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In many new world cities, inner city apartment development proceeds at unprecedented rates. In dominant urban planning and property development discourses, new inner city dwellers are consumption-orientated young professionals and “empty nesters”—all similarly childless. Nonetheless, families make their homes in city apartments, and their experiences are not well understood. Meanwhile, within urban and political geography, new interest in verticality has directed attention to the changing urban topography and volumetric profile of cities. However, a topographic bias occludes the mundane, intensive relations that enervate these everyday lived spaces (i.e. ordinary topologies), while a fascination with spectacular urbanisms and cities in conflict neglects other “ordinary” vertical urbanisms. Drawing on a qualitative study of high-rise families in inner city Melbourne (Australia), this article responds both to calls for a more topological rendering of vertical urbanisms and the neglected experiences of vertical urban families. We detail the intimate and material geographies of high-rise family living and highlight how the topologies of high-rise living and the topographies of urban intensification projects intersect, including with benign and hopeful prospects for the contemporary city.

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This article advances understandings of Melbourne’s dramatic vertical expansion over the last decade by attending to the political economies of its high-rise housing development. Melbourne’s major high-rise development in the wake of the financial crisis represents a radical yet poorly understood departure from the city’s traditional patterns of suburban development. This article applies an existing conceptual framework for residential vertical urbanisation informed by heterodox political economy and critical geography. Drawing on secondary sources supplemented by supply-side stakeholder perspectives, the analysis shows how Melbourne’s high-rise development assisted in syphoning significant investor capital into the city. This not only expanded the local housing stock but, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and later, amid ongoing economic uncertainty, Melbourne’s high-rise construction served both economic and geopolitical/symbolic functions in the city’s ongoing inter-urban competition for hyper mobile flows of capital and highly-skilled workers. Large apartment projects fuelled the Victorian economy and filled state coffers through property-related revenue. Meanwhile, the city’s dramatic vertical expansion helped project a powerful image of Melbourne around the world. Its crane-filled skyline heralded a thriving economy, and its new thicket of towers rendered a striking impression of urbane high-density living. Together these representations helped promote Melbourne as a vibrant, desirable place to live, work, and invest. Looking beyond the planning failures and planning politics identified in planners’ critiques of Melbourne’s vertical expansion, this article showcases the state’s considerable stakes in this development, and its role in smoothing the way for this expansion to occur.

Under post-welfarist realignments in neoliberal democracies, the provision of welfare is increasingly conditional on claimants fulfilling certain (behavioural)