Evils (Weizman, 2011).
3. As Misselwitz and Weizman (2003) suggest, ‘in many
ways, the West Bank is nothing but an extreme model
of a territorial and urban conflict that can take place in
other places.’
4. In the ‘vertical noir’ of Bladerunner (1982), Deck-
ard’s pursuit of replicants across the different strata
of Los Angeles in 2019 – from street-level to the
Harris
700th storey of Tyrell’s pyramid – allows him to
reveal ‘the interlinked corruptions of society, to recog-
nize the evil that looms above’ (Bullock, n.d.).
5. For example, the depiction by Émile Zola (1999: 6) in
his 1883 novel Pot Luck of the vertical differentials of
an apartment building in Haussmann’s new Paris:
‘after the third floor, the red carpet came to an end, and
was replaced by a simple grey covering’.
6. 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.
7. Although counter to the argument that Weizman ‘hol-
lows out’ the lives of Palestinians, it is 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’.
8. For example, see www.tall-tales.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 life in high-rises’ http://submit.
nytimes.com/high-rise?smid¼tw-nytimes (accessed
28 March 2013).
9. Although McGuirk (2014: 186) explores the absence of
lifts in Torre David in Caracas, which he suggests sti-
mulates (in a rather Eurocentric turn 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.
10. On the politics of physical topography, see, for
instance, the architectural theorist Daniela Fabricius
(2008) on the ‘topographic apartheid’ of Brazilian cit-
ies, and the anthropologists O’Neill and Fogarty-
Valenzuela (2013) on the vertical vocabulary of
arriba and abajo in Guatemala City, while James
Scott (2009) suggests that the art of not being gov-
erned involves running to the hills.
11. In this, Eyal Weizman and his colleagues’ (2010)
ongoing ‘forensic architecture’ project that brings
615
together architects, artists, legal scholars, archaeolo-
gists, cultural theorists and palaeontologists might
prove just as influential as Hollow Land. For a good
example of experimental literary grapplings with
urban verticality – including from geographers – see
Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City (Chivers
and Kratz, 2014).
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