This presentation is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the super-rich. Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.

1. Luxified
Skies
Or, How
Vertical
Urban Housing
Became
an Elite
Preserve
Stephen Graham
Newcastle
University

2. 1. Horizontalism in Critical Urban Research
and Neglect of Vertical Social Polarisation
Arguments about the
clustering of elites into
fortressed enclaves
have tended to be, as
Anthropologists Kevin
Lewis O'Neill and
Benjamin Fogarty-
Valenzuela put it,
“supremely horizontal
observations ” linked
with studies of gated
communities and
fortified enclaves in the
suburbs and exurbs
scattered to the
peripheries of cities

3. 2. In Such a Context,
Economistic,
Neoliberal and
Planning Orthodoxy
is Leading to, and
Camouflaging, the
Luxification of the
Urban Skies

4. • Central gentrification & urban conservation a combined with urban population
growth mean that there is little choice but to build up, to build high, and to build
quickly (exploiting supposed economies of scale and height)
• “Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable
and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a
thriving city remain successful and diverse.”
• Highly influential: walkability; containing sprawl; ‘sustainability’’ “smart growth”
combined with entrepreneurial planning of high level city skylines to denote ‘world
city’ status
• But the ‘trickle-down’ economics of neoliberalisation: invokes densification and
verticalisation for cities as a simple economic imperative whilst completely
ignoring the structural social and political forces shaping the production of urban
housing in contemporary cities

5. “The combination of height and social disorder can be very, very bad, New
York and Chicago built many of those projects, and they proved very
unsuccessful. They concentrated large amounts of poor people on very small
amounts of land, which made it difficult to create law and order.” Ed Glaeser
“The dismal reputation of public housing highrises had grown to such
monstrous proportions that it overshadowed the reality on the ground. The
idea of pervasive and irrevocable dysfunction in the system was the first
necessary component of an agenda to eradicate public housing.’ [This has
necessitated] ‘manufactured realities that have been widely used to justify
neoliberal policies for the systematic disassembling of public housing
systems and their distribution into private hands” Maya Dukmasova
Manufactured Truth
That Mass Social
Housing Towers for
Those on Low Incomes
Universal & Inevitable
Failures

6. • Elite condominiums in cities like London,
Vancouver, Toronto, Melbourne and New
York, are “tradable commodities, perfect for
the speculatively inclined” Paul Golberger
“not for full-time residents but for the top 1
percent of the 1 percent to touch down in
when the mood strikes.”
• Financial mechanisms treat the new housing
towers – and the land they rest on -- purely as
investment assets for the world’s booming
and dominant – but numerically small -- class
of super-rich (who often buy off-plan at
distant marketing events) and who often
rarely even visit their ‘housing’
• In 2013, 85% of all housing purchase in inner
London – largely those in the higher and
‘super-high’ price brackets – were being
snapped up by non-UK nationals in 2014

7. 3. Examples: ‘Vancouverism’ and its
Discontents
Jamie Peck, Elliot Siemiatycki and Elvin Wyly ‘winning
combination of density, livability and sustainability—all
rendered seductively real in the forest of glass-walled
condominium towers that has colonized the down-town
core since the late 1980s’.
“Subsequent commodification, materially and culturally, is
reducing them to vehicles for capital gains accumulation
and marketing cliche´s. Reassuringly standardized—right
down to the granite countertops, top-of-the-range
stainless-steel appliances and hardwood floors—
Vancouver condos have become highly fungible and
slickly marketed investment commodities”

8. Resort Cities: Political
Economy of
Speculative Real-Estate
Bubbles
“Someone recently said,
“No one knows what
drives Vancouver”’, a
former Vancouver city
councillor related
recently, ‘Well what drives
Vancouver is that people
make wealth in
unpleasant places and
they come here and
spend their wealth in a
pleasant place—that’s it!’

9. Mid-Town Manhattan: Paul Goldberger on 432 Park Ave
“Many of them [are] put up not so much to house people
or businesses as to give to rich Indians, Russians, Iranians,
and Southeast Asians a place to park some cash away
from nosy local governments.”

12. “From the 90th floor, you feel as
connected to the sky as to the
ground,” Paul Golberger writes:
“The city is laid out like a map,
and the enormous windows are
less like frames for the view than
wide-open portals to it. And
inside, the high ceilings and large
rooms make the place feel even
less like a conventional apartment.
The layout leaves an open vista
through the apartment, so you can
see north to the Tappan Zee
Bridge and south to the new 1
World Trade Center tower”
Eyrie-like spaces:
$95m Penthouses

13. Crucial role of what photographer Alex
Maclean has called the ‘fifth façade’: the
roofscape. This increasingly gilded and
private world – which is absolutely
pivotal to the luxification of the urban
skies – is only visible from above. A
potentially crucial urban and public
resource in crowded cities, it enters
planning debates all too rarely.

16. • London: New towers are “sort
of high-rises that was
supposed to be unpopular in
this country [the UK],
discredited architecturally
and politically, at least when it
was called council housing
“Justin McGuirk 2012
• “To manufacture the
neoliberal reality it is
necessary to establish a
baseline of truths, such as
‘public housing is doomed to
fail.’ Sometimes history and
reality speak to the contrary.”
Maya Dukmasova

18. This new verticality of elites in Guatemala City “marks yet
another strategy by which elites abandon public space,”
“A new skyline indexes a new class of cosmopolitanism, one
that floats above the city,” Kevin Lewis O'Neill and Benjamin
Fogarty-Valenzuela, stress. “The experience of looking up at
privilege, the experience of looking down on the masses, now
defines Guatemala City”
“The lower you go, the more dangerous it gets” tower
resident.
Global South
Megacities:
“Heavenly Enclaves
Surrounded by
Slums”

20. ‘Sky Tower’, Mumbai

22. “At some point the penny
dropped for everyone,” writes
Indian journalist Vikram Doctor
writes:
“This whole structure was just for
one family []. In part, this surprise
could be for how the building
subtly shifts the meaning that
apartment blocks have come to
acquire in Mumbai [].
Because as a full apartment block,
for just one family, it tears up the
conventions of compactness: here,
for all we know, each floor could
be a room, a garden, or even a
bathroom (more reasonably, a
swimming pool), and none of it
hidden away, but up in public
view”

23. 4.Verticality,
Urban
Branding,
Spectacle:
Skyscraper-
Skyline as the
Key ‘Global’
City Signifier

24. ‘Vanity’ Height:
‘There is of
course
something
ludicrously
childish about
the irrational urge
to build high,
simply for the
sake of being the
world’s highest”
Deyan Sudjic

25. “Social status is designated ‘high’ or
‘low’ rather than ‘great’ or ‘small’”
Yi-Fu Tuan, 1979
“Low suggests immorality, vulgarity,
poverty, and deceit. High is the
direction of growth and hope, the
source of light, the heavenly above
of angels and gods” Stephen Kern
(1983)
“The world above – the world of
law, order, economy and conformity
– is given structure and order by
what it excludes beneath it as unfit.
{} This is a symbolic gesture,
reinforced by myriad linguistic
pairings and tropes: high and low,
up and down, upper and lower, light
and dark, north and south” David l.
Pike (2005)
5. Ethnographies, Linguistics and
Visual Cultures of Vertical
Secession: The Politics of Looking
Down

28. “To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s
grasp.. One’s body is no longer clasped by the city’s streets that turn and return it
according to anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by
the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic...
When one goes up there [the viewer] leaves behind the mass that carries off and
mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators... His elevation transfigures
him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world into
by which one ‘was possessed’ into a text that lies before ones eyes. It allows one to
read it, to be a solar eye, looking down like a god.” Manuel De Certeau.
The Politics of
Looking Down

29. Um
Lugar
Ao
Sol
(A
Place
in
the
Sun)
Gabriel
Mascaro

30. 6. A Neglected, and Parallel
‘Splintering’ of Access, Services
and Elevator Mobilities

32. Elevator
Politics:
The ‘Sky
Garage’:
‘Bypass’ Via
‘Premium
Network Space’
Goes Vertical

33. Paralleled By Vertical Transport Crises
in Mass Social Housing Towers
The United Way (2010) lobby group
warns that Toronto, for one, is
becoming a city of ‘vertical poverty’
where vulnerable people are often
stranded
Growing up in a decrepit tower in an
inner city in Toronto, Jamal, a
participant in the study, recalls that:
“the elevator would skip floors,
jumping and jolting, moving up and
down. I used to wonder if we would
survive if the elevator dropped from the
13th floor to B2. I was so terrified when
my family went in there. I had
disturbing thoughts that they wouldn’t
come out. To this day, I’m scared of the
elevator”.

34. ‘Live elevators’
necessary...
• In 2013, Margareth, a Congolese
immigrant said: "With the kids , just
the trip , it would take me almost an
hour ”
• “A woman ascends slowly and silently
up the stairs, bent double under the
weight of a full cart , she pulls with a
strap from the front. She lives on the
8th floor . We are 15 km from Paris , is
this possible ?” Local Mayor, Claude
Dilain.
• Dilain intervened and organised a
system of ‘live elevators’: volunteers to
help residents ascend the stairs.

35. Conclusion: Urgently Need a Three-Dimensional or Volumetric
Approach to the Politics and Geographies of Cities and Urban Space...

36. Thank you!
steve.graham@ncl.ac.uk