Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers

by Stephen Graham

A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet

Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical , Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.

Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?

Vertical will make you look at the world around you this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Politics, Urbanism, Geography, Cities, Urban

416 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2016

About the author

Stephen Graham is an academic and author who researches cities and urban life. He is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit and is based in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.

Professor Graham has a background in Geography, Planning and the Sociology of Technology. His research centres, in particular, on:

•relations between cities, technology and infrastructure
•urban aspects of surveillance
•the mediation of urban life by digital technologies; and
• connections between security, militarisation and urban life.
Writing, publishing and lecturing across many countries and a variety of disciplines, Professor Graham has been Visiting Professor at MIT and NYU, amongst other institutions. The author, editor or co-author of seven major books, his work has been translated into eleven languages

Reviews

[Bob H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating work takes a new look at human topology, with more attention to economic and social engineering than to architecture or engineering as such -- a focus on the impacts and reactions to vertical structures. It focuses not just on skyscrapers, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai or the new 1000m tower rising in Medina but on subterranean structures as well, both the tunnel systems honeycombing the depths of major cities and the deep mines that provide the material for cities and skyscrapters. Indeed, we find, the deepest mines are far longer than the skyscrapers are high, but requiring much the same engineering -- elevators, ventilation, pulley cables or ropes -- as skyscrapers.

We also learn of the impacts, social and economic, of these same mines providing a jaw-dropping proportion of world resources, while leaving toxic waste and destitute workers mining it. We learn of the gentrification of high-rise living and the subterranean urban colonies of the poorer classes, of the heat and noise pollution, of the increasing concentration of wealth in new urban high-rises. We learn of vertical segregation by skywalks and elevated transit, and of the segregation of breathable air.

There's also a military aspect to it, not the least because these urban landscapes would, time and again, be targets. A 2005 art exhibition could show a futuristic 1939 painting, Tullio Crali's "Nose Diving on the City," and not really ponder its implication, that such an urban view in 1939 would be that of a dive-bomber pilot.

http://media.mutualart.com/Images/200...

We learn, later in the book, that the tallest hill in Berlin, the Teufelsberg, is not only man-made but consists of the rubble of World War II bombing. We learn of higher verticality than buildings, in the legions of satellites overhead, and their implications, including military, and the countermeasures against them. We learn of the proliferation of deep bunkers and the countermeasures against them.

Some of the book is political, in the sense that it discusses the climate implications of all this, both cause and effect, and the geography of walls (e.g., the U.S. border with Mexico, or the walls Israel builds, as well as the tunneling to circumvent them and the countermeasures for that). We learn that digs under cities and towns can have archaeological implications, both to preserve the past or to justify a national identity.

This is an intriguing and original story, the human geography of verticality and its human implications. Highest recommendation.

[Dеnnis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Если вам хочется узнать, где находятся самые динамичные экономики мира, забудьте о ВВП, статистике безработицы и трендах потребления. Все, что вам нужно, это ответ на простой вопрос: «Где самые быстрые лифты?» Неожиданно, но факт — синоним амбициозных инвестпроектов, километровые небоскребы требуют самых передовых технологий, а скоростной лифт — самое узкое место строительства. «Вертикаль» Стивена Грэма предлагает по-новому взглянуть на города и технологии: сверху вниз, давая срез от спутников до шахт и бомбоубежищ. Города действительно начинаются уже в небе: воздух в них на 3–10 градусов теплее, а летающих в Пекин пилотов учат садиться в смог. Другой совет инвесторам — покупайте акции производителей кондиционеров, поскольку самые бысторастущие гигантские города расположены в жарком климате.

Погружение в подземелья не менее увлекательно, чем подъем в небеса: под Парижем «проживает» 6 млн покойников — больше, чем живых, а под Лондоном в 2015-м с трудом уничтожили Fatberg, десятитонный ком жира.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent critique of urbanism that shifts our spatial focus from the horizontal grid of maps to the vertical hierarchy from satellites to the deepest mines. It gets a bit repetitive towards the end, but it’s an engaging, informative, and appropriately infuriating read.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Although Google Earth clearly has enormous potential as an aid to activism and critique, it is easy to forget that such new, GPS-enabled activism relies fundamentally on ‘dual-use’ devices that can function only because of military rocket launches. Such efforts are also based on the deployment of a series of twenty-four geosynchronous satellites used continually to drop murderous ordnance of a wide range of countries. And they are inevitably mediated through imperial networks of militarised ground stations and data centres, relying fundamentally on a network of atomic clocks run by the US Air Force."

"Working face-recognition drones, trawling images from all manner of high-resolution social media and image and other biometric and information databases, would, at a stroke, radically undermine remaining notions of public anonymity on city streets."

"In 2008 – an admittedly exceptional year – twelve air ambulances crashed in the US alone, killing twenty-nine crew and patients.54 Civilian helicopters crash, on average, forty-three times more often than winged aircraft per 100,000 hours of flying time.”

"In many social or low-income housing towers, however, the costs and difficulties of maintaining elevators present a perennial problem. Often, vertical transport crises caused by decrepit, obsolescent or unreliable elevators lead to problems of social isolation in cities just as powerfully as the more visible and familiar crises of horizontal mobility through failed or disrupted rail, subway, auto or air travel systems.”

"In an eerie parallel to the mechanism of the towers’ demise nearly three decades later, other critics of the project also condemned the towers’ construction as a brutal act of ‘urbicidal’ violence – that is, violence against the city."

"Sixteen acres of dense streetscape, including ‘Little Syria’ – a thriving Middle Eastern neighbourhood – were erased to clear the ground for the construction of the Twin Towers.”

"Caught in the pincers between these forces and the growing privatism and elitism of many urban planning regimes in neoliberalising cities, the city’s resident population, Kaika argues, is often left to deal with arrogant landscapes of power made up of strings of poorly designed, highly secured and unbreachable ‘objects of desire’ that are inaccessible to all but a wealthy elite.”

"The urban growth skyward often thus becomes merely a process of the marketisation of land and real estate organised more for the ‘housing’ of elite capital than for a city’s people (let alone a city’s poorer population)."

"The wider city is usually rendered as a mere aesthetic backdrop of startling (and expensive) views: a premium panorama to be consumed from on high, at a safe distance from the people who actually inhabit it far below."

"Very often, indeed, the processes through which new housing towers are constructed amount to programmes of engineered gentrification, which forcibly evict or sweep away the remnants of earlier periods where housing was at least to some extent organised collectively based on criteria of social need."

"‘the dismal reputation of public housing high-rises had grown to such monstrous proportions that it overshadowed the reality on the ground … But the idea of pervasive and irrevocable dysfunction in the system was the first necessary component of an agenda to eradicate public housing.’"

"myths about the inevitable failure of vertical public housing have been so widely generalised that they are endlessly repeated as accepted facts in many Western societies."

"myths have been used to justify the wholesale dismantling of all public and social housing provision, or their systematic neglect and impoverishment."

"Redlining, deindustrialisation and the growing emergence of racialised ghettos in Pruitt-Igoe and similar projects allowed mainstream media to demonise such places and their inhabitants."

"In the context of contemporary housing crises, mythical assumptions that any high-rise housing for lower-income residents must necessarily be a bad idea are profoundly unhelpful."

"we must recognise the systematic deindustrialisation of and disinvestment in many of the surrounding local economies imagined to sustain the towers and the severe problems of mass unemployment that followed."

"Successes in vertical social housing have occurred when design, maintenance and management have been of a high quality; where residents have been able to maintain their economic fortunes amid dramatic processes of urban restructuring; and where residents have had continued inputs into the design and management of their homes."

"In nations where mass high-rise housing has been organised for whole populations – as in Singapore and Hong Kong – high levels of maintenance, rent regulation and the provision of mass transit, decent public and commercial services and quality landscaping have helped to make tower living relatively popular, even for families."

"communities who inhabit modernist high-rises can shape and transform them in important ways that often belie the apparently monolithic architecture of such structures.”

"the sprouting of towers for the super-rich that in many cities now constitutes de facto housing policy is a social catastrophe in the making."

"material and often dystopian embodiment of the ways in which the current neoliberal version of capitalism continues to concentrate ever more extreme amounts of wealth and resources into the hands of the very few, to be used to sustain speculative dynamics that accentuate this wealth further while severely damaging the lives and life chances of everyone else."

"such processes of neoliberalisation are merely allowing cities to be reconstructed into forests of super-tall cocoons, owned and controlled by the super-rich, who might occasionally deign to occasionally even inhabit the structures."

"methods must be developed to channel a significant portion of the profits from land development into resources for creating accessible and high-quality housing for the urban masses based on regulated rents and abilities to pay."

"Zoning and ‘planning gain’, to stipulate social and affordable housing obligations, offers merely a camouflage that allows developers to buy off planners and construct ever-more elite housing towers."

"efforts are necessary to tax the capital gains from elite housing locally in order to finance nonmarket and affordable housing."

"Without more fundamental transformations at the structural level – changes that will inevitably mean important alterations in the political and economic dynamics of capitalism – little can be done to improve things."

"truly public and fully regulated social housing must be rehabilitated as a pivotal idea."

"The growing disconnect between housing and labour markets will inevitably continue to create larger and larger populations of evictees and homeless, and to drive out the poorer and middle classes who are fundamental to the continued economic and social vitality of cities."

"As global temperatures rise, the growing frequency of urban heat crises, and the fact that the air-conditioned interior dumps its heat onto the street outside, mean that interior skywalk cities will also inevitably exaggerate the urban heat-island problems faced by their cities."

"The new Jewish-only settlement of Tel Rumeida, carved since 1999 out of the middle of a Palestinian neighbourhood in the ancient city of Hebron on the West Bank, has even been built on stilts within a protective wall as a means of protecting Bronze Age excavations beneath it that are used to bolster historical Jewish claims that the area was the original ‘City of David’. To sustain this situation, and to support the settlement of Tel Rumeida by groups of ultra-nationalistic and often violent Jewish fundamentalists, much of the old centre of Hebron has been violently remodelled as a sterile and highly militarised security landscape.”

"Cellar-occupants also feature widely in Marxist and radical critiques of the extreme inequalities inherent within capitalist urban industrialisation"

"Friedrich Engels, horrified at the living conditions of the workers in 1880s Manchester, emphasised how the process of forcing the poor into teeming cellars worked to render them increasingly invisible to above surface lives of the city’s mercantile bourgeoisie. Token reforms merely redistributed the crisis spatially. ‘In reality’, Engels wrote, ‘the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion – that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew.’ Without structural reorganisation of labour and housing markets, Engels argued, the destruction of notorious slum areas merely meant that slum housing would ‘appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighbourhood! The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere!’"

"Worsening crises in London, Toronto, New York, Vancouver and elsewhere are forcing larger and larger populations of poorer tenants into illegal units and overcrowded basements."

"idea of ‘underground’ film, publishing, music, activism or other forms of culture has long connected subversion and bohemian living with the occupation of subterranean spaces."

"New York’s lively gay, lesbian, transvestite and drugs scenes between the 1910s and 1930s centred on a range of illicit basement nightclubs in districts like Greenwich Village, set up partly to escape the constraints of Prohibition (1919–1933). This led many commentators to connect basements per se with illicit, exotic, and, for the political right, degenerate sexual and drug subcultures."

"Such psychoanalytic celebrations of the power of basements to link positively to subconscious and primordial worlds of fear, madness, hell and haunting, however, are likely to ring decidedly hollow to those forced to inhabit inadequate basements because of poverty and the rampant housing crises which afflict so many of the world’s major cities."

"In response to the revolutionary insurrections in 1848, Haussmann sought to use the process of ploughing a citywide system of boulevards through the labyrinthine fabric of Parisian alleyways to deliberately expel or carve up many of the most notorious poorer districts that were deemed to be centres of insurrection."

"Boulevards were designed to the width of one cavalry squadron; vistas were opened up so that the streets would be extremely hard to block with barricades and could be swept by artillery. In addition, troublesome populations were forcibly decanted away from the city core."

"Spaces in which society’s outcasts could gather, the sewers were refuges from which to challenge the bourgeois order above."

"In Les Misérables the sewer is a place where the poor and the outcasts of society gather together as a collective population which can erupt upwards at any moment to threaten the world above ground."

"Sewers thus became central to a powerfully technocratic ideology of managing the city’s flows and circulations through a series of scientifically constructed infrastructural edifices."

"As the odour of human excrement was removed from the urban surface, its associations changed radically. As ‘the smell of human excrement began to lose the last semblance of its rural associations with fertility: from now on it was to be indicative of disorder, decay and physical repulsion.’"

"‘shit’ was culturally transformed into ‘sewage’;"

"excretory city became veiled and removed from the deodorised surface within the systems of subterranean sewers."

"In the process, in many cities the human act of exploiting gravity by defecating vertically down into the sanitised toilet in the modern home becomes strangely disconnected from the sewers that lie immediately below."

"The act of defecating in a modern private toilet thus becomes delinked from other places or processes."

"Huge efforts are made in contemporary urban life to construct this myth of the complete separation of individual intimacy from the vast collective sewer infrastructures just below the porcelain."

"The huge work necessary to continually bring water to the city while removing its shit – the very metabolism of urban life – goes on continually, underground as well as beyond the city."

"For Freud, ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and [is] long familiar … which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.’"

"The history of linking the representation of women – especially the demonised figure of the prostitute – in analogous ways to the threats of contaminated water is especially important here."

"Historian Christopher E. Forth stresses that women’s bodily life has widely been inscribed ‘as a mode of seepage’ that is inherently threatening to civilisation, order and male power and which requires paternalistic or violent control (or both) to ensure both physical and social hygiene (as well as controlled sexuality and reproduction)."

"In filling the ‘lower’ city with an endless array of demons, monsters and urban myths, these ideas work to make the lives of the people whose working lives involve the movement of the city’s shit even less visible and even more marginal than they would otherwise be."

"1.7 million people are killed every year by diseases caused by poor water and sanitation (88 per cent of which are caused by infectious diarrheal diseases).”

"Public defecation in parks, roadsides or creeks is thus now criminalised in many Indian cities, even though millions of people have little choice but to practice it. Within neoliberal megacities with utterly inadequate sanitation, rather than a matter of public politics or municipal action, the act of shitting is all too easily reconstructed as an individual, private matter within a bourgeois notion of order, cleanliness and criminality."

"it is really bad. Water mixes with the shit and when we carry it [on our heads] it drips from the baskets, onto our clothes, our bodies, our faces. When I return home I find it difficult to eat food sometimes. The smell never gets out of my clothes, my hair. But this is our fate. To feed my children I have no option but to do this work."

"The entire population of toilet cleaners in India are ‘Dalits’, the people previously labelled with the ultimate pejorative ‘untouchables’. Through extreme religious and social demonisation, they are confined to the ‘lowest’ category within India’s complex caste system. The system itself derives from a 4,000-year-old set of Hindu laws that manufacture metaphorical connections between the vertical aspects of theological, social and bodily realms more powerfully than any other discussed in this book."

"Dalits were deemed to be so abject that they were not even deemed to originate from the ‘lower’ body of the Creator. The result has been complete demonisation, extreme violent domination and a process of often unremarked exclusion."

"contemporary so-called ‘asymmetric’ conflict between states and nonstate adversaries renders the burrowing of the adversary as inherently problematic"

"Not to be forgotten, of course, the entire command complex of the US military and state itself is deeply buried within a series of massive, high-tech bunker complexes buried deep into the bedrock.”

"Advocates of a new range of nuclear bunker busters even argue that nuclear explosions are a good way of dealing with buried chemical or biological warfare facilities."

"‘Just as every wall casts a shadow’, architect Bryan Finoki writes, ‘so too does each inspire its own mechanism of subversion … The wall is an object that inadvertently designs its own negation’, in the form of tunnel systems.”

"cross-border tunnels work to render the above-ground discourses of perfect, militarised control as little less than a post 9/11 ‘security theatre’."

"They thus work to challenge lucrative military-industrial fantasies, organised by politicians and contractors to symbolise projects deemed to ‘protect’ vulnerable national identities against some demonised, external or racialised other.”

"‘By driving the world’s labor/refugee overflow underground, it becomes easier to perceive such a superfluous population as less human and through a wider lens of “ferality”."

"The large and diverse homeless communities that have long inhabited the tunnels of Manhattan certainly face much greater challenges in settling in than was the case in the 1980s and 1990s. Those living there for many years have been removed at gunpoint as part of the subterranean security drive that happened as part of the city’s ‘war on terror’."

"In 2011, Marc Singer, whose celebrated year 2000 documentary Dark Days was made in partnership with subterranean communities living in an abandoned section of the city’s subway system, revisited the tunnels that he had lived in. ‘It was quite surreal’, he recalls. ‘Amtrak [the US passenger train operating authority] had hollowed out the space. There used to be actual paintings and amazing art there, but they’d painted it grey. There was no graffiti, no rats, no semblance that anyone had ever lived there. It was quite sanitised and heavily patrolled.’”

"As we stressed in the introduction, books and atlases of exploration have long used a bird’s-eye view from nowhere to mark colonial conquests as sequences of coloured-in shapes on globes or flat cartography."

"Such imperial resource grabs are pivotal but neglected elements within a neoliberalised version of capitalism which produces an increasingly savage sorting of a small cabal of überwealthy winners centred on a few global cities – and a mass of losers."

"All are controlled by a few giant and often esoteric multinationals; use vast amounts of scarce water and energy; are huge polluters; and are run and owned by tiny cabals of super-rich elites of financiers and predatory speculators, in often-corrupt alliances with states at various scales, and frequently backed by local security forces or their own violent militias."

"Trade unionists and community activists working against mining corporations are often targeted and killed. Toxic and polluted air, water and landscapes can leave a legacy of poverty and ill health for generations after the mining corporations have moved on. With crucial soil removed, dumped and heavily polluted, agriculture and foraging remain impossible long after the mining corporations have left (for this reason, activists call mining areas ‘sacrifice zones’)."

"To sustain the ‘inverted minescapes’ of today’s burgeoning global cities and skyscrapers, deep mining must reach further and further into the earth’s crust to reach the remaining reserves of a wide range of increasingly scarce ores and metals in the context of burgeoning demand, high prices, and the exhaustion of more accessible reserves."

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

3. 5 stars

Interesting book looking at the structure of cities and urban areas from the perspective of above (satellites, drones, elevators etc) and below (basements, tunnels, mining).

This weighty tome is varied and well researched, with plenty of statistics and photographic evidence.

I found it really good in the main, but the end chapter on mining was a little boring/banal, and the author's views on tunnels created by Hamas in Palestine/Israel baffled me as he seemed to completely negate the role of Hamas as a terrorist organisation!

Otherwise very good, particularly the chapters featuring building in Dubai/Abu Dhabi.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could've used better editing. A typo on every other page, it seemed.

Also, adverbs/adjectives to cut down on:
*radical/ly - way overused, in most cases could've been cut out altogether
*colonize/ation - "she's sitting on the bench" becomes "the bench is colonized by her"
*neoliberal/ism - really, even in context I still don't know what it means other than it's a current bogeyman word and so i just replace it with 'bad stuff' in my head. or, i guess it's just a new way to say 'capitalism'? i recall some quote by some dude being described in a neoliberal context with a footnote that stated he was part of a neoconservative think-tank. well, i'm not opposed to the word existing but it (along with these other words) seems to have just been peppered in gratuitously.

I mean, I like pepper...but even I know when my mashed potatoes have had enough.



THAT SAID.
I like the concept of exploring the use of space going from Space->Subterranean Earth. It was illuminating, if mostly unsurprising (we build up at the expense of the environment/working class/poor, we build down at the expense of the environment/working class/poor). The verbiage/jargon just started to annoy me after a while.

Also, I like that my area got a paragraph devoted to it.

[dantelk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bunun kentleşme ve yapılaşma ile ilgili bir metin olacağını düşünerek başladım. Başlanıgçta öyle gitmiyordu, biraz konudan sapıyor gibiydi. Daha sonra, özellikle orta bölümde toparladı. Ama zaten kitabın bence asıl temasını, yazarın otorite karşıtı politik duruşu biçimlendiriyor. Son tahlilde fena değildi, konular ilginç falan. Ancak beklediğimden daha fazla siyasi mesaj vardı - neyse ki bunları okuyucuyu sıkmayacak şekilde vermiş. Bu kent sosyolojisi ve özel alan gibi meselelere de epeyce dokunan bir kitap. Yazık ki kitabın kapsadığı konular öyle çok disiplini kapsıyor ki, yazarın bahsetmek için seçtiği konular, kimi zaman biraz klişe kalıyorlar. Metinde çok sayıda kaynağa referans verilmiş olması da iyi bir haber - buradan epey ekmek çıktı.

Özellikle mesela, İstanbul'un kentleşmesi, ve yeni yapılan toplu konutlarla ilgili eleştiriler çoktur. Ben bu yerli malı çağdaş-modernist anlayışla ilgili biraz beyin jimnastiği yaptıracak bir yaklaşım okumayı hayal ediyordum aslında, ama tam hedefi tutturamadım. Yine de ilginç bir okuma.

Ayrıca bu kitabı, mesela Jan Gehl'in eserinden sonra okumak da faydalıydı - Gehl, yaşanabilir ve sürdürülebilir kentleşme ile ilgili çok güzel ahkam kesiyor, ama sonuçta, onun kitabında bahsettiği kentler hep kuzey Avrupa ülkelerinde. Biliyoruz orada hayat güzel, ama devamlı kontrolsüzce göç alan ve ekonomik olarak kendimi zorlukla ayakta tutan (özellikle Asya tarafında) yerleşim yerlerinde problemi nasıl çözecekler? Aslında kitabın belki de kötü yanı, bir çözüm önerisi getiremiyor oluşu. Yüksek bina istemiyoruz, ama gecekondular da berbat. Göç istemiyoruz, ama işte, çoğumuz kentlerde yaşıyoruz sonunda. Biraz fazla sol goy-goyuna dönüyor kimi zaman.

Kitabın politik çizgisi bu kadar belirgin ve katı olmasaydı ve karşıt eleştiri ve görüşler barındırsaydı bence daha tatmin edici olabilirdi.

[Alexandre Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perspective-shifting work that opens up many new ways of thinking about the spaces in which we live. This book breaks apart the old ways of seeing cities and the world, and talks about how we have to go beyond the simplicity of surfaces into understanding how we view things from above, are affected by the internal volumes of cities, and ultimately how they generate their own 'archaeosphere.'

By upending the typical axis of perception in urbanism this book helps you reconsider what you thought you knew, and what you didn't know you hadn't known. The book is clearly written, having never read a book on urbanism before I never found it tough going, beyond the wealth of details provided. The scope is impressive too, covering satellites, drone warfare, skyscapers, displaced earth, slum dwellings, military helicopters, hong kong as a megastructure and the mines which extract all that we require. If you're interested in cities, this is essential reading to my mind. If nothing else I know have many more things to look up as a result of it - my ebook is filled with highlighted passages.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A phenomenally wide-ranging and intensive exploration of the vertical axis in our contemporary world. Graham exposes the complexities and often the hidden violent and exploitative shadows embodied in our skyscrapers, their underworld alter-egos: deep mines, and all things between. Fairly jargon-free and accessible to a general reader, each chapter carries numerous insights that do change the way you'll think cities and the human relationship to verticality.
Be warned though -- if you're looking to find a book that celebrates humanities' heroic triumph over gravity, this is not it...

[bookcookery]

A fascinating exploration of humanity’s engagement with the Z-axis, Vertical is cleverly structured as a descent from satellites to the mines deep within the Earth and is chock-full of compelling facts and stories. However, the organization of individual sections varies, as Graham lacks a clear overarching thesis beyond humanity’s exploitation of nature and other humans at each level of his descent. Some of the strongest chapters focus on elevators and skyscrapers, particularly where they connect to Graham’s ongoing examination of construction in Dubai.

[Ajk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham’s a brilliant and insightful mind, and he is always very easy to read. But this book seemed a bit more slapped together than Cities Under Siege – there’s a bit less coherency between chapters and it reads a bit more like a series of essays in that regard. They’re very good essays, don’t get me wrong. But the idea of a central thread connecting all of this work on the (literal) ups and downs of 21st century life don’t quite adhere in a satisfying way.

[Vernon Luckert · Rating 2 out of 5]

While appearing to be well researched, the author has taken what could have been a fascinating subject and used it as a vehicle for espousing his anti-military, anti-police, anti-corporate, anti-wealthy misguided activist opinions.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well structured survey of urbanism centered around the dimension of height, and more importantly a critique of the economies around it. Lots of great insights on the direction our politics and economics are headed.

[Fazackerly Toast · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting insights amidst a sea of sociology-speak

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satellites and drones to sewers and the mines of imperial frontiers. The trip up and down the city is an eye-opener to both the physicality of the city as well as its socio-economic implications.

[James Piss · Rating 4 out of 5]

plz stp[ yoyoing me upa nd doown likethat imgonna hurl

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

Graham brings convoluted, academic prose to a fascinating subject. His research is well worth your while if you can stomach the style.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting

[Erdem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modern şehirlere, şehir yaşamına farklı bakmamı sağlayan güzel kitap.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book that takes aim at the inherent verticality present in society, starting with the very words we use (superb, subjugate, upper/lower class) and then proceeding to start in space with satellites and dive all the way down deep into the Earth with mines.

In each chapter, Vertical describes, oftentimes chillingly, how various structures we take for granted in today's modern society are used to simultaneously elevate elites and subjugate the rest.

Even if today's world is not actually so simplistic and traceable to vertical thinking, Vertical offers a fascinating take on today's stratified civilization, and I suspect there is much truth in it.

[Robert Rauschenberg]

Recommended by Gabriel Martinez (Alabama Song).