A presentation about a range of utopian projects for moving about cities above and below the surface via tunnels. orbital travel, supersonic airliners and vertical take off and autonomous 'sky taxis'.

1. Transcending the Surface:
The New Techno-Utopian Dreams (and Realities!) of Volumetric Mobility
Stephen Graham

2. Increasingly
stacked
societies
A growing
“independence of
volumes with respect
to the original land”
Henri Lefebvre

3. Mobilities in stacked societies
Beyond flat, God’s eye,
cartographic perspectives

4. Geographers,
especially,
s0ll
facing
legacies
of
the
‘flat
earth’
problem

5.
The power of the section
“In the section you can tell compelling stories
which not only talk about the building, but of a
whole society”
Architect Max Gerthel
“While attention is traditionally given to the
plans of urban civilization and top [down] views
of human history, this schematic cross-section
view of the world opens a lens on the planet
as an urban projection, pattern and process of
overlapping change across different layers and
level of space... “
Processes ...isolated in plans, or divided in
conventional categories from above, can be
better understood and revealed from the side,
as being associative and integrative— often
overlapping, intertwined and entangled”
Pierre Bélanger (my emphasis)

6. Vertical/ aerial/
volumetric
turn well
underway!

7. But
slow
to
react
to
myriad
of
proposed/imagined/experimental/
exis0ng
volumetric
mobility
systems.
1.
Hyperloop:
Radical
0me-­‐space
compression
for
kine0c
elites

9. Fantastical, multiscale, projections

11. Messianic, boosterist, ‘launches’

12. 2. Fantasies of
subterranean
auto-tunnels
Elon Musk tweet
“Traffic is driving me nuts.
Am going to build a tunnel
boring machine and just start
digging...”
hGps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI

14. 3. New supersonic/stratospheric transports: NASA and Boom
Supersonic (one-third scale demo planned to fly 2018)

17. 4. Suborbital
space travel

20. 5. Deepening
sub-oceanic
verticalities

21. 6. Superfast and volumetric
elevators

24. ‘Sky garage’:
Singapore

25. Much more hidden and older push for deep mining

27. 7.
Drone
logis-cs,
sky
taxis
and
Ver-cal
take-­‐off
urban
vehicles

29. Drone-­‐based
logis0cal
solu0ons
for
the
urban
‘Last
mile’:
”A
key
to
solving
urban
mobility
is
to
fly
burgers”
Dara
Khosrowshahi,
Uber
CEO,
2018

30. Drone
securi0sa0on

32. Protected
Volumes
and
the
Fear
of
the
‘Swarm’

33. Ultimate ‘disruptors’?
More than 30 prototype
‘ski-taxi’ urban mobility
systems in development
Various technological and
engine configurations;
software systems; levels of
autonomy; financial
backing; and levels of
credibility

35. Multiple competing vehicle designs:
Embraer’s “Dream maker”

36. Uber’s own idea

37. Pipistrel (Slovenia)
‘Vertical Solutions’

40. ‘Uberising’
the
elite
helicopter
in
São
Paulo:
“[Voom]
is
showing
preGy
clearly
there
is
a
need
for
urban
air
transporta0on
in
ci0es.
Even
with
a
conven0onal
helicopter
—
which
is
a
bit
more
noisy
and
higher
in
costs
than
a
CityAirbus
will
be
—
even
with
this
concept
and
the
right
approach
you
can
deliver
an
opportunity
for
ci0es.”

42. Uber
Elevate
e.g.
Bell
4
Seat
Sky
Taxi:
trials
in
2020;
commercial
flights
in
‘2023’

44. Trials
also
in
planned
(inevitably!
allegedly!)
In
Dubai

45. London
scenario:
Ini0ally
160
sky
taxis
and
10
ver0ports
geared
towards
allowing
kine0c
business
elites
to
bypass
congested
ground
corridors
(especially
routes
between
finance
districts
and
interna0onal
airports)

46. ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuWOUEFB_IQhGps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuWOUEFB_IQ

47. New politics of urban
airspace

48. NASA
Slides

50. Initial ‘vertiports’ visions
decidedly utilitarian...

52. Now glossy architectural
competitions to imagine
sky-taxi stations
hGps://www.uber.com/info/elevate/

53. Projekt
Humphreys &
Partners:

54. Pickard
Chilton/
Arup’s
“Sky Tower”

55. Corgan

56. Gannett
Fleming

57. BoKA

58. Questions/ Issues: 1. Political and performative
power of technophiliac/ masculinist fantasies
Fragmented, patchworks: Ultimate ‘bypass’ through ‘premium network spaces’?
Technophiliac and capsular fantasies of three-dimensional bypass and transcendence for
neoliberalisation’s techno-kinetic elite. As with ‘smart’ cities and ‘eco’ city projects,
politically constitutive without having to be built. Technocratic fantasies which work to
depoliticise, aestheticise, fetishise and technicise mobility politics

59. 2. Back to the future:
Retrofuturism and the
Blade Runner effect

60. 3. Futuristic imagineering as ‘worlding’: Overlap with global city
boosterism, branding and spectacle; elite urban vanity projects;
competitive, urban experimentation; urban plutocratisation; and political
economies of technological change and data capture...

61. 4. What of
mobility justice and critical
mobilities research?
But what of system-builders, mobility justice,
standards, cross-subsidies, labour,
technological diffusion, infrastructural
planning, state mobility policies, safety,
effects on existing labour processes and
infrastructures?
Contest the masculinist and elitist
technophilia and its depoliticising effects
Work to support social mobility innovations
which exploit undoubted potential, especially
of UAV systems, for ecologically and socially
beneficial, and ethical, innovations...

62. Thank you!
Steve.graham@ncl.ac.uk

63. “What would happen if you took geographic thinking and
instead of putting it on a horizontal axis, you added a
vertical axis?” Trevor Paglen

64. Beck

65. Aurora Flight Sciences, belonging to Boeing

66. ‘Geography’ as a Flat Plane: ‘Geopolitics is a flat discourse. It largely
ignores the vertical dimension and tends to look across rather than to cut
through the landscape. This was the cartographic imagination. Vertical
inherited from the military and political spatialities of the modern
state” Eyal Weizman