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'.
Offering a critical response to the dominant vision of the smart city, this talk seeks to look beyond the seductive imagery and hype that surrounds emerging smart city paradigms. In their place, it explores arrange of critical perspectives to smart city planning that are emerging across the social sciences and activist communities, in various places across the world. These critiques centre, broadly, on ways in which smart city paradigms radically deepen urban surveillance ; the way they embed power into corporate urban operating systems; the way the glossy hype and marketing hides tendencies toward authoritarianism and centralized power ; and the way in which ‘smart’ city labels are used to camouflage the construction of highly elitist urban enclaves. The talk will finish by exploring efforts to mobilise digital media to more democratic and egalitarian urban vision.
Presentation to the Design students at Norwich University of the Arts that explored how interaction with data increasingly mediates peoples relationship with cities.
Offering a critical response to the dominant vision of the smart city, this talk seeks to look beyond the seductive imagery and hype that surrounds emerging smart city paradigms. In their place, it explores arrange of critical perspectives to smart city planning that are emerging across the social sciences and activist communities, in various places across the world. These critiques centre, broadly, on ways in which smart city paradigms radically deepen urban surveillance ; the way they embed power into corporate urban operating systems; the way the glossy hype and marketing hides tendencies toward authoritarianism and centralized power ; and the way in which ‘smart’ city labels are used to camouflage the construction of highly elitist urban enclaves. The talk will finish by exploring efforts to mobilise digital media to more democratic and egalitarian urban vision.
Presentation to the Design students at Norwich University of the Arts that explored how interaction with data increasingly mediates peoples relationship with cities.
Presentation by Karima Kourtit and Peter Nijkamp
Advanced Brainstorm Carrefour (ABC): ‘Urban Empires - Cities as Global Rulers in the New Urban World’
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland (August, 2016)
Stephen graham remediating cities: ubiquitous computing and the urban public ...Stephen Graham
An overview of how the latest digital technologies are 'remediating' urban life by layering their services within and through the streets, spaces and circulations of cities
Despite the hype about Smart Cities, many IoT startups find this sector daunting, thinking smart city applications are complex, hard to sell and require intensive support. Rick Robinson thinks this is a myth and in this talk he will look at the current state of Smart Cities and where some of the most interesting challenges lie.
Berlin Hackaton MaaS Business Models by Comtrade Digital ServicesJosep Laborda
Full weekend design thinking and developing ideas spent in Berlin with students, entrepreneurs and fellow industry colleagues to figure out how urban mobility will look like in the future. No coding, only hacking our well-stablished cliches and painpoints regarding mobility for the better!
The future of cities: creative solutions for a brighter urban life Individual mobility is as simple as taking a walk. But the more that humans have to live in shared spaces, the more mobility becomes about technology—powering transit, but also coordinating it. And nowhere is this linkage as vivid as in cities.
Tomorrow's cities will be shaped by human-centric technology solutions—more ""Iron Man"" and less ""Skynet."" Over the coming decades, we'll see the proliferation of autonomous, connected, electric, shared transportation systems that will increase, rather than decrease, the importance of superb mass-transit systems and multi-modal options for getting from point A to point B. We'll create public/private partnerships, with policymakers at the local level creating markets for new technologies, infrastructure development, and advancing new thinking like mileage-based user fees. At the same time, denser cities will blur the lines between where we live and work, our energy consumption and production, and how we get around.
Ultimately, this upheaval creates vast new opportunities for business model innovation and startup wealth creation. Join URBAN-X Managing Director Micah Kotch for his view from the frontlines of urban mobility."
(by Serafeim Makris) Presentation of a dissertation "Analysis of the intertwining factors underpinning Smart Cities: A Systems Thinking Approach" for partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Master of Science in Informatics and Telematics , Harokopio University, Athens-Greece (2018)
Smart cities, empowering people - Robert Ouellette in CRJEmily Hough
What happens the day cities become sentient, smarter than their citizens? Will we have a frightening, Terminator-like world? Robert Ouellette thinks not, but says the days of cities that are smarter than their humans are coming soon...
Responsibly Imprecise: Topology, Engineering, and the Politics of the CityAltair
This presentation will discuss current research on architecture and urban density through topological optimization and solidThinking Inspire \ Morphogenesis.
I Software Studies Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noa.docxsheronlewthwaite
I
Software Studies
Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors
Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies,
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009
Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life,
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011
Programmed Visions: Software and Memory,
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011
Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression,
Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, 2012
10 PRINT CHR$(205.S+RND(1));: GOTO 10,
Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Michael
Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 2012
The Imaginary App,
Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko, 2014
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty,
Benjamin H. Bratton, 2015
The Stack
On Software and Sovereignty
Benjamin H. Bratton
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
/
40 The Nomos of the Cloud
cells and others with hierarchical patterns, but all afford some kind of social posture
and position. Their proliferation doesn't only close off space into smaller units; it also
produces new territories that are equally physical and abstract, heavy and virtual. In
turn, this space is motivating a new land grab among state and nonstate actors alike;
it is also forcing transformations in how geography is held, conceptualized, modeled,
and defended. The order of those transformations occupies a similar location in our
architectures of sovereignty as nomos, but because it involves grids of land, air, and sea
all at once, dedifferentiating their relative weight and liquidities, the logics of this new
arrangement are also perhaps very different.42 Because these transformations are both
driven by planetary-scale computation and mediated through it, any strong distinc-
tions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological
systems spread through agonistic geographic space are undermined.
The state takes on the armature of a machine, because the machine, The Stack, has
already taken on the roles and register of the state. While the proliferation of lines has
normalized a certain kind of reversibility, the early geopolitics of The Stack also sees the
fortification of intentional camps and bunkers, with some populations excluded from
movement and transaction and others stationed in networks of enclaves absorbing
capital by centripetal force. To design up and away from this outcome does not mean
a reestablishment of ground for an upright primate perspective of natural place or pre-
maturely freezing in place The Stack's most preliminary new geographies as the only
options. An emergent alternative to archaic and recidivist geopolitics must be based
on something more scalable than settler colonialism, legacy genomes, and Bronze Age
myths and the maps of nations that have resulted from these. 43 The discussion of the
layers of The Stack, and the productive accidents of each, is an outline platform sover-
eign ...
Presentation by Karima Kourtit and Peter Nijkamp
Advanced Brainstorm Carrefour (ABC): ‘Urban Empires - Cities as Global Rulers in the New Urban World’
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland (August, 2016)
Stephen graham remediating cities: ubiquitous computing and the urban public ...Stephen Graham
An overview of how the latest digital technologies are 'remediating' urban life by layering their services within and through the streets, spaces and circulations of cities
Despite the hype about Smart Cities, many IoT startups find this sector daunting, thinking smart city applications are complex, hard to sell and require intensive support. Rick Robinson thinks this is a myth and in this talk he will look at the current state of Smart Cities and where some of the most interesting challenges lie.
Berlin Hackaton MaaS Business Models by Comtrade Digital ServicesJosep Laborda
Full weekend design thinking and developing ideas spent in Berlin with students, entrepreneurs and fellow industry colleagues to figure out how urban mobility will look like in the future. No coding, only hacking our well-stablished cliches and painpoints regarding mobility for the better!
The future of cities: creative solutions for a brighter urban life Individual mobility is as simple as taking a walk. But the more that humans have to live in shared spaces, the more mobility becomes about technology—powering transit, but also coordinating it. And nowhere is this linkage as vivid as in cities.
Tomorrow's cities will be shaped by human-centric technology solutions—more ""Iron Man"" and less ""Skynet."" Over the coming decades, we'll see the proliferation of autonomous, connected, electric, shared transportation systems that will increase, rather than decrease, the importance of superb mass-transit systems and multi-modal options for getting from point A to point B. We'll create public/private partnerships, with policymakers at the local level creating markets for new technologies, infrastructure development, and advancing new thinking like mileage-based user fees. At the same time, denser cities will blur the lines between where we live and work, our energy consumption and production, and how we get around.
Ultimately, this upheaval creates vast new opportunities for business model innovation and startup wealth creation. Join URBAN-X Managing Director Micah Kotch for his view from the frontlines of urban mobility."
(by Serafeim Makris) Presentation of a dissertation "Analysis of the intertwining factors underpinning Smart Cities: A Systems Thinking Approach" for partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Master of Science in Informatics and Telematics , Harokopio University, Athens-Greece (2018)
Smart cities, empowering people - Robert Ouellette in CRJEmily Hough
What happens the day cities become sentient, smarter than their citizens? Will we have a frightening, Terminator-like world? Robert Ouellette thinks not, but says the days of cities that are smarter than their humans are coming soon...
Responsibly Imprecise: Topology, Engineering, and the Politics of the CityAltair
This presentation will discuss current research on architecture and urban density through topological optimization and solidThinking Inspire \ Morphogenesis.
I Software Studies Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noa.docxsheronlewthwaite
I
Software Studies
Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors
Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies,
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009
Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life,
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011
Programmed Visions: Software and Memory,
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011
Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression,
Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, 2012
10 PRINT CHR$(205.S+RND(1));: GOTO 10,
Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Michael
Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 2012
The Imaginary App,
Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko, 2014
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty,
Benjamin H. Bratton, 2015
The Stack
On Software and Sovereignty
Benjamin H. Bratton
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
/
40 The Nomos of the Cloud
cells and others with hierarchical patterns, but all afford some kind of social posture
and position. Their proliferation doesn't only close off space into smaller units; it also
produces new territories that are equally physical and abstract, heavy and virtual. In
turn, this space is motivating a new land grab among state and nonstate actors alike;
it is also forcing transformations in how geography is held, conceptualized, modeled,
and defended. The order of those transformations occupies a similar location in our
architectures of sovereignty as nomos, but because it involves grids of land, air, and sea
all at once, dedifferentiating their relative weight and liquidities, the logics of this new
arrangement are also perhaps very different.42 Because these transformations are both
driven by planetary-scale computation and mediated through it, any strong distinc-
tions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological
systems spread through agonistic geographic space are undermined.
The state takes on the armature of a machine, because the machine, The Stack, has
already taken on the roles and register of the state. While the proliferation of lines has
normalized a certain kind of reversibility, the early geopolitics of The Stack also sees the
fortification of intentional camps and bunkers, with some populations excluded from
movement and transaction and others stationed in networks of enclaves absorbing
capital by centripetal force. To design up and away from this outcome does not mean
a reestablishment of ground for an upright primate perspective of natural place or pre-
maturely freezing in place The Stack's most preliminary new geographies as the only
options. An emergent alternative to archaic and recidivist geopolitics must be based
on something more scalable than settler colonialism, legacy genomes, and Bronze Age
myths and the maps of nations that have resulted from these. 43 The discussion of the
layers of The Stack, and the productive accidents of each, is an outline platform sover-
eign ...
I Software Studies Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noafideladallimore
I
Software Studies
Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors
Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies,
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009
Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life,
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011
Programmed Visions: Software and Memory,
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011
Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression,
Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, 2012
10 PRINT CHR$(205.S+RND(1));: GOTO 10,
Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Michael
Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 2012
The Imaginary App,
Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko, 2014
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty,
Benjamin H. Bratton, 2015
The Stack
On Software and Sovereignty
Benjamin H. Bratton
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
/
40 The Nomos of the Cloud
cells and others with hierarchical patterns, but all afford some kind of social posture
and position. Their proliferation doesn't only close off space into smaller units; it also
produces new territories that are equally physical and abstract, heavy and virtual. In
turn, this space is motivating a new land grab among state and nonstate actors alike;
it is also forcing transformations in how geography is held, conceptualized, modeled,
and defended. The order of those transformations occupies a similar location in our
architectures of sovereignty as nomos, but because it involves grids of land, air, and sea
all at once, dedifferentiating their relative weight and liquidities, the logics of this new
arrangement are also perhaps very different.42 Because these transformations are both
driven by planetary-scale computation and mediated through it, any strong distinc-
tions between a political geography supported by technical systems and technological
systems spread through agonistic geographic space are undermined.
The state takes on the armature of a machine, because the machine, The Stack, has
already taken on the roles and register of the state. While the proliferation of lines has
normalized a certain kind of reversibility, the early geopolitics of The Stack also sees the
fortification of intentional camps and bunkers, with some populations excluded from
movement and transaction and others stationed in networks of enclaves absorbing
capital by centripetal force. To design up and away from this outcome does not mean
a reestablishment of ground for an upright primate perspective of natural place or pre-
maturely freezing in place The Stack's most preliminary new geographies as the only
options. An emergent alternative to archaic and recidivist geopolitics must be based
on something more scalable than settler colonialism, legacy genomes, and Bronze Age
myths and the maps of nations that have resulted from these. 43 The discussion of the
layers of The Stack, and the productive accidents of each, is an outline platform sover-
eign ...
Future Outlook on Urban CompetitivenessWendy Schultz
The narrative of my 22 June 2010 presentation to the Global Innovation Forum in Seoul, sponsored by the Korea Economic Daily. Please refer to PDF of slidedeck, above.
Graham, Stephen. "The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptuali...Stephen Graham
Abstract: This article critically explores how the relations between information technologies and space and place are being conceptualized in a broad swathe of recent writings and discourses on the geographies of `cyberspace' and information technologies. After analysing the powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors in anchoring current discourses about information tech- nologies and society, the article goes on to identify three broad, dominating perspectives. These I label the perspective of `substitution and transcendence' (dominated by technological Utopian- ists), the `co-evolution' perspective (drawing from political economy and cultural studies) and the `recombination' perspective (derived from recent work in actor-network theory). The discussion turns to each in turn, extracting the geographical dimensions and implications of each. The article concludes by considering the implications of the discussion for spatial treatments of society± technology relations and for broader debates about the nature of space and place.
Super-tall and Ultra-deep: The Cultural Politics of the ElevatorStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geo- graphies of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on). And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks, first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn: the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the eleva- tor as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected ver- tical politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Super-tall and ultra-deep: The Politics of the ElevatorsStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geographies
of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are
intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on).
And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural
geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of
vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks,
first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of
urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected
worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn:
the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the elevator
as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of
elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators
and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected vertical
politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Disability and Smart Cities:
On Communication Policy, Technology, and Justice in Future Societies
by Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney)
paper presented at Communication Policy and Technology section of 'Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward', International Association of Media Communication Research (IAMCR) conference
27-31 July, 2016, University of Leicester
Similar to Transcending the surface graham: The New Techno-Utopian Dreams (and Realities!) of Volumetric Mobility (20)
Elite Avenues: Flyovers, Freeways and the Politics of Urban MobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the global south still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at “worlding” their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this article presents an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and expressways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the west Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or re-appropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
Bunkering down the geography of elite residential basement development in londonStephen Graham
Much has been written about the “luxified skies” – “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the super-rich – that has been sprouting up across London. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of London’s changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this paper, we map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood. Some 7,328 new residential basements underneath existing houses had been granted planning permission up to late-2019. Over 1,500 of them are of a size that their locations might best be thought of as marking out a distinct plutocratic “basement belt”.
Vertical : The city from satellites to bunkersStephen Graham
A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world.
Subterranean urban politics: Insurgency, sanctuary, exploration and tourismStephen Graham
A presentation, drawing on my book 'Vertical', exploring the politics of the urban subterranean. The wide-ranging discussion explores the subterranean as a source of class threats and insurrections; as a sanctuary; as a space of exploration; and as a site for tourism.
Elite avenues: Flyovers, freeways and the politics of urban mobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the Global South still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at ‘worlding’ their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this paper presents an international and interdis- ciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and express- ways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the West Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or reappropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
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.
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that
operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically
stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, to many cyberpunk
classics, this essay – the latest in a series in City on the vertical dimensions of cities1 –
reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and
contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It
begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang,
Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures,
landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then teases out the
complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are
actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and
binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories
mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do
much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such
connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests
of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The essay’s final discussion
draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting
the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers Stephen Graham Stephen Graham
A presentation outlining some of the themes to my new book, 'Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers' (Verso, 2016).
"A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world."
See https://www.versobooks.com/books/2237-vertical
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel 'High Rise', to many cyberpunk classics, this essay – the latest in a series on the vertical dimensions of cities –reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang, Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures, landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then then teases out the complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The
essay’s final discussion draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Histories of the Future in Contemporary Megastructures
An exploration of the development of multi-level cities around the world, and their links to historic futurism
Vertical ground: making geology graham icus 2016Stephen Graham
Key note presentation at the Island Cities and Urban Archipelagos 2016. 07-12 March 2016, Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong
See http://www.islandcities.org/icua2016.html
Life support: The political ecology of urban airStephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacture their own air. In and around the three-dimensional
aerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches particular
levels of intensity. For a species that expires without air in two or three minutes,
this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however,
urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political–ecological literatures. Accordingly,
this paper suggests a range of key themes, which a political ecology of urban air needs
to address. These touch upon the links between global warming, urban heat-island effects
and killer urban heatwaves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal
movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical
condominium structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterise air-conditioned
urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly
hot climates; the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments; and, finally, the
manipulation of urban air through political violence.
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science...Stephen Graham
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature
Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham
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.
Water Wars in Mumbai
Stephen Graham, Renu Desai, and Colin McFarlane
Beyond the Pale
The Mumbai Mirror, January 8, 2010. A photograph shows a line of proud Mumbai police officers standing behind row upon row of what appear at first sight to be rusted machine guns (see fig. 1). But this is not one of the arms caches regularly unearthed to demonstrate the force’s effectiveness against the myriad terrorist networks that regularly target urban sites in contemporary India. Rather, the objects are water booster pumps, confiscated in a new campaign of dawn raids targeting “water theft” by slum dwellers in the Shivaji Nagar and
Govandi districts (see fig. 2 map below).
“Stealing Water to Earn a Few Bucks?” the headline reads. “Pay a Hefty
Price!” (Sathe 2010). The article details how the raids are being backed up by new legal moves to criminalize certain uses of water. Hundreds of people, arrested for installing and using the pumps, are to be prosecuted under draconian and nonbailable laws such as the Prevention of Damages to Public Property Act. All this activity is portrayed unproblematically as a heroic response to the threat that water theft in slums poses to the wider, formal, legitimate, and law-abiding city. “Pilferages, if not controlled,” writes the author, “could exhaust the potable water reserves before the next monsoon” (Sathe 2010).
Such statements tap into a mainstream discourse according to which recent poor monsoons have led to a major “water crisis” in Mumbai, necessitating radical, emergency measures to address widespread “water theft” or “water pilferage”— especially by the urban poor. What such discourses occlude, however, are the ways that current systems of urban water provision work to systematically dehydrate and profit from urban slum communities, while water wastage by the affluent and their preferred urban facilities goes unchecked.
Life support the political ecology of urban air (Paper)Stephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacturer their own air. In and around the three-dimensional aerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches particular levels of intensity. For a species which expires without air in two or three minutes, this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however, urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political-ecological literatures. Accordingly, this paper suggests a range of key themes which a political ecology of urban air needs to address. These address, in turn, the links between global warming, urban heart-island effects and killer urban heat-waves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical condominiums structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterised air-conditioned urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly hot climates; and, finally, the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments.
Life-support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air (Presentation)Stephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacturer their own air. In and around the three-dimensional aerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches particular levels of intensity. For a species which expires without air in two or three minutes, this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however, urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political-ecological literatures. Accordingly, this paper suggests a range of key themes which a political ecology of urban air needs to address. These address, in turn, the links between global warming, urban heart-island effects and killer urban heat-waves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical condominiums structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterised air-conditioned urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly hot climates; and, finally, the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments.
Vigar, Geoff, Stephen Graham, and Patsy Healey. "In search of the city in spa...Stephen Graham
Summary. This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of ‘cityness’ in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality and territoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word ‘city’ in a range of urban governance contexts in Newcastle upon Tyne, this paper analyses the political work done by diverse representations and invocations of ‘cityness’ in contemporary urban governance. Such representations matter because the way in which contemporary cities are conceptualised influences policy formulations and policy outcomes. In addition, considerable emphasis is being placed in contemporary urban policy on ‘joining-up’, ‘integrating’ and co-ordinating governance efforts. How conceptions of the city are mobilised to do such integrating work provides insight into the challenge such ambitions present. The evidence from the case study suggests that the capacity of local actors to think about the processes of change in metropolitan regions, and to define the ways in which they can respond, is often limited, as they struggle to define what their ‘city’ actually might be these days. This tends to be to the detriment of collective attempts to maximise conditions for citizens and for investment.
Graham, Stephen. "Bridging urban digital divides? Urban polarisation and info...Stephen Graham
The societal diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs) remains starkly uneven at all scales. It is in the contemporary city that this unevenness becomes most visible. In cities, clusters and enclaves of ‘superconnected’ people, rms and institutions often rest cheek-by-jowel with large numbers of people with non-existent or rudimentary access to communications technologies. In such a context, this paper has two objectives, reected in its two parts. The rst part of the paper seeks to demonstrate that dominant trends in ICT develop- ment are currently helping to support new extremes of social and geographical unevenness within and between human settlements and cities, in both the North and the South. The paper’s second part aims to explore the prospect that such stark ‘urban digital divides’ might be ameliorated through progressive and innovative policy initiatives which treat cities and electronic technologies in parallel. It does this using a range of illustrative exemplars from a variety of contexts
Crang, Michael, Tracey Crosbie, and Stephen Graham. "Variable geometries of c...Stephen Graham
Summary. This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban ‘digital divides’. It focuses on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace of life within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICTs are being used in an affluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper suggests that urban digital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in this work as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is argued that different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio- spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, the paper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasively and continuously as the ‘background’ infrastructure to sustain privileged and intensely distanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Secondly, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectively organised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help to orchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter, it is those neighbourhood ties that enable on-line access.
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TRAVEL TO MT. RWENZORI NATIONAL PARK WITH NILE ABENTEUER SAFARIS.docxnileabenteuersafaris
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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)
7. But
slow
to
react
to
myriad
of
proposed/imagined/experimental/
exis0ng
volumetric
mobility
systems.
1.
Hyperloop:
Radical
0me-‐space
compression
for
kine0c
elites
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
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
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.”
41.
42. Uber
Elevate
e.g.
Bell
4
Seat
Sky
Taxi:
trials
in
2020;
commercial
flights
in
‘2023’
43.
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)
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...
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