The document discusses the need for critical urban research to adopt a more three-dimensional, "vertical" perspective in line with the radical vertical extensions of modern built environments. It highlights four main themes: 1) the cultural politics of the aerial view in urban planning, 2) the vertical dimensions of building up and down through structures like skyscrapers and underground complexes, 3) the new "military urbanism" dominated by vertical surveillance technologies, and 4) possibilities for vertical forms of counterpolitics and democratic urbanism. The document calls for connecting analyses of the vertical dimensions of cities to broader social, political, and ecological contexts of urban life.

1. Vertigo: For a vertical turn in critical urban research Steve Graham & Lucy Hewitt University of Newcastle

3. In short, does critical urban research, with a few exceptions, suffer the same ‘flatness’ as classical and critical geopolitics, as diagnosed by Eyal Weizman “ 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 inherited from the military and political spatialities of the modern state” Eyal Weizmann (2002, 3) Urban verticality project seeks to re-imagine critical urban research from a vertical or volumetric perspective, to bring it more in to line with radical vertical and subterranean extensions of built space as well as broader cultural politics and geopolitics of aeriality and verticality. Four main themes: 1. Cultural Politics of the Aerial View . 2. Building Up and Building Down 3. The New Military Urbanism 4. Vertical Counterpolitics

4. 1. Cultural Politics of the Aerial View Central to Modern Urbanism: “ Aviator as Moralist Planner” (Christine Boyer) “ More than ever before, we now deal in aerial images as a method of remediating the urban landscape”. Mark Dorrian Thinning of the ethical relationship engendered by distance (Dorrian): “with the exquisite impression of a marvelous, ravishing cleanliness! No squalor or blots on the landscape. There is nothing like distance to remove us from all ugliness.” 1858 by Félix Nadar (quoted in Frizot, ) Le Corbusier’s aerial gaze was ‘not simply a surveying eye Post-1945 ‘the aerial view became institutionalized as a central tool of planning’ – ‘ the vision of modernity.’ Anthony Vidler

5. Building for the Skies: Google Earth Urbanism?

6. 2. Building Up and Building Down Politics of Vertical Transportation, Secession, Surveillance

7. ‘ Vertical Gated Communities’: Luxury+’Security’+Verticality “ Roughlux” in Manhattan “ Pin-drop quiet” “ Luxification” (Sharon Zukin) Splintered, solipsistic urbanism “ Capsules on networks” Lieven de Cauter Francoise Hall on Vertical Secession: ‘ We commonly think of secession as a horizontal, territorial phenomenon – The secession of the United States from Britain (1776), Belgium from the Netherlands (1831), Pakistan from India (1947), Bangladesh from Pakistan (1971). But secession can also have a vertical dimension, as when a tiny, upper layer of the population stops belonging to the planet which most of us inhabit. They are embedded in their own world, within gated communities and private schools, using filtered water and filtered ideas.’

8. Paolo Soleri : One-building, vertical, mega- technical cities (plus Archigram etc.)

11. Favelas in the Sky: The Beggar’s Banquet, by Léopold Lambert

13. New rationalisations of urban space linking subterranean, surface and aerial architectures of inhabitation, circulation, consumption: China planning 90 million m3 of underground urban complexes

14. 3. “Don’t Shoot the Drone”: The New Military Urbanism Dominated by Vertical Dreams of Omniscience “ The orbital weapons currently in play possess the traditional attributes of the divine: Omnivoyance and omnipresence” Paul Virilio, (2002, 53) Vertical urban order, military visioning technologies, global city networks (Ryan Bishop)

16. Complex Foucauldian Boomerangs Between Colonial Urban Frontier and Metropole

17. New extremes of distanciated targeting and killing

18. Preoccupation with Unveiling Subterranean Space

19. 4. Vertical Counterpolitics Democratising vertical urbanism? System 77 ‘civil counter-reconnaissance group’: Austria