luxified skies stephen graham
TRANSCRIPT
Luxified Skies
Or, How Vertical
Urban Housing Became an Elite
Preserve
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University
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
2. In Such a Context, Economistic,
Neoliberal and Planning Orthodoxy is Leading to, and Camouflaging, the Luxification of the
Urban Skies
• 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
“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
• 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
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”
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!’
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.”
“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
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.
• 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
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”
‘Sky Tower’, Mumbai
“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”
4.Verticality, Urban
Branding, Spectacle: Skyscraper-
Skyline as the Key ‘Global’ City Signifier
‘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
“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
“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
Um Lugar Ao Sol (A Place in the Sun) Gabriel Mascaro
6. A Neglected, and Parallel ‘Splintering’ of Access, Services
and Elevator Mobilities
Elevator Politics:
The ‘Sky Garage’:
‘Bypass’ Via ‘Premium
Network Space’ Goes Vertical
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”.
‘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.
Conclusion: Urgently Need a Three-Dimensional or Volumetric Approach to the Politics and Geographies of Cities and Urban Space...
