Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham

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Vertical cities: Representations of
urban verticality in 20th-century
science fiction literature
Lucy Hewitt
University of Glasgow, UK
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University, UK
Abstract
This paper seeks to intersect two recent trends in urban research. First, it takes seriously the
recognition that established traditions of research concerned with urban space have tended to
privilege the horizontal extension of cities to the neglect of their vertical or volumetric extension.
Second, the paper contributes to the resurgence of interest among social scientists in the validity
of fiction – and especially speculative or science fiction – as a source of critical commentary and
as a mode of knowledge that can exist in close reciprocity with non-fictional work. From these
two starting points the paper develops a reading of the dialogue between the representations of
vertical urban life that have featured in landmark works of 20th-century science fiction literature
and key themes in contemporary urban analysis.
Keywords
science fiction,spatial representations, urban theory, verticality
Received October 2013; accepted March 2014
Introduction: Science fiction and
the ‘vertical turn’ in urban social
science
It requires little excavation to uncover the
fascination that vertical urban structures
have held for modern architects and plan-
ners. The Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia
(2009 [1914]: 200), for example, envisioned
cities where ‘elevators [would] swarm up the
facades like serpents of glass and iron’ and
where the street would ‘no longer lie like a
doormat . but plunge several storeys deep
into the earth’. A few years later, the archi-
tect Auguste Perret imagined a Paris of the
future with ‘avenues 250 meters wide and on
either side houses that reach to the clouds’
(1920, quoted by Passanti 1987: 56). While
Le Corbusier – an iconic figure whose
Corresponding author:
Lucy Hewitt, University of Glasgow, Urban Studies, 25–29
Bute Gardens, Glasgow G11 7ET, UK.
Email: Lucy.Hewitt@glasgow.ac.uk
at Univ of Newcastle upon Tyne on April 28, 2014usj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

preoccupation with verticality and aeriality
have cast long shadows in modern urban
and architectural history – expressed his
ambition to remake the urban landscape of
the future as ‘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’
(1987 [1927]: 280).
Interest in the development of the vertical
urban axis has, therefore, been a central
strand of the modern architectural imagina-
tion and alongside this imaginative preoccu-
pation, supported by the engineering
innovations characteristic of the period, pro-
cesses of urbanisation have also extended
over the vertical axis. In the course of their
growth and extension, urban development
processes have excavated downwards, creat-
ing subterranean urban landscapes domi-
nated by the infrastructural plexus that is
the prerequisite of modern urban life. At the
same time, they have stretched far into the
spaces of the air and sky, signalling corpo-
rate status, political and economic centrality,
and technological mastery as they reach for
ever-greater vertical extension.
Vertical aspects of the production, experi-
ence and representation of urban space are
clearly fundamental to the nature of modern
cities. Steve Pile, for example, in assessing
what physical attributes might be exclusive
to cities, as compared with other places, sug-
gests ‘skyscrapers, underground railways,
street lighting (maybe), and not much else’
(1999: 5). As we have agued elsewhere
(Graham and Hewitt, 2013), however, criti-
cal social science has long prioritised a flat,
planar or horizontal imaginary of urban
space over a volumetric or vertical one. In
the collections of essays that follow Pile’s
observation, for example – books which are
currently a key reference point for urban
scholarship and, particularly, education –
the specific and crucial contribution of verti-
cality to the spatiality and intensity of cities
is addressed in only the briefest form (see
Allen et al., 1999; Massey et al., 1999; Pile
et al., 1999).
Cities have been widely explored in terms
of distributions, concentrations, stretched-
out topologies, corridors, networks, sprawl
and extending urban regions. Such a dis-
course indicates a strong tendency, particu-
larly in urban geography, to normalise the
top-down aerial or cartographic gaze as a
dominant representational device through
which to perceive and analyse cities and sys-
tems of cities, and that normalisation has
tended to privilege relations across the sur-
face of cities and systems of cities distributed
across the planet’s surface. While this domi-
nant horizontalism has bequeathed a rich
vein of scholarship, it has also established an
epistemological and empirical bias towards
geographies of the surface. The metaphors
and vocabulary we routinely deploy in dis-
cussions of urban growth – for example,
sprawl, extension, hyper-urbanisation, the
megalopolis, the recent discussion of plane-
tary urbanisation (see Merrifield, 2012) and
so on – have thus implicitly but overwhel-
mingly been used to define the changing
urbanisation of space in horizontal rather
than vertical or volumetric terms.
However, there is now a growing recogni-
tion among contemporary social scientific
urbanists and geographers that traditions of
scholarly research have tended to privilege
the horizontal dimension of space at the
neglect of a three-dimensional conceptuali-
sation. Such a recognition is particularly
timely, given the continued and deepening
urbanisation of the world, rising urban den-
sities and increasingly ubiquitous interests in
engineering ever more volumetric and verti-
cally stretched urban complexes. Thus, writ-
ers such as Heidi Scott have responded to
the prevalence of horizontalism by challen-
ging contemporary scholarship to arrive at
‘stronger theorizations of verticality’ (2008:
1858; see also Weizman, 2002). Such calls
2 Urban Studies

for a ‘vertical turn’ in urban social science
(see Graham and Hewitt, 2013) have been
prompted by the recognition that knowledge
of the processes of modern and contempo-
rary urbanisation will remain incomplete
and inadequate while urban social science
largely fails to engage with the increasingly
vertical and volumetric nature of the urban
environment and experience that is at the
core of contemporary urbanism.
Research that directly or indirectly
addresses this problematic has already begun
to demonstrate how important and how
fruitful it is to challenge the past dominance
of the surficial, planar view. Arguably, a
‘vertical’ or ‘volumetric’ turn is already
underway. Writers such as Gandy (1999)
and Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) have
begun to unearth the urban subterranean;
Adey (2010) and Cwerner (2006) have
started to highlight the social politics of
vertical urban splintering; and Dorrian
(2011) and Munster (2008) have pointed to
the complex visual and cultural politics of
the aerial view, not least as it is now popu-
larised by Google Earth. In addition, there
is a growing acknowledgement that, like
horizontal space, vertical spaces can mani-
fest the inequities and secessionary tenden-
cies surrounding processes of splintering
urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001).
This paper therefore joins a growing field
of scholarship interested in challenging the
overly surficial focus of existing urban
geography.
Our focus in what follows falls on the
widespread imagining within science fiction
literature (hereafter, ‘SF’) of the last century
– exemplified in the work of HG Wells, JG
Ballard and William Gibson – of future
urban complexes structured around extremes
of vertical extension and distanciation. We
focus on these three authors because in com-
bination they offer both a temporal and a
thematic breadth that is particularly valuable
for our examination of and engagement with
contemporary urban thinking. Furthermore,
in adopting this focus we also recognise, as
others have done before, that fiction can
provide a powerful vantage point for insight
and critique. Marc Brosseau (1994), for
example, has argued that the use of fiction
can been seen particularly strongly through
the humanist tradition of geographic
research, which has sought to refocus scho-
larship on human experience as opposed to
prioritising quantitative analysis, and
through the radical tradition of geography
which has viewed literature as having an
political function.
In this paper, we are concerned with the
complex ways in which fiction depicts plausi-
ble near-future urban scenarios that overlap
with and relate to the extending verticalities
of modern and contemporary metropolitan
space. Given the critical commentary that
has become particularly visible in 20th-cen-
tury SF (Claeys, 2010) and the powerful way
in which fiction and contemporary theory
can be brought together (Lewis et al., 2008,
2014; Tyner, 2004), we are also interested in
the ways SF has animated some of the politi-
cal and analytical themes that now, increas-
ingly, interest contemporary thinking about
cities. This contribution to urban social
science’s vertical turn therefore emerges in a
context in which social-scientific studies of
SF (and fictional representations more
broadly) increasingly demonstrate that, as
well as speculations about the future, it can
offer powerful commentaries on, and cri-
tiques of, the nature of the contemporary
social life.
Crucially, too, writers have begun to
argue that the epistemological boundaries
separating fiction from non-fiction are far
more porous than often recognised. Both
Carl Abbott (2007) and Nic Clear (2009)
have suggested that such boundaries are
breached particularly clearly in the case of
urban planning, architectural design and SF,
since the ‘visionary’ element of the
Hewitt and Graham 3

architectural and planning disciplines is a
strong, even a central, part of traditional
activity. There has been little focused explo-
ration of this shared ground, but Abbott
(2007) has argued that what we might call
‘design science fiction’ shares the same pur-
pose as SF, namely that of speculating about
what the future might look like if certain ten-
dencies were developed, and is, therefore,
itself a type of science fiction. Clear (2009)
also follows this argument, however he also
suggests that the tendency of architects to
locate their speculations in a ‘better’ future
has undermined the plausibility of architec-
tural design. ‘The architectural work,’ Clear
argues (2009: 6–7), ‘has proved completely
incapable of suggesting what the future may
hold’ and as a result, in comparison, it is the
visions of SF that ‘are often more believable’.
Further, as Rob Kitchin and James
Kneale (2005) have argued, there is a reci-
procity to the relationship, with contempo-
rary urbanism shaping SF, which in its turn
works in complex ways to effect the imagi-
nation, experience and construction of con-
temporary urbanism. Specifically in relation
to geography, Kitchin and Kneale argue
that SF particularly helps to establish an
interplay between its writers, its readers and
the development of space; it becomes part of
a popular and professional imagination
that feeds into practice (see also Abbott,
2007). Various illustrations can be cited
that demonstrate this observation. William
Gibson, for example, indicates the impor-
tance of certain contemporary cities for his
fictional urban worlds in recent writing.
Describing a trip to Tokyo, taken ‘to refresh
[his] sense of place’, he explains that the city
‘has been my handiest prop shop for as long
as I’ve been writing: sheer eye candy’ (2012:
158).
Our interest in examining and theorising
the vertical aspects of urban life through the
lens of SF literature is motivated by pre-
cisely this kind of dialogue. Further, while
we recognise that the relationships between
architecture, planning and science fiction are
not straightforward, it is nevertheless worth
noting from the outset that an ongoing dia-
logue has been, and remains, clearly visible.
According the Ester da Costa Meyer (1995:
137), for example, Antonio Sant’Elia,
with little formal training, drew more on the
imagery of contemporary SF than on the
architectural theory circulating in early
20th-century Italy. Further, the relationship
between contemporary urbanism and cyber-
punk SF – with its extremes of social polari-
sation, highly technologised circuits of social
control and cyborgian blurring between
social, organic and technological life – is
particularly multifaceted (see Burrows, 1997;
Davis, 1992). Norman Klein (1991: 147) has
given the much noted example of five ‘lead-
ing urban planners’ publicly expressing their
hope that Los Angeles might eventually
resemble the landscape depicted in the film
Blade Runner (based on Philip K Dick’s
influential novel, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, 1968). And to complicate the
connections still further, Ridley Scott, the
film’s director, admitted that his iconic
depiction of a near-future Los Angeles –
replete with extraordinary vertical architec-
ture, gas flares and endless rain – owed
much to his childhood in the steel and chem-
ical town of Middlesbrough (see Gold,
2001).
The discussion that follows falls into four
parts. The first uses an analysis of two semi-
nal SF novels – HG Wells’ The Sleeper
Awakes (2005 [1910]) and JG Ballard’s High-
Rise (2006 [1975]) – to explore how SF com-
monly deploys vertical spatial and architec-
tural metaphors to symbolise, posit and
expose deepening inequalities and social and
class distinctions (which are themselves often
traditionally labelled ‘vertical’ within urban
sociology). The second part of the paper
continues to explore Wells’ and Ballard’s
writings to engage with the ways in which
4 Urban Studies

the top-down gaze of the high-rise dweller
on the city and population below is used to
symbolise wider structures of privilege, elit-
ism and power. The paper’s third section
strikes out into the profoundly verticalised
imaginaries of cyberpunk SF. Here we focus
on the architectural bricolage of William
Gibson’s writing. We show how his vertica-
lised urban imaginaries work to muddy the
conceptual waters of modernist political
thought whilst still invoking deep metapho-
ric connections between urban verticality
and social and political power. The paper’s
conclusion reflects on how our analyses help
to extend understanding of the complex,
recursive relationships between the vertica-
lised urban imaginaries of SF an the vertica-
lised spaces of contemporary urbanism.
Vertical space as hierarchical
space: Wells, Ballard and stratified
urbanism
In the late 19th century the rise of the sky-
scraper charged the architectural imagina-
tion and altered the skyline of those cities
that were then at the centre of urban devel-
opment. Yet, the vertical city, both as it was
conceived by architects and as it began to
materialise, was not simply a transformation
of space; it was fundamentally connected to
new forms of social organisation. For exam-
ple, in London, mansion flats, dubbed by
EM Forster as ‘Babylonian flats’ in his 1910
novel Howard’s End, were explicitly mar-
keted as social experiments (see Dennis,
2008). As Richard Dennis has noted (2008:
240), with their communal facilities and var-
ied, mobile populations, these early high-rise
residential buildings were described in The
Times as ‘very novel and, socially speaking,
revolutionary’. But, as Dennis also demon-
strates, high-rise buildings could also be sub-
ject to strong criticism and the topic of
heated political debate.
Speculation about the future of London
was often a theme for HG Wells and the
potentiality of a vertical future appeared
under the spotlight in his novel, The Sleeper
Awakes. Published first in serial form in the
late 1890s, Wells rewrote the piece for publi-
cation as a novel in 1910. The timing of its
writing and publication therefore corre-
sponded with early experiences and debates
about how high-rise living could be inte-
grated into and might change the social and
built landscape of the capital. The narrative
of The Sleeper Awakes concerns Graham, a
character who, at the outset, has been suffer-
ing from insomnia so severe he considers sui-
cide. When he finally falls asleep, the sleep is
a trance in which his body suspends the nor-
mal aging process (even his hair stops grow-
ing) and from which he is never expected to
wake. He does awaken, 203 years later, to a
world that is transformed and a London that
has grown along profoundly vertical lines:
[Graham] went to the railings of the balcony
and stared upward . His first impression was
of overwhelming architecture. The place into
which he looked was an aisle of Titanic build-
ings, curving spaciously in either direction.
Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together
across the huge width of the place, and a tra-
cery of translucent material shut out the sky.
Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the
pale sunbeams that filtered down through the
girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer
suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers
flung across the chasm and the air was webbed
with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung
above him . (Wells, 2005 [1910]: 42).
As the novel progresses, this vision of
extraordinary architectural scale is gradually
revealed as the embodiment of an acutely
segregated society in which Graham himself
is implicated as the unwitting symbolic and
economic figurehead. The functionality of
this socially stratified London relies on a
workforce for whom the city is a labour
Hewitt and Graham 5

camp from which they cannot escape.
Indeed, the only possible escape route, pay-
ing for ‘Enthansay’, is beyond the means of
most of the workers – ‘for the poor there is
no easy death’ – and they are, rather, con-
demned to a life of hard labour and ill
health in the city’s subterranean labyrinths
(2005 [1910]: 162). The underground spaces
of the city are not visible to Graham as he
initially experiences the city, but he is even-
tually led down to witness the plight of the
urban masses, his description evoking the
poverty and deprivation of the 19th-century
slum:
They penetrated downward, ever downward,
towards the working places . through these
factories and places of toil, seeing many pain-
ful and grim things . Everywhere were pillars
and cross archings of such a massiveness as
Graham had never before seen, thick Titans of
greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath the
vast weight of that complex city world, even
as these anaemic millions were crushed by its
complexity. And everywhere were pale fea-
tures, lean limbs, disfigurement and degrada-
tion. (Wells, 2005 [1910]: 193 and 196)
In its characterisation of urban social rela-
tions, The Sleeper Awakes reflects the con-
viction, prevalent at the time Wells wrote,
that the modern city embodied a new politi-
cal and industrial order, and that urban soci-
ety brought a greater degree of social
polarisation as the city exploited its work-
force (see Lehan, 1998: 153 and 158).1
Wells
explored the same distribution of privilege
and deprivation over the vertical axis in his
novella, ‘A Story of Days to Come’ pub-
lished in an early collection, Tales of Time
and Space (1900). For example:
In the twenty-second century . the growth of
the city storey above storey, and the coales-
cence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a
vast series of sumptuous hotels in the upper
storeys and the halls of the city fabric; the
industrial population dwelt beneath in the tre-
mendous ground-floor and basement . of the
place. (1900: 101)
In this vision of the city Wells presented a
powerful piece of ‘cultural prophecy’
(Crossley, 2007: 361). It reflected his own
political concerns, particularly his antipathy
for unregulated industrial capitalism, and,
thus, the city appeared as a closed system –
‘a world of dire economic struggle’ – built
on exploitative social relationships. Indeed,
the functionality of the vertical metropolis
which Wells animates through his writing
relies on a workforce of labourers who par-
take in none of the privilege available to
those further up the social and spatial scales.
However, The Sleeper Awakes also reflects
Wells’s interrogation, through fiction, of the
nature of modern culture. In 22nd-century
London, the political and media institutions
have become both powerful and unaccoun-
table and the novel is pervaded by an esca-
lating sense that the city manifests the
signals of a moral decline that must lead to
violent crisis (for example, 2005 [1910]: 57).
Appearing 65 years after Wells’s specula-
tive engagement with the capital was pub-
lished in novel form, JG Ballard’s High-Rise
(2006 [1975]) offers a second iconic piece of
writing about the nature of metropolitan
urbanity. The context with which Ballard
engaged was significantly altered from that
which immediately framed The Sleeper
Awakes. From 1956, in a deliberate political
attempt to precipitate high-rise building,
subsidies for flats in blocks over 15 storeys
high were three times more than those for
other forms of affordable housing and,
until the Ronan Point disaster 12 years
later, tower blocks were built rapidly in
major cities across Britain (Hall, 2002:
241). However, by the 1970s, the high-rise
was becoming synonymous with unsuccess-
ful mass social housing and carried a raft
of negative connotations as the tower
6 Urban Studies

blocks built to alleviate housing problems
began to degenerate both materially and
socially (Glendinning and Muthesius, 1994).
Ballard’s fictional account of high-rise living
was a direct engagement with this deepening
trend in urban planning and his exploration
of the social implications of high-rise residen-
tial building and its material failure explicitly
referred to contemporary development. For
example, he pointed specifically to the now
famous infrastructural and architectural
innovation at the Park Hill estate in Sheffield
– titling one of his chapters, ‘Danger in the
Streets of the Sky’ – of building walkways
outside the front doors of flats that were
wide enough for milk floats and thus nick-
named ‘streets in the sky’.
Yet Ballard penned a vision that is at
least as startlingly relevant today than it was
to the context in which he wrote: Ballard’s
Highrise is an ultra-modern, technologically
sophisticated, luxury enclave – clearly evoca-
tive of what De Cauter (2005) has recently
called a ‘capsular’ urban space – which is
powerfully reminiscent of the verticalised,
elite and gated communities that now pepper
the world’s metropolitan spaces. The build-
ing is ‘a small vertical city, its two thousand
inhabitants boxed up into the sky’ (Ballard,
2006 [1975]: 9). Yet, despite the overall sense
of privilege, the social stratification among
inhabitants is a central feature of the novel.
The 40 floors are divided along social and
economic lines that quickly become solidi-
fied as the ‘natural social order of the build-
ing’ (2006 [1975]: 14):
In effect, the high-rise had already divided
itself into the three classical social groups, its
lower, middle and upper classes. The 10th-
floor shopping mall formed a clear boundary
between the lower nine floors, with their ‘pro-
letariat’ of film technicians, air-hostesses and
the like, and the middle section of the high-
rise, which extended from the 10th floor to the
swimming pool and restaurant deck on the
35th. This central two-thirds of the apartment
building formed its middle class, made up of
self-centred but basically docile members of
the professions – the doctors and lawyers,
accountants and tax specialists who worked,
not for themselves, but for medical institutes
and large corporations . Above them, on the
top five floors of the high-rise, was its upper
class, the discreet oligarchy of minor tycoons
and entrepreneurs, television actresses and
careerist academics, with their high-speed ele-
vators and superior services, their carpeted
staircases. (2006 [1975]: 53)
This plausibly rendered vision of deeply
unsettling dysfunction involves a cast of pro-
fessionals, entrepreneurs and intellectuals
who band together in groups that take on a
tribal and ultimately violent character. In
Ballard’s dystopic high-rise this social strati-
fication fuels resentment as confrontations
develop between floors and intimidation
escalates into violence that takes on an
increasingly brutal and irreversible quality.
Indeed, as the atmosphere becomes brittle
with tension, residents form raiding parties
and protection groups, elevators are
hijacked, cars are smashed and assaults take
place.
Despite their differences, both Wells and
Ballard powerfully animate the social rela-
tionships they analyse through the spatial
metaphor of verticality, and in doing so they
dramatise an observation that is currently
being explored in urban and spatial theory.
The use of the vertical axis to explore social
divisions appeals to a symbolic gesture that
is frequently grounded in the metaphor of
spatial geometry. In social terms, the vertical
implies hierarchy; deployed in spatial terms
the vertical highlights and concretises
inequities.
Cultural and urban historian, David Pike,
in particular, has developed this point. He
argues that the use of such conceptual order-
ing can be traced back to medieval
Christendom, where the ‘vertical cosmos’
located ‘good above and evil below’ (2005: 5;
Hewitt and Graham 7

see also Stallybrass and White, 1986). The
symbolism reappears, Pike observes, in a
variety of forms, pairings and tropes – high
and low, up and down, upper and lower,
light and dark, north and south – each con-
taining powerful imaginative and conceptual
connotations beyond their identification of a
space and its relative location. Furthermore,
Pike has argued that wherever it occurs verti-
cal space is always hierarchised space (2005:
90). This argument highlights the cultural
connotations and moral associations that are
frequently subject to spatialisation, but even
more than Pike’s observations, the use of
vertical space to ground the class-based soci-
eties of the speculative futures examined by
both Wells and Ballard signals the political
potency of high-rise building. What De
Cauter (2005) has recently described as ‘the
capsular’ nature of contemporary urban
space suggests that our current (and future)
ability to build up may be increasingly able
to sustain extreme forms of social secession
through vertical splintering.
The aerial view: Power, distance
and the experience of verticality
At the top of Ballard’s dysfunctional vertical
enclave we find Anthony Royal, one of the
building’s architects. Royal’s positionality
‘on top’ is a source of intrigue and tension
for the other residents of the high-rise. He is
‘well-to-do’, arrogant and defensive, ‘deter-
mined to outstare any criticism’ of the build-
ing he helped to conceive (Ballard, 2006
[1975]: 15, 27). He is also, ultimately, impo-
tent, able only to limp through the building
as it crumbles materially and socially and
destined to die rambling and starved
amongst the human and architectural
debris.
However, early on, from his penthouse
apartment, Royal is allowed the conceit that
he may act as ‘mid-wife’ to ‘a pattern of
social organisation that would become the
paradigm of all future high-rise blocks’
(2006 [1975]: 70). Royal’s penthouse loca-
tion, at the pinnacle of social and spatial
scales, with an abstracted vision of the whole
in the form of his plans and architectural
drawings, appeals to a unique positionality
on the vertical scale. Indeed, it seems that
the ultimate embodiment of power comes
from what Topalov (1993) has called the
‘zenithal’ position and the view it affords.
Ballard uses that view, and the sense of dis-
tance created through it, to frame the
increasing detachment of the high-rise resi-
dents from the world surrounding them. For
Robert Laing, another central figure in the
drama of the high-rise and the only survivor
of the narrative, it is this mode of perception
that explains his removal from his everyday
life, his work and the city around him:
Laing made less and less effort to leave the
building. He unpacked his record collection
and played himself into his new life, sitting on
his balcony and gazing across the parking-lots
and concrete plazas below him. Although the
apartment was no higher than the 25th floor,
he felt for the first time that he was looking
down at the sky, rather than up at it. Each day
the towers of central London seemed slightly
more distant, the landscape of an abandoned
planet receding slowly from his mind. (2006
[1975]: 9)
Like Ballard, Wells also utilises the elevated
position and the aerial view that it permits
to illustrate an experience of profound
detachment, this time the detachment of the
powerful from the city they rule. In Wells’
novel the streets and houses of Victorian
London have been replaced by a ‘vast city
structure’ and, while the labouring popula-
tion live in its depths, the powerful, the city’s
Council, occupy an elaborate complex
nestled beneath the domed roof of the city
onto which Graham makes an early escape
(2005 [1910]: 69). This first experience of the
highest points of the city and the view they
8 Urban Studies

afford causes Graham to experience paralys-
ing vertigo (2005 [1910]: 70), but later, when
he goes in search of greater knowledge of
the city he finds himself master of, he is
shown to ‘the crow’s nest of the wind-vane
keeper’ from which the city, despite being
gripped by violent conflict looks serene, its
‘luminous landscape undisturbed’ (2005
[1910]: 125). Indeed, viewing from this posi-
tion Graham:
could almost forget the thousands of men lying
out of sight in the artificial glare within the
quasi-subterranean labyrinth, dead or dying of
their overnight wounds, forget the impover-
ished wards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses,
and bearers feverishly busy . (2005 [1910]:
125).
For both Ballard and Wells, then, the mode
of perception offered by the aerial view rep-
resents an experience of profound detach-
ment in the fictional worlds they explore.
The social life of the High-Rise degenerates
into a violent dystopia as its inhabitants
retreat from their wider social relationships
and become the voluntary captives of the
apartment building, complicit in and protec-
tive of their collective withdrawal from the
world around them.2
For Ballard, such a
removal from the surface and detachment
from the conventions of ‘normal’ sociability
are the prerequisite that allows the violence
of the narrative to spiral towards ruin. Wells
uses the aerial view to further his explora-
tion of the social stratification and antagon-
ism of his 22nd-century London. In The
Sleeper Awakes it is the aerial view and the
pinnacle location that emphasises the with-
drawal of the powerful from contact with
the labouring population of the city, the dis-
tance between the two segments of society
and the subsequent invisibility both of the
poor and their exploitation.
Such an emphasis places the ethics and
the politics of the aerial view – the view
which vertically distanciates the top-down
viewer occupying the architectural heights
from the teeming city below – in the centre
of attention. Recent contributions to the the-
orisation of the aerial view have emphasised
that this technique of visuality, characteristic
of modern cartography and photography, as
well as urban planning, has a significant
impact on the perception and subsequent
relation to space. Adnan Morshed, for exam-
ple, is among those who have pointed to the
centrality of this vision in the most radically
interventionist programmes of modernist
architecture. Using what Morshed has called
the dieu voyeur (the voyeur god), ‘twentieth-
century urban planning sought to fulfil the
modernist dream of transforming the city
into an object of knowledge and a govern-
able space’ (2002: 204; see also Boyer, 2003).
Similarly, in his pioneering work on the cul-
tural history of the aerial view, Mark
Dorrian has argued that the perspective of
distance, abstraction and power secured
through ascension has been a key narrative
in Western modernity and that the aerial
view ‘is conceptually linked to notions of
transcendent subjectivity, futurity and
abstraction that have the potential to license
a violence directed towards the surface’
(2006: 20).
The work of both Morshed and Dorrian
deepen the observations and analysis made
by De Certeau in his iconic reflections on
The Practice of Everyday Life (1988). In
those essays, De Certeau drew attention to
the ethics and experience of the distanciated
top-down view of the city, seen from the top
of the World Trade Center, in opposition to
the enmeshed corporeal worlds of the walk-
ing city below. De Certeau’s concern to
recognise and examine the relational implica-
tions of perceptual positionality have formed
a current of critique, which is visible among
contemporary writers such as Morshed,
Boyer and Dorrian; that same concern is
dramatised in the fictional worlds created by
Wells and by Ballard, and these, too, provide
Hewitt and Graham 9

insights into and reflections on the social
ethics of vertical spatial separation.
Cyberpunk verticalities
Over the later 20th century, keeping time
with its technological and philosophical con-
text, SF underwent a series of profound
changes in terms of both subject matter and
narrative form (see, for example, Levy,
2009; Merrick, 2009). For some, through its
engagement with the trajectories of the pres-
ent, the emergence of cyberpunk has offered
a radical departure and a valuable vantage
point. Kitchin and Kneale, for example,
have pointed out that cyberpunk is ‘one of
the first forms of literary genre to recognize,
reflect and explore the postmodern condi-
tion’ and that, as such, it offers ‘privileged
insights into the contemporary’ (2001: 22).
Indeed, as commentary and discussion
ground, cyberpunk narrativises some of the
key critiques that have been made of moder-
nist philosophy. Thus, the traditional bin-
aries of self/other, nature/technology, order/
chaos, and so forth, are collapsed by the
post-human, technologically driven and
volatile worlds of cyberpunk. Furthermore,
in relation to space, this has significant con-
sequences for the landscapes imagined. The
spaces of cyberpunk leave little room for the
stable geopolitics, the stasis and the essenti-
alism characteristic of the accounts of space
given by modernist philosophers and writers
alike. Instead, the landscapes of cyberpunk
are more in keeping with the kind of space
theorised by writers such as Doreen Massey
(2005); they are heterogeneous, relational
and lively. They also, echoing a theme in
contemporary critical urbanism which Steve
Graham (2010) has powerfully underlined,
emphasise the privatisation and the militari-
sation of urban space.
William Gibson (1995) explicitly signals
his distance from the dominant modernist
architectural and science fictional dreams of
the past by deploying those dreams as hallu-
cinations in his short story, ‘The Gernsback
Continuum’. In this engagement with the
‘design science fiction’ of the past, Gibson’s
protagonist, an unnamed photographer,
takes a job documenting the architectural
traces of 1930s American pop culture.
Becoming absorbed in his task as he drives
across America photographing aging factory
buildings, motels and gas stations, he starts
to see traces also of ‘a shadowy America-
that-wasn’t’ (1995: 41). Appearing first in
glimpses, and then in disturbingly convin-
cing three-dimensionality, the city of fictions
past bears a striking resemblance to the cine-
matic depictions of Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
and Menzies Things to Come (1936). The
protagonist is frightened by this American
dream, with its towering spires and soaring
roads and polished blond inhabitants who
have ‘all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler
Youth propaganda’ (1995: 47). Indeed,
Gibson’s protagonist hopes the vision is only
an ‘amphetamine pyschosis’ (1995: 46), but
as the narrative resolves, he retreats into tra-
shy television and the daily rehearsal of cata-
strophe found in newspaper headlines; the
image of the totalising society imagined by
the past, he decides, is far worse than the
‘near-dystopia we live in’ (1995: 50).
The vertical spaces of Gibson’s futures, in
contrast, share none of the modernist clarity
exemplified by the landscapes of Metropolis
or Things to Come; they are fragmented, vio-
lent and vulnerable. Furthermore, as Gibson
paints them, Nighttown, the San Francisco
Bridge and Hak Nam each provide imagery
that is strongly at odds with early and mid
20th-century architectural visions. Gibson’s
vertical worlds are captured and repurposed
enclaves offering the protection of chaos,
random accretions materialising an impro-
vised and provisional architecture.
Nighttown’s Pit, for example, is where
Johnny Mnemonic goes to hide when he is
hunted by the multinational Yakuza,
10 Urban Studies

because in the Pit ‘any outside influence gen-
erates swift, concentric ripples of raw
menace’ (1995: 22). It looks like a ‘disused
maintenance yard’, spirals up to the geodesic
roof structure where the Lo Teks (the local
gang) ‘leech their webs and huddling places
to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy’
(1995: 29–30). And Johnny stays there,
secreted away from view, becoming part of
the social, spatial and technological network
that makes the Pit tick. Neil Campbell
argues these architectural figures in Gibson’s
work are spaces of resistance and possibility
reminiscent of the Bakhtinian carnival
(2000: 160–161). The exemplar of this ima-
ginary appears in Gibson’s much quoted
account of the San Francisco bridge:
Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost
within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors,
gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with
decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of
cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed
pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers. Dreams of
commerce, their locations generally corre-
sponding with the decks that had once carried
vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to
the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the
intricately suspended barrio, with its unnum-
bered population and its zones of more private
fantasy. (Gibson, 1994: 58–59).
This structure is at the centre of the plot of
Virtual Light, the first of Gibson’s bridge
trilogy. The novel tells the story of the theft
of glasses that contains visualisations of a
virtual model, a masterplan for San
Francisco that would remake the city’s land-
scape in a cliche´ of modernist destruction.
The San Francisco bridge stands as the
embodied antithesis of this vision. It is a bri-
colage of fragments patched together, ‘a car-
nival,’ reminiscent of ‘the favelas of Rio’,
with ‘a fairy quality to the secondary con-
struction’ that has built up over the ‘vertical-
ity of the core structure’s poetry of
suspension’ (Gibson, 1994: 58, 1999: 18). As
a central space of the plot and a heuristic
device for Gibson’s social and spatial reflec-
tions, the bridge represents something radi-
cally different from both the landscapes of
the past and from the privatised, militarised
urban splintering that surrounds it. The
bridge emerged out of an act of opposition,
but not an act those involved are willing to
designate as ‘politics’. As Skinner, one of
those who initiated occupation of the struc-
ture, explains ‘‘‘Shit happens. Happened that
night. No signal, no leader, no architects.
You think it was politics. That particular
dance . that’s over’’’ (1995: 86). Indeed, the
social commentary embedded in Virtual
Light in the form of Yamazaki’s (a Japanese
student of existential sociology) reflections
indicate that the bridge is a manifestation of
a qualitatively different experience, one that
partakes in the sense of a fissure in the
nature of the times:
Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through
the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and
the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of
sound from some secret bell .We are come
not only past the century’s closing, he thought,
the millennium’s turning, but to the end of some-
thing else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the
signs of closure. Modernity was ending. (1995:
89–90)
Gibson’s spaces, then, problematise the
metaphorical shift between conceptualisa-
tions of social organisation, particularly
social class, and vertical space because they
do not seem easily to accommodate the
modern categorical project of class distinc-
tions and hierarchies. Thus, the sense that
social divisions can be mapped through
space with clarity and confidence is lost, and
what we seem to be left with is a critique of
the metaphorical alignments explored earlier
in relation to Wells and Ballard. The socio-
spatial hierarchies are certainly at moments
replaced by something more dynamic and
unstable, more creative and provisional, yet
Hewitt and Graham 11

Gibson also highlights the vulnerability of
these spaces and points to their creation out
of necessity. In the case of the Bridge, its
inhabitants build upwards because they have
little or no space on the surface. Thus, while
Gibson’s vertical spaces step well beyond the
architectural orderliness of the modern high
rise, and while the social hierarchies of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries do not
map readily onto the landscape Gibson
depicts, there remains ground for common-
ality. In particular, there remains a strong
sense of social bifurcation in Gibson’s narra-
tives and his vertical spaces can be read as
an architecturally creative solution to the
militarisation, privatisation and control of
the surface.
Conclusions
In a recent discussion of the way 20th-cen-
tury literature has represented sociologists
and sociology, Diane Bjorklund (2001: 36)
argued that novelists and sociologists are
competitors, their choice of discipline sig-
nifying differing epistemological convictions
about how it is possible to engage with, ana-
lyse and represent social life. Her suggestion
points to questions that are important in the
current context, when interdisciplinarity
holds a reified position, but the argument
that literature and social science are oppos-
ing forms of knowledge is difficult to sus-
tain. As we noted at the outset of this paper,
the relationship between SF, architecture
and planning, and the development of urban
space is complex, but fully visible, reciprocal
and longstanding. Like Kitchin and Kneale
(2001, 2005), we suggest that the critical
commentaries of SF offer considerable util-
ity to contemporary urban social scientists.
Furthermore, in our view, though SF
literature and urban social science represent
different ways of investigating and commen-
tating upon urban modernity, rather than
the oppositional epistemic modes of art and
science, we suggest that drawing SF into a
dialogue with urban social science demon-
strates important critical and analytical
common ground.
In each of the examples of SF that we
have examined, the narratives have featured
the vertical growth of the urban landscape
and identified the ways in which that upward
growth reflected, and had implications for,
inequalities in urban social life. Urban social
science is beginning to recognise and docu-
ment those development processes which
have excavated downwards and stretched
upwards so rapidly over the past century of
urbanisation, but analytical engagement
with that material growth remains embryo-
nic in comparison with the systematic treat-
ment of urban horizontal extension. What is
made clear in the novels we have discussed
here is that urban life distributed over the
vertical axis, built through increasing tech-
nological and engineering capabilities, and
made desirable and necessary by the increas-
ing density and inequality of urban popula-
tions, is one powerful way in which the city
can function to spatially differentiate its
inhabitants. Indeed, in the spatial metaphor
of verticality deployed by Wells and Ballard,
the fictional high-rise provides the material
frame for explorations of precisely those
social inequalities. Furthermore, what both
writers identify through their fictional repre-
sentations of high-rise living is, today,
increasingly visible in the verticalities of elite
urban living.3
Such fictional accounts of the future help
us to raise questions about the experiences
and imaginaries of our contemporary metro-
politan landscapes; from a historical dis-
tance, they nevertheless offer critiques of
present inequalities. They also suggest that
to be located and to look down from above
is not ethically neutral. The unproblematic
and unreflective acceptance of the carto-
graphic view in urban social science, particu-
larly urban geography and planning, which
12 Urban Studies

has been related to the treatment of cities as
horizontally extending entities, should also
be subject to critical scrutiny as our focus of
enquiry shifts towards attempting an under-
standing of that vertical relationship. The
epistemological and empirical bias of the
top-down gaze becomes ethically question-
able as we interrogate the nature of the dis-
tanciation on which it is predicated.
As a commentary on and critique of con-
temporary processes, our selection of novels
also highlights the vulnerability of urban
space as privatisation, violence and sophisti-
cated technology work to intersect in influ-
encing the functionality of cities. The shift
away from a metaphorical alignment of
space and social structure, exemplified in
this paper by Gibson’s narratives, also
brings important analytical themes to the
foreground. The violence common to all
three novels is pushed further by the cyber-
punk imaginary and accompanied by the
necessity to build upwards, by a denial of
space to those with the least resources. The
writings we discuss here share important
commonalities in their subject matter; all
deal with social bifurcation and with the way
urban space both animates and concretises
those distinctions. Yet the move into the ter-
ritories imagined by the cyberpunk genre,
and in particular by Gibson, is important
because it complicates, presses our thinking
further, encompasses the militarisation and
privatisation of the urban landscape which is
detectable in our present, asks that we take
seriously the right to space in the city.
In addressing these themes, what is per-
haps most striking is the way SF literature
has been consistently interested in analytical
and spatial themes that have only recently
become prominent in urban theory and
research. We argued in our opening discus-
sion that the ‘vertical turn’ discussed by
some contemporary writers is an important
corrective to the surficial preoccupations
that have dominated so much work in the
broad field of urban social science. In the
temporal breadth of these literary accounts
we see very clearly that the recognition of
this theme by social scientists comes late,
and that it has been prefigured in the critical
commentaries of SF writers. The analytical
themes and the historical grounding for an
extension of the contemporary vertical turn
can be, therefore, well supported by a wider
engagement with other types of knowledge.
Certainly, in addressing the sociologies and
power geometries of the verticalisation char-
acteristic of contemporary cities, urban stud-
ies can gain much by excavating the deep
imaginative histories that have attended ver-
tical cities within literature.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. He also developed an account of the ramifica-
tions of this in The Time Machine (Wells,
2005 [1895]), articulating a vision of the future
in which humanity had diverged into the tech-
nologically advanced, but subterranean and
predatory, Morlocks and the child-like and
innocent Eloi, their prey.
2. For example: ‘A police car approached the
perimeter entrance. A few residents were leav-
ing for work at this early hour, neatly dressed
in suits and raincoats, briefcases in hand. The
abandoned cars in the access roads prevented
the police from reaching the main entrance to
the building, and the officers stepped out and
spoke to the passing residents. Usually none
of them would have replied to an outsider,
but now they gathered in a group around the
two policemen . Clearly they were pacifying
the policemen, reassuring them that every-
thing was in order, despite the garbage and
broken bottles scattered around the building’
Ballard (2006 [1975]: 131).
3. For example, Gabriel Mascaro’s exceptional
2009 documentary film Um Lugar ao sol

(High-Rise) shows how vastly different the
experience of urban life is for those who can
afford penthouse apartments in Rio de Janeiro.
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