Ordinary vertical urbanisms: City apartments and the everyday geographies of high-rise families

Abstract

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.

Multi-sensory ethnography and vertical urban transformation: ascending the Peckham Skyline

“…Indeed, this call has been taken up to provide insights into the everyday geographies of home among those who live in high-rise residential developments (Nethercote & Horne, 2016;Baxter, 2017) and the experience of communal spaces at height in Hadi, Heath & Oldfield's (2018) ethnography of sky gardens in Singapore. The embodiment and inhabitation of being at height also emerge as themes within such literature, including the 'Vicarious Vertigo' of those involved in co-producing high-up spaces (Butt, 2018), the bodily practice of urban climbers (Brighenti & Pavoni, 2017), and the experience of walking on glass viewing platforms at height (Deriu, 2018).…”

When Social Infrastructure Deficits Create Displacement Pressures: Inner City Schools and the Suburbanization of Families in Melbourne

“…Market‐led inner city development remains underpinned by normative assumptions about city life, with high‐rise living marketed to the young and the childless, as a counterpoint to suburban homes and nuclear family lifestyles (Fincher, ; Easthope and Tice, ; cf . Nethercote and Horne, ). These misreadings fuel a broader state failure to anticipate, accommodate or adequately plan for the needs of families in the central city, including for public education.…”

Vertical segregation of apartment building dwellers during late state socialism in Bucharest, Romania

“…In recent years, the rates of high-rise housing development and vertical extensions (both upward and downward) of urban space have been unprecedented and have inspired scholars to call for critical research about vertical separation (Graham, 2015;Graham & Hewitt, 2012;Harris, 2015;Nethercote & Horne, 2016). Essentially, the vertical turn in human geography has its roots in critical urban and/or political studies highlighting vertical perspectives of power, sovereignty, and space.…”

“…The appearance of luxury towers for elites in fashionable global cities [New York, Dubai, Mumbai, Toronto (Bernstein, 2005;McNeill, 2015)] is argued to trigger the division of urban space into new vertical enclaves and residualized surface space. Nonetheless, it seems that the available research on vertical urbanism is still geographically and methodologically selective (Nethercote & Horne, 2016), which raises the question whether patterns discerned in "iconic" contexts are truly universal (Harris, 2015).…”

“…Answering a recent call to refocus scholarly attention on the vertical dimension of urbanization (Graham, 2015) especially the call to shift scholarly attention to "ordinary" cities (Nethercote & Horne, 2016) and to investigate other threads in vertical urbanism than those of verticalized territorial violence (Harris, 2015) this article investigates the patterns of vertical segregation in Bucharest, Romania during socialism. Vertical segregationin contrast to horizontal segregationrefers to the social and/or ethnic stratification by floor of residence within apartment buildings (Maloutas & Spyrellis, 2016).…”