![]() ![]() On account of their distinctive legal architecture, these towers have been interpreted as an accelerant of urban privatization as towerscapes revise public/private boundaries through new vertical forms of exclusive, privatized and securitized residential gating (for example Hong Kong: La Grange 2014). Such accounts corroborate that planning regimes do not single-handedly steward this development with developers’ influence unmistakable (North America: Lippert and Steckle 2016 Rosen 2017 Australia: Nethercote 2019 Troy et al 2020).Ĭondominium’s role in this vertical expansion has not gone unnoticed in urban geography ( Kern 2010 Lehrer et al 2010 Harris 2011 Rosen and Walks 2013 Webb and Webber 2017). ![]() Recent accounts of the political economies of these rising skylines meanwhile capture how vertical urbanization’s local contours are shaped by a complex array of political, economic, geographic and temporal contingencies that derive from myriad factors, including intermediaries, states and local opportunity structures (for example London: Craggs 2018 Chicago: Weber 2015 Melbourne: Nethercote 2019). They highlight the tower’s constitutive function, enabling political, planning and real-estate elites to orientate host cities outwards by providing means for attention-grabbing, differentiation and identifiability whether through iconicity ( Kaika 2010 Sklair 2017) and starchitect designs ( Charney 2007 McNeill 2009) or whether by projecting dynamism, innovation and progress ( Ong 2011). Recent contributions identify skyscrapers as important cultural artefacts in intercity competition and geopolitics, foregrounding their performative function as ‘signifiers and logos of “global cityness”’ ( Acuto 2010 Graham 2016b: 755) and iconographies of power ( Kaika and Thielen 2006). This ‘vertical turn’ in urban and political geography calls upon scholars to attend to the verticalizing urban topography and volumetric profiles of cities ( McNeill 2005 Graham and Hewitt 2013 Harris 2015). A dedicated strand of research singularly or largely dedicated to urban vertical expansion is only just emerging, encouraged by the impetus to explain this stark rise of city skylines, including amid economic turmoil (for discussion: Nethercote 2018 also McNeill 2005 Graham 2016a Drozdz et al 2018). Prompted by this remarkable urban verticalization, urban and political geographers have challenged the pervasive horizontalism of urban scholarship on the grounds that this way of seeing limits full interrogation of these changing urban morphologies and their implications. Neither avant-garde nor pioneering, this latter stock might be thought of as the stacking of ‘highly fungible and slickly marketed investment commodities’ ( Peck et al 2014), development that has been driven by intensifying housing financialization. Other new housing developments, which stand in the shadows of this conspicuous luxury, are decidedly more prosaic though by no means affordable. These sometimes spectacularly vertiginous new additions shun local housing needs in favour of providing what have been described as ‘eyrie-like refuges for the world’s super rich’ or worse, merely places for these elites to ‘park’ their capital ( Graham 2016a: 215, 192 Atkinson 2019). ![]() ![]() Unlike their much-maligned modernist forebears with their lofty aims to democratize the skies, some new skyscrapers are unashamed beacons of decadence designed by ‘starchitects’. Even so, much of this high-rise development has been residential rather than commercial, making this the latest instalment in a stunted history of vertical living in many cities. Globally, this vertical expansion has not followed a single universal pattern: it is neither linear nor uniform in its scale, its target neighbourhood types, nor its design. Large, tall and often gaudy tower development has become a hallmark of 21 st-century urban change from Melbourne to Tel Aviv and from London to Vancouver ( Nethercote 2018). In many cities around the globe, urban skylines have risen at faster rates and to higher heights than ever before over the past two decades. ![]()
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