Key points
- Graham: urbanism thought of the city as a plane and forgot the vertical axis where power and vulnerability are organised.
- São Paulo's helipads and Manhattan's penthouses: elites rise above the real city.
- Thousands of migrants live beneath Beijing in former shelters; depth is infrastructure and the space of the poor.
The vertical city is one organised in height and depth, from satellites to bunkers, and Stephen Graham, a geographer at Newcastle University, made it an object of study in Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (2016), arguing that urbanism has thought of the city as a horizontal plane and ignored the vertical axis along which power, wealth and vulnerability are now organised. Skyscrapers, penthouses, helicopters and drones above; tunnels, basements, mines and sewers below: each layer distributes advantages and risks, and those higher up see, control and breathe better than those lower down.
Above: satellites, drones, helipads and penthouses as refuge
Graham starts at the top. Satellites and drones have turned the view from the sky into an instrument of government and war, from Google Earth to border surveillance, and urban elites have literally risen: the helipads of São Paulo, where the rich fly over congestion and violence, the Manhattan penthouses bought as financial refuges by investors who never live in them, and the residential towers of London or Mumbai that sell height as distance from the real city. The skyscraper, he shows, stopped being an office building and became an instrument of vertical segregation and of competition among cities for the height record.
In between: lifts, skywalks and elevated highways
The middle layer is that of the lift and the skywalk. Graham reminds us that without the lift there is no vertical city, and that the speed and destination of lifts divide those who live up and down the same tower; the skywalks and elevated walkways of Hong Kong, Minneapolis or Mumbai create second-level pedestrian cities for those who can access them, while the street is left to traffic and to the poor. Flyovers and highways on pillars crossing working-class neighbourhoods are another form of verticality: wealthy traffic passes over a city it does not see.
Below: sewers, mines, bunkers and luxury basements
Below lies the hidden city. Graham tours the sewers, the metro, service tunnels, the mines that supply the materials of skyscrapers and the bunkers: the nuclear shelters of the Cold War, the luxury basements dug beneath London mansions, underground data centres and the underground cities of Beijing, where thousands of migrants live in former civil defence shelters. Depth is at once the invisible infrastructure that sustains urban life and the space of the poorest and of war, from the Gaza tunnel to the bombed basement. The city, he argues, is a volume, and its inequality is measured in metres of height as well.
Influence and criticism: volumetric geography
The book converses with Eyal Weizman, who described the occupation of Palestine as vertical control of air, ground and subsoil, with the geography of surveillance and with infrastructure studies. It has influenced volumetric geography, debates on unsafe residential towers, which the Grenfell fire in London in 2017 made tragically visible, and the critique of luxury vertical cities. Critics note that the catalogue of layers is more descriptive than explanatory; its defence is that naming the vertical axis is the first step toward governing it.
The lesson of Vertical is that urban justice is also played out in height. A city that reserves the sky for elites and the subsoil for migrants, that lifts traffic over poor neighbourhoods and watches from above those who live below, reproduces in three dimensions the inequality the plan showed only in two. Seeing the city as volume allows one to ask who rises, who descends and who decides, and that is the question horizontal urbanism never knew how to formulate.
Frequently asked questions
What does Stephen Graham argue in Vertical?
That the city is a volume organised in layers, from satellites and drones to skyscrapers, lifts, skywalks, sewers, mines and bunkers, and that each layer distributes advantages and risks, so that urban inequality is measured in height and depth as well.
How does the vertical city produce segregation?
By reserving the sky for elites, with penthouses, helipads and towers that sell height as distance from the real city, lifting traffic over poor neighbourhoods and leaving the subsoil to migrants and invisible infrastructure, as in Beijing's underground cities.
