Disorientation in the unmaking of high‐rise homes

Abstract

This paper expands our understanding of vertical urbanism, and specifically the experience of home in high-rise housing, by assessing and mobilising a "disorientated geographies" approach. It follows Bissell and Gorman-Murray's recent call for researchers to better account for the logics of disconnection and undoing in geographical inquiry. Building on their exploration of "disorientated geographies," this paper examines the lived experience of three single men living in high-rise housing to revisit the high-rise as home. It aims to advance prevailing understandings of urban vertical living and more specifically of the processes through which these homes are made and unmade. Drawing on in-depth interviews with apartment dwellers in new high-rise housing in London and Melbourne, we explore residents' loss of orienting relations through their feelings of frustration, restlessness, and disappointment. We consider how these emotional states contribute to destabilise their homes as these three men struggle to comprehend and orient themselves within the sociospatial environment of the high-rise, and specifically an environment compromised by design and build quality issues. We argue that disorientation provides a useful but undervalued vantage point from which to understand the making and unmaking of vertical homes. In so doing, we foreground and sharpen understandings of the role of verticality, in particular, in these processes of home-unmaking. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. Conceptually, it both expands the application of disorientated geographies into a novel urban setting and broadens its frames of reference by examining other bodily experiences and emotions. Empirically, we advance understandings of the lived experience of vertical urbanisms by drawing new and productive links between verticality and disorientation that move us beyond consideration of purely physiological responses, such as vertigo or dizziness, to high-rise living, to better account for a fuller range of bodily, emotional, and social practices.

Assembling high-rise: The uneven agencies of air in suburban densification in the Anthropocene

“…(cf. Dorignon and Nethercote, 2021). Thus, while air science labours to abstract air from atmosphere -to pin-point one characteristic, isolate it from its context and create a set of generalisations about this characteristic -Mahgol's account underscores the plurality of air and its ongoing, relational character.…”

“…Within a single molecule, air connects us to bushfire, car-dependencies and urban heat islands in densifying suburbs directing attention to the ‘solidifying and melting edges between people, regions, and events’ (Choy, 2011: 145). Residential apartment buildings actively enter into these relationships by ‘texturing’ air through design, infrastructure and fixtures that collectively exaggerate or dampen sound (Barber, 2020; Kerr et al, 2018; Power, 2015), light (Ebbensgaard, 2022), pathogen ecologies (Wakefield-Rann, 2021) and affective atmospheres (Dorignon and Nethercote, 2021). These airy networks are a co-production of material and immaterial worlds, compelling an analytic framework that can hold seemingly disparate elements and places in relation.…”

Common Areas, Common Causes: Public Space in High-Rise Buildings During Covid-19

“…In another, we can see it as contributing to a kind of "capsular" society in which one's unit is one's fortress, and separation and hyper-individualization are key (De Cauter, 2004). Indeed, the development of modernist tower neighbourhoods was oriented towards "the remaking of people as well as environments" (Graham, 2016, p. 182), and more recent scholarship understands the verticality of the high-rise form as a force capable of powerfully shaping how residents live and producing unique affective experiences (Dorignon & Nethercote, 2021;Graham & Hewitt, 2013;Hadi et al, 2018;Shilon & Eizenberg, 2021).…”

Housing in Germany and the Rebirth of the High-Rise in Post-Modern Urban Design

“…The critical assessments of high-rise residential buildings expressed in the early works are repeatedly taken up in architectural criticism (for example, Jonak, 2001Jonak, /2018. However, they give way in the face of more detailed studies of residential satisfaction and renewed appreciation (Kabisch et al, 2022;van Damme et al, 2021; in the international context, see Althaus, 2018;Dorignon & Nethercote, 2021;Kalantari & Shepley, 2021;Lukas, 2007;Power, 1999;Turkington et al, 2004;van Kempen & Musterd, 1991;Wu & Ge, 2020) as well as a recent increase in the construction of high-rise residential buildings in German metropolises against the background of housing market shortages, enormously rising real estate prices, and increasingly spectacular individual projects, a tendentially rather open-minded echo among consumers, in the general press, and in real estate magazines (Baulinks, 2015;Hilgenstock, 2011;Jung, 2016;Kiefer, 2016;"Marktreport: Fast 80 neue Wohnhochhäuser in Deutschland bis 2018Zabel, 2020). The main drivers and manifestations are being discussed, but, not infrequently, the focus is on planned projects without following up more closely which of them are realized.…”