Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature

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Urban Studies1–15� Urban Studies Journal Limited 2014Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0042098014529345usj.sagepub.com

Vertical cities: Representations ofurban verticality in 20th-centuryscience fiction literature

Lucy HewittUniversity of Glasgow, UK

Stephen GrahamNewcastle University, UK

AbstractThis paper seeks to intersect two recent trends in urban research. First, it takes seriously therecognition that established traditions of research concerned with urban space have tended toprivilege 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 validityof fiction – and especially speculative or science fiction – as a source of critical commentary andas a mode of knowledge that can exist in close reciprocity with non-fictional work. From thesetwo starting points the paper develops a reading of the dialogue between the representations ofvertical urban life that have featured in landmark works of 20th-century science fiction literatureand key themes in contemporary urban analysis.

Keywordsscience fiction,spatial representations, urban theory, verticality

Received October 2013; accepted March 2014

Introduction: Science fiction andthe ‘vertical turn’ in urban socialscience

It requires little excavation to uncover thefascination that vertical urban structureshave held for modern architects and plan-ners. The Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia(2009 [1914]: 200), for example, envisionedcities where ‘elevators [would] swarm up thefacades like serpents of glass and iron’ andwhere the street would ‘no longer lie like a

doormat . but plunge several storeys deepinto the earth’. A few years later, the archi-tect Auguste Perret imagined a Paris of thefuture with ‘avenues 250 meters wide and oneither side houses that reach to the clouds’(1920, quoted by Passanti 1987: 56). WhileLe Corbusier – an iconic figure whose

Corresponding author:

Lucy Hewitt, University of Glasgow, Urban Studies, 25–29

Bute Gardens, Glasgow G11 7ET, UK.

Email: [email protected]

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preoccupation with verticality and aerialityhave cast long shadows in modern urbanand architectural history – expressed hisambition to remake the urban landscape ofthe future as ‘a vertical city . which will pileup the cells which have for so long beencrushed on the ground, and set them highabove the earth, bathed in light and air’(1987 [1927]: 280).

Interest in the development of the verticalurban axis has, therefore, been a centralstrand of the modern architectural imagina-tion and alongside this imaginative preoccu-pation, supported by the engineeringinnovations characteristic of the period, pro-cesses of urbanisation have also extendedover the vertical axis. In the course of theirgrowth and extension, urban developmentprocesses have excavated downwards, creat-ing subterranean urban landscapes domi-nated by the infrastructural plexus that isthe prerequisite of modern urban life. At thesame time, they have stretched far into thespaces of the air and sky, signalling corpo-rate status, political and economic centrality,and technological mastery as they reach forever-greater vertical extension.

Vertical aspects of the production, experi-ence and representation of urban space areclearly fundamental to the nature of moderncities. Steve Pile, for example, in assessingwhat physical attributes might be exclusiveto cities, as compared with other places, sug-gests ‘skyscrapers, underground railways,street lighting (maybe), and not much else’(1999: 5). As we have agued elsewhere(Graham and Hewitt, 2013), however, criti-cal social science has long prioritised a flat,planar or horizontal imaginary of urbanspace over a volumetric or vertical one. Inthe collections of essays that follow Pile’sobservation, for example – books which arecurrently a key reference point for urbanscholarship and, particularly, education –the specific and crucial contribution of verti-cality to the spatiality and intensity of cities

is addressed in only the briefest form (seeAllen et al., 1999; Massey et al., 1999; Pileet al., 1999).

Cities have been widely explored in termsof distributions, concentrations, stretched-out topologies, corridors, networks, sprawland extending urban regions. Such a dis-course indicates a strong tendency, particu-larly in urban geography, to normalise thetop-down aerial or cartographic gaze as adominant representational device throughwhich to perceive and analyse cities and sys-tems of cities, and that normalisation hastended to privilege relations across the sur-face of cities and systems of cities distributedacross the planet’s surface. While this domi-nant horizontalism has bequeathed a richvein of scholarship, it has also established anepistemological and empirical bias towardsgeographies of the surface. The metaphorsand vocabulary we routinely deploy in dis-cussions of urban growth – for example,sprawl, extension, hyper-urbanisation, themegalopolis, the recent discussion of plane-tary urbanisation (see Merrifield, 2012) andso on – have thus implicitly but overwhel-mingly been used to define the changingurbanisation of space in horizontal ratherthan vertical or volumetric terms.

However, there is now a growing recogni-tion among contemporary social scientificurbanists and geographers that traditions ofscholarly research have tended to privilegethe horizontal dimension of space at theneglect of a three-dimensional conceptuali-sation. Such a recognition is particularlytimely, given the continued and deepeningurbanisation of the world, rising urban den-sities and increasingly ubiquitous interests inengineering ever more volumetric and verti-cally stretched urban complexes. Thus, writ-ers such as Heidi Scott have responded tothe prevalence of horizontalism by challen-ging contemporary scholarship to arrive at‘stronger theorizations of verticality’ (2008:1858; see also Weizman, 2002). Such calls

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for a ‘vertical turn’ in urban social science(see Graham and Hewitt, 2013) have beenprompted by the recognition that knowledgeof the processes of modern and contempo-rary urbanisation will remain incompleteand inadequate while urban social sciencelargely fails to engage with the increasinglyvertical and volumetric nature of the urbanenvironment and experience that is at thecore of contemporary urbanism.

Research that directly or indirectlyaddresses this problematic has already begunto demonstrate how important and howfruitful it is to challenge the past dominanceof the surficial, planar view. Arguably, a‘vertical’ or ‘volumetric’ turn is alreadyunderway. Writers such as Gandy (1999)and Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) havebegun to unearth the urban subterranean;Adey (2010) and Cwerner (2006) havestarted to highlight the social politics ofvertical urban splintering; and Dorrian(2011) and Munster (2008) have pointed tothe complex visual and cultural politics ofthe aerial view, not least as it is now popu-larised by Google Earth. In addition, thereis a growing acknowledgement that, likehorizontal space, vertical spaces can mani-fest the inequities and secessionary tenden-cies surrounding processes of splinteringurbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001).This paper therefore joins a growing fieldof scholarship interested in challenging theoverly surficial focus of existing urbangeography.

Our focus in what follows falls on thewidespread imagining within science fictionliterature (hereafter, ‘SF’) of the last century– exemplified in the work of HG Wells, JGBallard and William Gibson – of futureurban complexes structured around extremesof vertical extension and distanciation. Wefocus on these three authors because in com-bination they offer both a temporal and athematic breadth that is particularly valuablefor our examination of and engagement with

contemporary urban thinking. Furthermore,in adopting this focus we also recognise, asothers have done before, that fiction canprovide a powerful vantage point for insightand critique. Marc Brosseau (1994), forexample, has argued that the use of fictioncan been seen particularly strongly throughthe humanist tradition of geographicresearch, which has sought to refocus scho-larship on human experience as opposed toprioritising quantitative analysis, andthrough the radical tradition of geographywhich has viewed literature as having anpolitical function.

In this paper, we are concerned with thecomplex ways in which fiction depicts plausi-ble near-future urban scenarios that overlapwith and relate to the extending verticalitiesof modern and contemporary metropolitanspace. Given the critical commentary thathas become particularly visible in 20th-cen-tury SF (Claeys, 2010) and the powerful wayin which fiction and contemporary theorycan be brought together (Lewis et al., 2008,2014; Tyner, 2004), we are also interested inthe ways SF has animated some of the politi-cal and analytical themes that now, increas-ingly, interest contemporary thinking aboutcities. This contribution to urban socialscience’s vertical turn therefore emerges in acontext in which social-scientific studies ofSF (and fictional representations morebroadly) increasingly demonstrate that, aswell as speculations about the future, it canoffer powerful commentaries on, and cri-tiques of, the nature of the contemporarysocial life.

Crucially, too, writers have begun toargue that the epistemological boundariesseparating fiction from non-fiction are farmore porous than often recognised. BothCarl Abbott (2007) and Nic Clear (2009)have suggested that such boundaries arebreached particularly clearly in the case ofurban planning, architectural design and SF,since the ‘visionary’ element of the

Hewitt and Graham 3



architectural and planning disciplines is astrong, even a central, part of traditionalactivity. There has been little focused explo-ration of this shared ground, but Abbott(2007) has argued that what we might call‘design science fiction’ shares the same pur-pose as SF, namely that of speculating aboutwhat the future might look like if certain ten-dencies were developed, and is, therefore,itself a type of science fiction. Clear (2009)also follows this argument, however he alsosuggests that the tendency of architects tolocate their speculations in a ‘better’ futurehas undermined the plausibility of architec-tural design. ‘The architectural work,’ Clearargues (2009: 6–7), ‘has proved completelyincapable of suggesting what the future mayhold’ and as a result, in comparison, it is thevisions of SF that ‘are often more believable’.

Further, as Rob Kitchin and JamesKneale (2005) have argued, there is a reci-procity to the relationship, with contempo-rary urbanism shaping SF, which in its turnworks in complex ways to effect the imagi-nation, experience and construction of con-temporary urbanism. Specifically in relationto geography, Kitchin and Kneale arguethat SF particularly helps to establish aninterplay between its writers, its readers andthe development of space; it becomes part ofa popular and professional imaginationthat feeds into practice (see also Abbott,2007). Various illustrations can be citedthat demonstrate this observation. WilliamGibson, for example, indicates the impor-tance of certain contemporary cities for hisfictional urban worlds in recent writing.Describing a trip to Tokyo, taken ‘to refresh[his] sense of place’, he explains that the city‘has been my handiest prop shop for as longas I’ve been writing: sheer eye candy’ (2012:158).

Our interest in examining and theorisingthe vertical aspects of urban life through thelens of SF literature is motivated by pre-cisely this kind of dialogue. Further, while

we recognise that the relationships betweenarchitecture, planning and science fiction arenot straightforward, it is nevertheless worthnoting from the outset that an ongoing dia-logue has been, and remains, clearly visible.According the Ester da Costa Meyer (1995:137), for example, Antonio Sant’Elia,with little formal training, drew more on theimagery of contemporary SF than on thearchitectural theory circulating in early20th-century Italy. Further, the relationshipbetween contemporary urbanism and cyber-punk SF – with its extremes of social polari-sation, highly technologised circuits of socialcontrol and cyborgian blurring betweensocial, organic and technological life – isparticularly multifaceted (see Burrows, 1997;Davis, 1992). Norman Klein (1991: 147) hasgiven the much noted example of five ‘lead-ing urban planners’ publicly expressing theirhope that Los Angeles might eventuallyresemble the landscape depicted in the filmBlade Runner (based on Philip K Dick’sinfluential novel, Do Androids Dream ofElectric Sheep, 1968). And to complicate theconnections still further, Ridley Scott, thefilm’s director, admitted that his iconicdepiction of a near-future Los Angeles –replete with extraordinary vertical architec-ture, gas flares and endless rain – owedmuch to his childhood in the steel and chem-ical town of Middlesbrough (see Gold,2001).

The discussion that follows falls into fourparts. The first uses an analysis of two semi-nal SF novels – HG Wells’ The SleeperAwakes (2005 [1910]) and JG Ballard’s High-Rise (2006 [1975]) – to explore how SF com-monly deploys vertical spatial and architec-tural metaphors to symbolise, posit andexpose deepening inequalities and social andclass distinctions (which are themselves oftentraditionally labelled ‘vertical’ within urbansociology). The second part of the papercontinues to explore Wells’ and Ballard’swritings to engage with the ways in which

4 Urban Studies



the top-down gaze of the high-rise dwelleron the city and population below is used tosymbolise wider structures of privilege, elit-ism and power. The paper’s third sectionstrikes out into the profoundly verticalisedimaginaries of cyberpunk SF. Here we focuson the architectural bricolage of WilliamGibson’s writing. We show how his vertica-lised urban imaginaries work to muddy theconceptual waters of modernist politicalthought whilst still invoking deep metapho-ric connections between urban verticalityand social and political power. The paper’sconclusion reflects on how our analyses helpto extend understanding of the complex,recursive relationships between the vertica-lised urban imaginaries of SF an the vertica-lised spaces of contemporary urbanism.

Vertical space as hierarchicalspace: Wells, Ballard and stratifiedurbanism

In the late 19th century the rise of the sky-scraper charged the architectural imagina-tion and altered the skyline of those citiesthat were then at the centre of urban devel-opment. Yet, the vertical city, both as it wasconceived by architects and as it began tomaterialise, was not simply a transformationof space; it was fundamentally connected tonew forms of social organisation. For exam-ple, in London, mansion flats, dubbed byEM Forster as ‘Babylonian flats’ in his 1910novel Howard’s End, were explicitly mar-keted as social experiments (see Dennis,2008). As Richard Dennis has noted (2008:240), with their communal facilities and var-ied, mobile populations, these early high-riseresidential buildings were described in TheTimes as ‘very novel and, socially speaking,revolutionary’. But, as Dennis also demon-strates, high-rise buildings could also be sub-ject to strong criticism and the topic ofheated political debate.

Speculation about the future of Londonwas often a theme for HG Wells and thepotentiality of a vertical future appearedunder the spotlight in his novel, The SleeperAwakes. Published first in serial form in thelate 1890s, Wells rewrote the piece for publi-cation as a novel in 1910. The timing of itswriting and publication therefore corre-sponded with early experiences and debatesabout how high-rise living could be inte-grated into and might change the social andbuilt landscape of the capital. The narrativeof The Sleeper Awakes concerns Graham, acharacter who, at the outset, has been suffer-ing from insomnia so severe he considers sui-cide. When he finally falls asleep, the sleep isa trance in which his body suspends the nor-mal aging process (even his hair stops grow-ing) and from which he is never expected towake. He does awaken, 203 years later, to aworld that is transformed and a London thathas grown along profoundly vertical lines:

[Graham] went to the railings of the balconyand stared upward . His first impression wasof overwhelming architecture. The place intowhich he looked was an aisle of Titanic build-ings, curving spaciously in either direction.Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang togetheracross the huge width of the place, and a tra-cery of translucent material shut out the sky.Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed thepale sunbeams that filtered down through thegirders and wires. Here and there a gossamersuspension bridge dotted with foot passengersflung across the chasm and the air was webbedwith slender cables. A cliff of edifice hungabove him . (Wells, 2005 [1910]: 42).

As the novel progresses, this vision ofextraordinary architectural scale is graduallyrevealed as the embodiment of an acutelysegregated society in which Graham himselfis implicated as the unwitting symbolic andeconomic figurehead. The functionality ofthis socially stratified London relies on aworkforce for whom the city is a labour

Hewitt and Graham 5



camp from which they cannot escape.Indeed, the only possible escape route, pay-ing for ‘Enthansay’, is beyond the means ofmost of the workers – ‘for the poor there isno easy death’ – and they are, rather, con-demned to a life of hard labour and illhealth in the city’s subterranean labyrinths(2005 [1910]: 162). The underground spacesof the city are not visible to Graham as heinitially experiences the city, but he is even-tually led down to witness the plight of theurban masses, his description evoking thepoverty and deprivation of the 19th-centuryslum:

They penetrated downward, ever downward,towards the working places . through thesefactories and places of toil, seeing many pain-ful and grim things . Everywhere were pillarsand cross archings of such a massiveness asGraham had never before seen, thick Titans ofgreasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath thevast weight of that complex city world, evenas these anaemic millions were crushed by itscomplexity. And everywhere were pale fea-tures, lean limbs, disfigurement and degrada-tion. (Wells, 2005 [1910]: 193 and 196)

In its characterisation of urban social rela-tions, The Sleeper Awakes reflects the con-viction, prevalent at the time Wells wrote,that the modern city embodied a new politi-cal and industrial order, and that urban soci-ety brought a greater degree of socialpolarisation as the city exploited its work-force (see Lehan, 1998: 153 and 158).1 Wellsexplored the same distribution of privilegeand deprivation over the vertical axis in hisnovella, ‘A Story of Days to Come’ pub-lished in an early collection, Tales of Timeand Space (1900). For example:

In the twenty-second century . the growth ofthe city storey above storey, and the coales-cence of buildings, had led to a differentarrangement. The prosperous people lived in avast series of sumptuous hotels in the upperstoreys and the halls of the city fabric; the

industrial population dwelt beneath in the tre-mendous ground-floor and basement . of theplace. (1900: 101)

In this vision of the city Wells presented apowerful piece of ‘cultural prophecy’(Crossley, 2007: 361). It reflected his ownpolitical concerns, particularly his antipathyfor unregulated industrial capitalism, and,thus, the city appeared as a closed system –‘a world of dire economic struggle’ – builton exploitative social relationships. Indeed,the functionality of the vertical metropoliswhich Wells animates through his writingrelies on a workforce of labourers who par-take in none of the privilege available tothose further up the social and spatial scales.However, The Sleeper Awakes also reflectsWells’s interrogation, through fiction, of thenature of modern culture. In 22nd-centuryLondon, the political and media institutionshave become both powerful and unaccoun-table and the novel is pervaded by an esca-lating sense that the city manifests thesignals of a moral decline that must lead toviolent crisis (for example, 2005 [1910]: 57).

Appearing 65 years after Wells’s specula-tive engagement with the capital was pub-lished in novel form, JG Ballard’s High-Rise(2006 [1975]) offers a second iconic piece ofwriting about the nature of metropolitanurbanity. The context with which Ballardengaged was significantly altered from thatwhich immediately framed The SleeperAwakes. From 1956, in a deliberate politicalattempt to precipitate high-rise building,subsidies for flats in blocks over 15 storeyshigh were three times more than those forother forms of affordable housing and,until the Ronan Point disaster 12 yearslater, tower blocks were built rapidly inmajor cities across Britain (Hall, 2002:241). However, by the 1970s, the high-risewas becoming synonymous with unsuccess-ful mass social housing and carried a raftof negative connotations as the tower

6 Urban Studies



blocks built to alleviate housing problemsbegan to degenerate both materially andsocially (Glendinning and Muthesius, 1994).Ballard’s fictional account of high-rise livingwas a direct engagement with this deepeningtrend in urban planning and his explorationof the social implications of high-rise residen-tial building and its material failure explicitlyreferred to contemporary development. Forexample, he pointed specifically to the nowfamous infrastructural and architecturalinnovation at the Park Hill estate in Sheffield– titling one of his chapters, ‘Danger in theStreets of the Sky’ – of building walkwaysoutside the front doors of flats that werewide enough for milk floats and thus nick-named ‘streets in the sky’.

Yet Ballard penned a vision that is atleast as startlingly relevant today than it wasto the context in which he wrote: Ballard’sHighrise is an ultra-modern, technologicallysophisticated, luxury enclave – clearly evoca-tive of what De Cauter (2005) has recentlycalled a ‘capsular’ urban space – which ispowerfully reminiscent of the verticalised,elite and gated communities that now pepperthe world’s metropolitan spaces. The build-ing is ‘a small vertical city, its two thousandinhabitants boxed up into the sky’ (Ballard,2006 [1975]: 9). Yet, despite the overall senseof privilege, the social stratification amonginhabitants is a central feature of the novel.The 40 floors are divided along social andeconomic lines that quickly become solidi-fied as the ‘natural social order of the build-ing’ (2006 [1975]: 14):

In effect, the high-rise had already divideditself into the three classical social groups, itslower, middle and upper classes. The 10th-floor shopping mall formed a clear boundarybetween the lower nine floors, with their ‘pro-letariat’ of film technicians, air-hostesses andthe like, and the middle section of the high-rise, which extended from the 10th floor to theswimming pool and restaurant deck on the35th. This central two-thirds of the apartment

building formed its middle class, made up ofself-centred but basically docile members ofthe professions – the doctors and lawyers,accountants and tax specialists who worked,not for themselves, but for medical institutesand large corporations . Above them, on thetop five floors of the high-rise, was its upperclass, the discreet oligarchy of minor tycoonsand entrepreneurs, television actresses andcareerist academics, with their high-speed ele-vators and superior services, their carpetedstaircases. (2006 [1975]: 53)

This plausibly rendered vision of deeplyunsettling dysfunction involves a cast of pro-fessionals, entrepreneurs and intellectualswho band together in groups that take on atribal and ultimately violent character. InBallard’s dystopic high-rise this social strati-fication fuels resentment as confrontationsdevelop between floors and intimidationescalates into violence that takes on anincreasingly brutal and irreversible quality.Indeed, as the atmosphere becomes brittlewith tension, residents form raiding partiesand protection groups, elevators arehijacked, cars are smashed and assaults takeplace.

Despite their differences, both Wells andBallard powerfully animate the social rela-tionships they analyse through the spatialmetaphor of verticality, and in doing so theydramatise an observation that is currentlybeing explored in urban and spatial theory.The use of the vertical axis to explore socialdivisions appeals to a symbolic gesture thatis frequently grounded in the metaphor ofspatial geometry. In social terms, the verticalimplies hierarchy; deployed in spatial termsthe vertical highlights and concretisesinequities.

Cultural and urban historian, David Pike,in particular, has developed this point. Heargues that the use of such conceptual order-ing can be traced back to medievalChristendom, where the ‘vertical cosmos’located ‘good above and evil below’ (2005: 5;

Hewitt and Graham 7



see also Stallybrass and White, 1986). Thesymbolism reappears, Pike observes, in avariety of forms, pairings and tropes – highand low, up and down, upper and lower,light and dark, north and south – each con-taining powerful imaginative and conceptualconnotations beyond their identification of aspace and its relative location. Furthermore,Pike has argued that wherever it occurs verti-cal space is always hierarchised space (2005:90). This argument highlights the culturalconnotations and moral associations that arefrequently subject to spatialisation, but evenmore than Pike’s observations, the use ofvertical space to ground the class-based soci-eties of the speculative futures examined byboth Wells and Ballard signals the politicalpotency of high-rise building. What DeCauter (2005) has recently described as ‘thecapsular’ nature of contemporary urbanspace suggests that our current (and future)ability to build up may be increasingly ableto sustain extreme forms of social secessionthrough vertical splintering.

The aerial view: Power, distanceand the experience of verticality

At the top of Ballard’s dysfunctional verticalenclave we find Anthony Royal, one of thebuilding’s architects. Royal’s positionality‘on top’ is a source of intrigue and tensionfor the other residents of the high-rise. He is‘well-to-do’, arrogant and defensive, ‘deter-mined to outstare any criticism’ of the build-ing he helped to conceive (Ballard, 2006[1975]: 15, 27). He is also, ultimately, impo-tent, able only to limp through the buildingas it crumbles materially and socially anddestined to die rambling and starvedamongst the human and architecturaldebris.

However, early on, from his penthouseapartment, Royal is allowed the conceit thathe may act as ‘mid-wife’ to ‘a pattern ofsocial organisation that would become the

paradigm of all future high-rise blocks’(2006 [1975]: 70). Royal’s penthouse loca-tion, at the pinnacle of social and spatialscales, with an abstracted vision of the wholein the form of his plans and architecturaldrawings, appeals to a unique positionalityon the vertical scale. Indeed, it seems thatthe ultimate embodiment of power comesfrom what Topalov (1993) has called the‘zenithal’ position and the view it affords.Ballard uses that view, and the sense of dis-tance created through it, to frame theincreasing detachment of the high-rise resi-dents from the world surrounding them. ForRobert Laing, another central figure in thedrama of the high-rise and the only survivorof the narrative, it is this mode of perceptionthat explains his removal from his everydaylife, his work and the city around him:

Laing made less and less effort to leave thebuilding. He unpacked his record collectionand played himself into his new life, sitting onhis balcony and gazing across the parking-lotsand concrete plazas below him. Although theapartment was no higher than the 25th floor,he felt for the first time that he was lookingdown at the sky, rather than up at it. Each daythe towers of central London seemed slightlymore distant, the landscape of an abandonedplanet receding slowly from his mind. (2006[1975]: 9)

Like Ballard, Wells also utilises the elevatedposition and the aerial view that it permitsto illustrate an experience of profounddetachment, this time the detachment of thepowerful from the city they rule. In Wells’novel the streets and houses of VictorianLondon have been replaced by a ‘vast citystructure’ and, while the labouring popula-tion live in its depths, the powerful, the city’sCouncil, occupy an elaborate complexnestled beneath the domed roof of the cityonto which Graham makes an early escape(2005 [1910]: 69). This first experience of thehighest points of the city and the view they

8 Urban Studies



afford causes Graham to experience paralys-ing vertigo (2005 [1910]: 70), but later, whenhe goes in search of greater knowledge ofthe city he finds himself master of, he isshown to ‘the crow’s nest of the wind-vanekeeper’ from which the city, despite beinggripped by violent conflict looks serene, its‘luminous landscape undisturbed’ (2005[1910]: 125). Indeed, viewing from this posi-tion Graham:

could almost forget the thousands of men lyingout of sight in the artificial glare within thequasi-subterranean labyrinth, dead or dying oftheir overnight wounds, forget the impover-ished wards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses,and bearers feverishly busy . (2005 [1910]:125).

For both Ballard and Wells, then, the modeof perception offered by the aerial view rep-resents an experience of profound detach-ment in the fictional worlds they explore.The social life of the High-Rise degeneratesinto a violent dystopia as its inhabitantsretreat from their wider social relationshipsand become the voluntary captives of theapartment building, complicit in and protec-tive of their collective withdrawal from theworld around them.2 For Ballard, such aremoval from the surface and detachmentfrom the conventions of ‘normal’ sociabilityare the prerequisite that allows the violenceof the narrative to spiral towards ruin. Wellsuses the aerial view to further his explora-tion of the social stratification and antagon-ism of his 22nd-century London. In TheSleeper Awakes it is the aerial view and thepinnacle location that emphasises the with-drawal of the powerful from contact withthe labouring population of the city, the dis-tance between the two segments of societyand the subsequent invisibility both of thepoor and their exploitation.

Such an emphasis places the ethics andthe politics of the aerial view – the viewwhich vertically distanciates the top-down

viewer occupying the architectural heightsfrom the teeming city below – in the centreof attention. Recent contributions to the the-orisation of the aerial view have emphasisedthat this technique of visuality, characteristicof modern cartography and photography, aswell as urban planning, has a significantimpact on the perception and subsequentrelation to space. Adnan Morshed, for exam-ple, is among those who have pointed to thecentrality of this vision in the most radicallyinterventionist programmes of modernistarchitecture. Using what Morshed has calledthe dieu voyeur (the voyeur god), ‘twentieth-century urban planning sought to fulfil themodernist dream of transforming the cityinto an object of knowledge and a govern-able space’ (2002: 204; see also Boyer, 2003).Similarly, in his pioneering work on the cul-tural history of the aerial view, MarkDorrian has argued that the perspective ofdistance, abstraction and power securedthrough ascension has been a key narrativein Western modernity and that the aerialview ‘is conceptually linked to notions oftranscendent subjectivity, futurity andabstraction that have the potential to licensea violence directed towards the surface’(2006: 20).

The work of both Morshed and Dorriandeepen the observations and analysis madeby De Certeau in his iconic reflections onThe Practice of Everyday Life (1988). Inthose essays, De Certeau drew attention tothe ethics and experience of the distanciatedtop-down view of the city, seen from the topof the World Trade Center, in opposition tothe enmeshed corporeal worlds of the walk-ing city below. De Certeau’s concern torecognise and examine the relational implica-tions of perceptual positionality have formeda current of critique, which is visible amongcontemporary writers such as Morshed,Boyer and Dorrian; that same concern isdramatised in the fictional worlds created byWells and by Ballard, and these, too, provide

Hewitt and Graham 9



insights into and reflections on the socialethics of vertical spatial separation.

Cyberpunk verticalities

Over the later 20th century, keeping timewith its technological and philosophical con-text, SF underwent a series of profoundchanges in terms of both subject matter andnarrative form (see, for example, Levy,2009; Merrick, 2009). For some, through itsengagement with the trajectories of the pres-ent, the emergence of cyberpunk has offereda radical departure and a valuable vantagepoint. Kitchin and Kneale, for example,have pointed out that cyberpunk is ‘one ofthe first forms of literary genre to recognize,reflect and explore the postmodern condi-tion’ and that, as such, it offers ‘privilegedinsights into the contemporary’ (2001: 22).Indeed, as commentary and discussionground, cyberpunk narrativises some of thekey critiques that have been made of moder-nist philosophy. Thus, the traditional bin-aries of self/other, nature/technology, order/chaos, and so forth, are collapsed by thepost-human, technologically driven andvolatile worlds of cyberpunk. Furthermore,in relation to space, this has significant con-sequences for the landscapes imagined. Thespaces of cyberpunk leave little room for thestable geopolitics, the stasis and the essenti-alism characteristic of the accounts of spacegiven by modernist philosophers and writersalike. Instead, the landscapes of cyberpunkare more in keeping with the kind of spacetheorised by writers such as Doreen Massey(2005); they are heterogeneous, relationaland lively. They also, echoing a theme incontemporary critical urbanism which SteveGraham (2010) has powerfully underlined,emphasise the privatisation and the militari-sation of urban space.

William Gibson (1995) explicitly signalshis distance from the dominant modernistarchitectural and science fictional dreams of

the past by deploying those dreams as hallu-cinations in his short story, ‘The GernsbackContinuum’. In this engagement with the‘design science fiction’ of the past, Gibson’sprotagonist, an unnamed photographer,takes a job documenting the architecturaltraces of 1930s American pop culture.Becoming absorbed in his task as he drivesacross America photographing aging factorybuildings, motels and gas stations, he startsto see traces also of ‘a shadowy America-that-wasn’t’ (1995: 41). Appearing first inglimpses, and then in disturbingly convin-cing three-dimensionality, the city of fictionspast bears a striking resemblance to the cine-matic depictions of Lang’s Metropolis (1927)and Menzies Things to Come (1936). Theprotagonist is frightened by this Americandream, with its towering spires and soaringroads and polished blond inhabitants whohave ‘all the sinister fruitiness of HitlerYouth propaganda’ (1995: 47). Indeed,Gibson’s protagonist hopes the vision is onlyan ‘amphetamine pyschosis’ (1995: 46), butas the narrative resolves, he retreats into tra-shy television and the daily rehearsal of cata-strophe found in newspaper headlines; theimage of the totalising society imagined bythe past, he decides, is far worse than the‘near-dystopia we live in’ (1995: 50).

The vertical spaces of Gibson’s futures, incontrast, share none of the modernist clarityexemplified by the landscapes of Metropolisor Things to Come; they are fragmented, vio-lent and vulnerable. Furthermore, as Gibsonpaints them, Nighttown, the San FranciscoBridge and Hak Nam each provide imagerythat is strongly at odds with early and mid20th-century architectural visions. Gibson’svertical worlds are captured and repurposedenclaves offering the protection of chaos,random accretions materialising an impro-vised and provisional architecture.Nighttown’s Pit, for example, is whereJohnny Mnemonic goes to hide when he ishunted by the multinational Yakuza,

10 Urban Studies



because in the Pit ‘any outside influence gen-erates swift, concentric ripples of rawmenace’ (1995: 22). It looks like a ‘disusedmaintenance yard’, spirals up to the geodesicroof structure where the Lo Teks (the localgang) ‘leech their webs and huddling placesto the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy’(1995: 29–30). And Johnny stays there,secreted away from view, becoming part ofthe social, spatial and technological networkthat makes the Pit tick. Neil Campbellargues these architectural figures in Gibson’swork are spaces of resistance and possibilityreminiscent of the Bakhtinian carnival(2000: 160–161). The exemplar of this ima-ginary appears in Gibson’s much quotedaccount of the San Francisco bridge:

Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lostwithin an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors,gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked withdecaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, ofcut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensedpawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers. Dreams ofcommerce, their locations generally corre-sponding with the decks that had once carriedvehicular traffic; while above them, rising to

the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted theintricately suspended barrio, with its unnum-bered population and its zones of more privatefantasy. (Gibson, 1994: 58–59).

This structure is at the centre of the plot ofVirtual Light, the first of Gibson’s bridgetrilogy. The novel tells the story of the theftof glasses that contains visualisations of avirtual model, a masterplan for SanFrancisco that would remake the city’s land-scape in a cliche of modernist destruction.The San Francisco bridge stands as theembodied antithesis of this vision. It is a bri-colage of fragments patched together, ‘a car-nival,’ reminiscent of ‘the favelas of Rio’,with ‘a fairy quality to the secondary con-struction’ that has built up over the ‘vertical-ity of the core structure’s poetry ofsuspension’ (Gibson, 1994: 58, 1999: 18). As

a central space of the plot and a heuristicdevice for Gibson’s social and spatial reflec-tions, the bridge represents something radi-cally different from both the landscapes ofthe past and from the privatised, militarisedurban splintering that surrounds it. Thebridge emerged out of an act of opposition,but not an act those involved are willing todesignate as ‘politics’. As Skinner, one ofthose who initiated occupation of the struc-ture, explains ‘‘‘Shit happens. Happened thatnight. No signal, no leader, no architects.You think it was politics. That particulardance . that’s over’’’ (1995: 86). Indeed, thesocial commentary embedded in VirtualLight in the form of Yamazaki’s (a Japanesestudent of existential sociology) reflectionsindicate that the bridge is a manifestation ofa qualitatively different experience, one thatpartakes in the sense of a fissure in thenature of the times:

Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, throughthe thousand things, the unwashed smiles andthe smoke of cooking, like concentric rings ofsound from some secret bell .We are come

not only past the century’s closing, he thought,

the millennium’s turning, but to the end of some-

thing else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the

signs of closure. Modernity was ending. (1995:89–90)

Gibson’s spaces, then, problematise themetaphorical shift between conceptualisa-tions of social organisation, particularlysocial class, and vertical space because theydo not seem easily to accommodate themodern categorical project of class distinc-tions and hierarchies. Thus, the sense thatsocial divisions can be mapped throughspace with clarity and confidence is lost, andwhat we seem to be left with is a critique ofthe metaphorical alignments explored earlierin relation to Wells and Ballard. The socio-spatial hierarchies are certainly at momentsreplaced by something more dynamic andunstable, more creative and provisional, yet

Hewitt and Graham 11



Gibson also highlights the vulnerability ofthese spaces and points to their creation outof necessity. In the case of the Bridge, itsinhabitants build upwards because they havelittle or no space on the surface. Thus, whileGibson’s vertical spaces step well beyond thearchitectural orderliness of the modern highrise, and while the social hierarchies of thelate 19th and early 20th centuries do notmap readily onto the landscape Gibsondepicts, there remains ground for common-ality. In particular, there remains a strongsense of social bifurcation in Gibson’s narra-tives and his vertical spaces can be read asan architecturally creative solution to themilitarisation, privatisation and control ofthe surface.

Conclusions

In a recent discussion of the way 20th-cen-tury literature has represented sociologistsand sociology, Diane Bjorklund (2001: 36)argued that novelists and sociologists arecompetitors, their choice of discipline sig-nifying differing epistemological convictionsabout how it is possible to engage with, ana-lyse and represent social life. Her suggestionpoints to questions that are important in thecurrent context, when interdisciplinarityholds a reified position, but the argumentthat literature and social science are oppos-ing forms of knowledge is difficult to sus-tain. As we noted at the outset of this paper,the relationship between SF, architectureand planning, and the development of urbanspace is complex, but fully visible, reciprocaland longstanding. Like Kitchin and Kneale(2001, 2005), we suggest that the criticalcommentaries of SF offer considerable util-ity to contemporary urban social scientists.Furthermore, in our view, though SFliterature and urban social science representdifferent ways of investigating and commen-tating upon urban modernity, rather thanthe oppositional epistemic modes of art and

science, we suggest that drawing SF into adialogue with urban social science demon-strates important critical and analyticalcommon ground.

In each of the examples of SF that wehave examined, the narratives have featuredthe vertical growth of the urban landscapeand identified the ways in which that upwardgrowth reflected, and had implications for,inequalities in urban social life. Urban socialscience is beginning to recognise and docu-ment those development processes whichhave excavated downwards and stretchedupwards so rapidly over the past century ofurbanisation, but analytical engagementwith that material growth remains embryo-nic in comparison with the systematic treat-ment of urban horizontal extension. What ismade clear in the novels we have discussedhere is that urban life distributed over thevertical axis, built through increasing tech-nological and engineering capabilities, andmade desirable and necessary by the increas-ing density and inequality of urban popula-tions, is one powerful way in which the citycan function to spatially differentiate itsinhabitants. Indeed, in the spatial metaphorof verticality deployed by Wells and Ballard,the fictional high-rise provides the materialframe for explorations of precisely thosesocial inequalities. Furthermore, what bothwriters identify through their fictional repre-sentations of high-rise living is, today,increasingly visible in the verticalities of eliteurban living.3

Such fictional accounts of the future helpus to raise questions about the experiencesand imaginaries of our contemporary metro-politan landscapes; from a historical dis-tance, they nevertheless offer critiques ofpresent inequalities. They also suggest thatto be located and to look down from aboveis not ethically neutral. The unproblematicand unreflective acceptance of the carto-graphic view in urban social science, particu-larly urban geography and planning, which

12 Urban Studies



has been related to the treatment of cities ashorizontally extending entities, should alsobe subject to critical scrutiny as our focus ofenquiry shifts towards attempting an under-standing of that vertical relationship. Theepistemological and empirical bias of thetop-down gaze becomes ethically question-able as we interrogate the nature of the dis-tanciation on which it is predicated.

As a commentary on and critique of con-temporary processes, our selection of novelsalso highlights the vulnerability of urbanspace as privatisation, violence and sophisti-cated technology work to intersect in influ-encing the functionality of cities. The shiftaway from a metaphorical alignment ofspace and social structure, exemplified inthis paper by Gibson’s narratives, alsobrings important analytical themes to theforeground. The violence common to allthree novels is pushed further by the cyber-punk imaginary and accompanied by thenecessity to build upwards, by a denial ofspace to those with the least resources. Thewritings we discuss here share importantcommonalities in their subject matter; alldeal with social bifurcation and with the wayurban space both animates and concretisesthose distinctions. Yet the move into the ter-ritories imagined by the cyberpunk genre,and in particular by Gibson, is importantbecause it complicates, presses our thinkingfurther, encompasses the militarisation andprivatisation of the urban landscape which isdetectable in our present, asks that we takeseriously the right to space in the city.

In addressing these themes, what is per-haps most striking is the way SF literaturehas been consistently interested in analyticaland spatial themes that have only recentlybecome prominent in urban theory andresearch. We argued in our opening discus-sion that the ‘vertical turn’ discussed bysome contemporary writers is an importantcorrective to the surficial preoccupationsthat have dominated so much work in the

broad field of urban social science. In thetemporal breadth of these literary accountswe see very clearly that the recognition ofthis theme by social scientists comes late,and that it has been prefigured in the criticalcommentaries of SF writers. The analyticalthemes and the historical grounding for anextension of the contemporary vertical turncan be, therefore, well supported by a widerengagement with other types of knowledge.Certainly, in addressing the sociologies andpower geometries of the verticalisation char-acteristic of contemporary cities, urban stud-ies can gain much by excavating the deepimaginative histories that have attended ver-tical cities within literature.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. He also developed an account of the ramifica-tions of this in The Time Machine (Wells,2005 [1895]), articulating a vision of the futurein which humanity had diverged into the tech-nologically advanced, but subterranean andpredatory, Morlocks and the child-like andinnocent Eloi, their prey.

2. For example: ‘A police car approached theperimeter entrance. A few residents were leav-ing for work at this early hour, neatly dressedin suits and raincoats, briefcases in hand. Theabandoned cars in the access roads preventedthe police from reaching the main entrance tothe building, and the officers stepped out andspoke to the passing residents. Usually noneof them would have replied to an outsider,but now they gathered in a group around thetwo policemen . Clearly they were pacifyingthe policemen, reassuring them that every-thing was in order, despite the garbage andbroken bottles scattered around the building’Ballard (2006 [1975]: 131).

3. For example, Gabriel Mascaro’s exceptional2009 documentary film Um Lugar ao sol




(High-Rise) shows how vastly different theexperience of urban life is for those who canafford penthouse apartments in Rio de Janeiro.

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Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature