Getting off the ground On the politics of urban verticality

Abstract

This article contends that critical urban research is characterized by horizontalism. It argues that the swathe of recent urban writings have neglected the vertical qualities of contemporary urbanization. The article’s introductory section elaborates this argument in detail. The paper then elucidates three areas where vertically oriented research is emerging. These encompass: the links between Google Earth and urbanism; the connections between social secession and ascension through buildings, walkways and personalized air travel; and the links between verticalized surveillance and urban burrowing.

Full text

Article
Getting off the ground: On the
politics of urban verticality
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University, UK
Lucy Hewitt
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
This article contends that critical urban research is characterized by horizontalism. It argues that the swathe
of recent urban writings have neglected the vertical qualities of contemporary urbanization. The article’s
introductory section elaborates this argument in detail. The paper then elucidates three areas where
vertically oriented research is emerging. These encompass: the links between Google Earth and urbanism;
the connections between social secession and ascension through buildings, walkways and personalized air
travel; and the links between verticalized surveillance and urban burrowing.
Keywords
cities, Google Earth, politics, secession, subterranean, surveillance, verticality
I Introduction: critical urban
research – an overly flat discourse
In 2002, in an influential series of articles for the
web magazine Open Democracy, architectural
writer Eyal Weizman argued that, paradoxi-
cally, the cartographic, top-down aerial gaze
that had long dominated both mainstream and
critical geopolitical discourses had worked to
flatten their spatial imaginaries. ‘Geopolitics is
a flat discourse,’ he wrote, ‘It largely ignores the
vertical dimension and tends to look across
rather than to cut through the landscape. This
was the cartographic imagination inherited from
the military and political spatialities of the
modern state’ (Weizman, 2002: 3). Weizman’s
response – his politics of verticality project –
explicitly sought to expose the complex politics
of vertical space that characterize the Orientalist
and neocolonial architectures of Israeli power in
and around the West Bank. In it, he worked
towards what he called the ‘re-visioning of exist-
ing cartographic techniques’ in order to ‘create
... a territorial hologram in which political acts
of manipulation and multiplication transform a
two-dimensional surface into a three-
dimensional volume’ (p. 3).
In this wide-ranging and synthetical article
our contention is that a similar flattening of dis-
courses and imaginaries tends still to dominate
critical urban research in the Anglophone
Corresponding author:
Lucy Hewitt, School of Social and Political Sciences,
University of Glasgow, 25–29 Bute Gardens, Glasgow
G12 8RS, UK.
Email: lucy.hewitt@glasgow.ac.uk
Progress in Human Geography
37(1) 72–92
ªThe Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512443147
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world. There are some notable exceptions; per-
spectives stressing the vertical and aerial
aspects of critical urban geography are begin-
ning to increase. However, we seek to demon-
strate in what follows that the majority of
critical urban writing emerging over recent
decades has neglected the vertical qualities of
contemporary processes of urbanization. In
other words – and in contrast to many emerging
debates within contemporary philosophy, cul-
tural studies, and architecture – we contend that
a notable horizontalism tends still to dominate
analyses of contemporary urban space within
such traditions.
The recent proliferation of ‘relational’ and
topological theorizations of urban life (Taylor
et al., 2010), for example, overwhelmingly pri-
vilege horizontally extending relational connec-
tions over vertical ones. Recent debates about
‘rescaling’ and the politics of urban space stress
the horizontal nature of such processes. These
are based explicitly on the idea of a ‘flat ontol-
ogy’ (Collinge, 2006) of multiscaled processes,
imaginaries and flows linking sites and spaces
to more or less distant elsewheres. In the pro-
cess, we would contend that such debates fail
to address how such rescaling processes might
lead to dramatic shifts in the vertical construc-
tions or experiences of urban space, form, and
social and political power. Indeed, scholars of
rescaling processes, rather than addressing the
actual vertical spatialities of urban life, nor-
mally posit the ‘vertical’ aspects of such trans-
formations as referring to the nested
hierarchies of units of territorial governance,
laid out as jurisdictions across flat, cartographic
space – from locality to city, region, nation, etc.
– that were often reified or naturalized within
more traditional approaches to urban and human
geography (see, for example, Brenner, 2004;
Marston et al., 2005).
In our final, illustrative example, the wide
spectrum of debates about ‘global cities’,
‘world city networks’ (Taylor, 2004), ‘network
societies’ (Castells, 2000) and the ‘splintering’
of urban space (Graham and Marvin, 2001) that
surrounds urban neoliberalization in turn impli-
citly prioritize horizontal processes of network
formation, spatial fragmentation, and the
uneven extensibility of mobilities and connec-
tions. While traditional cartographic representa-
tions are a much less dominant means of
depicting alleged transformations of cities and
urban life than they once were, the ‘God trick’
of the top-down, bird’s-eye view is still widely
deployed in critical urban social science, bring-
ing Weizman’s concomitant risk of discursive
flattening in its wake.
Encouragingly, a growing number of
scholars and writers have begun to argue for a
concerted move beyond the pervasive horizont-
alism of critical urban and human geographic
research. It is increasingly common for critical
geographic scholars, in particular, to concur
with Scott’s (2008: 1858) recent call for ‘stron-
ger theorizations of verticality’ to counter the
‘implicit horizontalism’ that she diagnoses in
critiques of the ‘cartographic impulse’ within
imperialist and colonial political and cultural
geographies. Her suggestion? To construct what
she calls a ‘postcolonial’ treatment of her main
area of concern – the subterranean:
The undeniable ‘horizontality’ of colonial and
imperial expansion should not be allowed to over-
shadow the dimension of verticality that, in many
times and places, was equally central to colonial and
imperial ventures and was manifest in practices
concerned with the subterranean such as mining and
the mapping of geological formations. (Scott, 2008:
1853)
Several promising examples of vertically
oriented critical urban research are beginning
to emerge. McNeil’s (2005) review of the
neglected, vertical relationalities which surround
the proliferation of urban skysrapers is one.
Skayannis’ (2010) recent call to attend to the pol-
itics and architecture of what he calls the urban
‘Z axis’ – especially the rapid growth of infra-
structural, luxury or securitized subterranean
Graham and Hewitt 73

complexes – is another. Klauser (2010), mean-
while, is pioneering the linkage of critical urban
research with Sloterdijk’s increasingly influen-
tial philosophy of ‘spheres’ (see Sloterdijk,
2011). Klauser (2010) urges researchers on the
politics of urban security, especially, to embrace
fully ‘spherical’ and hence volumetric and
verticalized imaginations of urban space and
so to move beyond contemporary approaches
which are ‘almost exclusively based on two-
dimensional planar metaphors’ (p. 326).
Urban and architectural historians, always
less dominated by the flat discourses, planar
metaphors and the ‘cartographic impulse’ than
urban geographers, have also done much to
excavate the ways in which vertical urban life
has been imagined, normalized, built or con-
tested (see, for example, Boyer, 2003; Morshed,
2004; Passanti, 1987; Wigoder, 2002). Within
these traditions, what Bauman (2000: 4) has
called the ‘metaphysics of verticalism’, extend-
ing from classical structures, through the city-
cosmos geometries inherent in medieval city
planning (Lilley, 2009), to modernist mass
social housing towers and the contemporary
global proliferation of massive skyscrapers and
urban megastructures, has dominated debates.
Most notable here is the edited collection
City Levels (Ireson, 2000), a project designed
to address the extending verticality of contem-
porary cities as a proliferation of stacked hori-
zontal surfaces and planes. Here, verticality is
seen as ‘an axis along which to view the city
in a different way’. Although contemporary
urbanists and urban thinkers may ‘be well
versed in the up-and-down rules of urban life’,
the book’s editor writes (Ireson, 2000: 70), ‘it
is a challenge to rethink our perspective on the
significance of the vertical zones they index as
contexts for specific patterns of architectural
design, or types of interaction between people,
or people and the city itself’. The perspective
in City Levels, although a step forward, remains
ultimately static by reifying such levels without
addressing the complex and dynamic relational
geographies through which they are mutually
constructed, inhabited and imagined.
Much, therefore, remains to be done. It is still
the case that very few books or papers in Anglo-
phone urban social science or critical urban
geography explicitly problematize or analyse
the vertical qualities of cities and urban life. The
emerging ‘aerial turn’ in critical human geogra-
phy (see Adey, 2010a) has thus far been domi-
nated by geopolitical and mobility-centred
debates; critical urban geographers have yet to
be fully involved. As a result, despite the
extraordinary vertical extension of built space
both upwards and downwards within the last
few decades, very few of the latest geographical
theorizations of contemporary cities fully
address such issues beyond passing asides. The
influential formulations of Massey et al. (1999:
4) – one useful example – do emphasize that
‘the number of things that can only be found
in cities’, as they put it, include ‘skyscrapers,
underground railways, street lighting (maybe),
and not much else’. They also rightly stress the
unique intensity of cities as places. However, in
the three-volume ‘Understanding Cities’ collec-
tion that follows (Allen et al., 1998, 1999; Pile
et al., 1999), the crucial contribution of vertical-
ity to the spatiality and intensity of cities is
addressed only in a brief aside on Michel de
Certeau’s (1984: 91) famous musings from the
top of the World Trade Center and of the cen-
trality of skyscrapers to the imagery of cities
(see Flusty, 1997).
In the discussion that follows, our aim is to
help galvanize the emerging strands of critical
urban research that address the vertical aspects
of contemporary urbanization and urban life.
Rather than simply arguing for some sort of ver-
tical or aerial turn, to counterbalance the impli-
cit horizontalism of contemporary critical urban
research, however, we argue that a fully volu-
metric urbanism is required which addresses the
ways in which horizontal and vertical exten-
sions, imaginaries, materialities and lived prac-
tices intersect and mutually construct each other
74 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

within and between subterranean, surficial and
suprasurface domains (see Lerup, 2006). This
is especially so when contemporary urban pro-
cesses involve: the radical horizontal extension
of cities and urban regions and the engineering
of unprecedented numbers of both super-high
and super-deep structures; the unprecedented
mass accessibility of the top-down visualities
of computerized remote sensing and actual
routine physical access to aerial and vertical
spaces; and the rapid growth of horizontally dis-
tanciated networks of communication and
growing exposure of every aspect of urban life
to unblinking constellations of vertical imaging,
tracking and surveillance.
Amid all this, Bauman (2000: 4) asks the per-
tinent question: ‘what does elevation mean in an
age of the horizontalization of world views?’
The discussion that follows is a preliminary
exploration of this question. In it, we illustrate
in detail three crucial areas where vertically
oriented research across the urban social
sciences is fast emerging. These encompass, in
turn: the complex links between Google Earth
and urbanism; the connections between social
secession and ascension through buildings, fly-
overs, walkways and personalized air travel;
and connections between vertical surveillance
and various forms of counter-hegemonic urban
burrowing.
II Google Earth urbanism
To truly exist every city needs its perspective. Its
point of view. Its eyes. (Lerup, 2006: 242)
Today the aerial view – the image of everywhere –
seems to be everywhere. (Dorrian, 2011: 164)
The first crucial challenge for critical urban
research on the politics of verticality is to
confront one of the most important innova-
tions in urban digital media in the contempo-
rary period: Google Earth (hereafter GE).
This mass media assemblage ‘mashes up’
global satellite imagery, geopositioning coor-
dinates, digital cartography, geolocated data,
three-dimensional GIS, architectural draw-
ings, street-level digital imagery and other
social media, data and software. These are con-
figured together as an ‘always-on’, interactive
datascape – a flexible and multiscaled portal
through which urban life can be enacted,
mediated and experienced in profoundly new
and important ways (see Scott, 2010).
GE forces us to revisit, and update, a very
long-standing debate about the urban cultural
politics of the aerial, ‘God’s eye’, or top-down
view (see Vidler, 2000) in a world where this
view has very rapidly become radically accessi-
ble, zoomable and pannable in a myriad of
mobile and (near) real-time ways. A particular
imperative is to consider the ways in which the
uses of GE resonate with de Certeau’s (1984:
92) foundational point that, from medieval per-
spective painters, modernist planning ideolo-
gies, scopic perspectives from skyscrapers and
aerial views from aircraft, ‘the desire to see the
city precedes the means of satisfying it’. The
anthropologically vertical and volumetric
stance of humans in occupying space is of cru-
cial importance here. For the representational
and visual abstractions of verticality and the
top-down gaze that continually remediate such
corporeal life have deep technoscientific and
cultural genealogies to which the GE assem-
blage adds new and subtle twists (see Bishop,
2004; Jay, 1993).
Dorrian (2011), for one, believes that mass
public access to Google Earth fundamentally
challenges long-standing assumptions that the
view from above necessarily involves dispassio-
nate, technocratic or privileged scopic power.
Scott (2010: xii), while linking Google Earth
to the Apollo images of Earth (see Cosgrove,
2003), Buckminster Fuller’s mini-Earth project
and Charles and Ray Earme’s 1968 film, Pow-
ers of Ten, argues that it brings a ‘significant
shift ... in the capacities inscribed within the
information technology and in the planetary
Graham and Hewitt 75

imagination it sponsors’. Two broad sets of
issues emerge at the intersections of GE and
contemporary critical urban research.
1 ‘Imperial infrastructure’? Resolution,
temporality and surveillance in the
indexical city
First, complex political and cultural economies
attend both to GE’s genealogy and to its highly
uneven resolution and up-to-dateness. This
crucially configures the degree to which GE can
emerge as a new, distributed and indexed urban
medium. While remarkably accessible compared
to previous generations of top-down cartography
and imagery, GE is, nonetheless, a product of US
military technoscience, commercialized by a
globe-spanning, although US-centred, internet
conglomerate. This has important effects and
profound urban biases. Until very recently, for
example, GE automatically defaulted to a US-
centred view. Indeed, the French Government
have launched Geoportal (http://www.geoporta-
l.org/web/guest/geo_home) to correct perceived
US-centricity and biases within GE’s
representations.
While GE is ‘mashable’ and flexible, the
dominant, de facto data sets are heavily domi-
nated by a cluster of key transnational corpora-
tions who overlay the satellite surfaces with
geolocation data geared towards exploiting this
new screen interface. This is done to sustain
their competitive advantages in tourism, travel,
leisure services, food provision, etc., as well as
to build up new geodemographic information
products that GE, as a surveillance apparatus,
helps generate. Meanwhile, while these restric-
tions are being blurred by the availability of
non-US-licensed providers, certain spaces have
been deliberately proscribed (Afghanistan),
blurred (Dick Cheney’s residence) or rendered
at a deliberately low resolution (Israel) because
of US or other national security interventions.
Beyond this, of course, lies a burgeoning poli-
tics of urban legibility and camouflage as state,
commercial and non-state actors work to appro-
priate the new vertical views to conflicting ends.
As financial collapse hit the Greek State in
2009, for example, the Government tried to
locate wealthy Athenians guilty of tax avoid-
ance by using GE to find their swimming pools.
The immediate response was to drape tarpaulins
over the telltale azure rectangles. Meanwhile,
many social and political movements have
mobilized GE and satellite imagery in their
efforts to expose war crimes and state violence
in places as diverse as Darfur, Zimbabwe,
Burma and Sri Lanka (see Herscher, 2010).
With GE blurring into Google Maps and
other social media, it is possible to mark up and
customize a myriad of personal and collective
urban traces and tracks. In turn, these data
tracks, analysed by specialist software, support
whole complexes of lucrative corporate data
mining and geodemographic profiling. Martijn
de Waal writes:
All kinds of mobile media can be used to register
and track behavior, varying from spatial use (where
was I last week) to consumption patterns (what did I
buy, what was I reading, listening to on my iPod
etc.) ... These track records can be analyzed on
aggregate, or used on an individual base. (de Waal,
2008)
As well as sustaining a myriad of customized
communities and surveillance assemblages,
GE sustains a range of ‘filtering mechanisms:
only people with a certain reputation are
allowed to enter a certain site: the clubhouse, the
VIP Room, the sports stadium, a shopping mall’
(de Waal, 2008).
It is also crucial to stress that the experience
of GE is replete with dramatic variations in
availability, resolution and degree of up-to-
dateness based on broader unevenness in the
political economies of use, markets and adver-
tising potential. On the demand side the highly
uneven geographies of broadband access across
the world constrain access. On the supply side,
unevenness in data resolution favours central,
76 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

high-technology and highly urbanized capitalist
heartlands. Muster (2008), contrasting the rich,
immersive and three-dimensional experience
of zooming in and around Manhattan, recalls
her parallel attempt to zoom in on towns in and
around the Oklahoma-Kansas border, and the
‘sorry, but we don’t have imagery at this zoom
level for this region’ apologies. The visual expe-
rience of GE tends also to be ‘strangely situated
between abrupt temporal glitches and near
real-time user interaction’ (Muster, 2008: 1).
Higher-resolution updates sometimes revert
certain cities to older imagery as digital mosaics
are continually remade. Liverpool City Council
have complained publicly because the relatively
old image of the City accessible to viewers failed
to incorporate many of the projects completed
through the recent wave of development activity.
More broadly, Holmes (2004) stresses the
importance of conceiving of worldwide assem-
blages of geolocational technology surrounding
GE as ‘Imperial infrastructure’. GE, as with the
GPS system to which it so seamlessly links, is a
system with strictly military origins which has
been recently liberalized to integrate broad sec-
tors of civil society into the basic architecture.
Any use of, or reliance on, GPS, for example,
involves connecting to satellites, Geodetic map-
ping complexes and atomic clocks run by the
US military. ‘When you use the locating device
you respond to the call: you are interpellated
into Imperial ideology’, writes Holmes (2004).
Paradoxically, though, GE assemblages also add
further potency to non-state insurgencies and
terrorist organizations, who, as with the 2008
Mumbai attacks by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group,
are widely embracing them to plan and coordi-
nate their attacks on cities (Bishop, 2010).
2 Google Earth brandscapes: the terrestrial
surface becomes digital medium
Second, critical urban research needs to con-
front how this latest development in mass verti-
cal visuality is being exploited to construct
megastructural urban brandscapes as startling
extensions of the politics of urban neoliberal-
ism. Here emerge the complex intersections
between a vertical, top-down view and the hor-
izontality of contemporary urban sprawl. For, as
Lerup (2006: 243) contends, it is only from the
perspective of the satellite that the ‘striated,
spread-out geographies’ of contemporary urba-
nized regions and ‘megalopolitan’ corridors can
actually be fully represented. Writing about
Berger’s (2006) influential mapping of the geo-
graphies of sprawl, and wasted land in urban
America, Lerup points out that ‘from a satellite,
this neglected in-between [of drosscape or ‘pure
unadulterated waste’] is the real grammar of the
horizontal city, requiring a new mathematics
whose nature, strength and intelligence lies
embedded in its apparent incoherence’ (Lerup,
2006: 243).
With the satellite view of the city now nor-
malized as a dominant field of urban representa-
tion for mass consumption, navigation,
planning and, increasingly, marketing, how-
ever, it is perhaps the way in which cityscapes
are increasingly engineered to be brandscapes
visible from space that is the most immediate
example of GE urbanism. Here, Dorrian points
out that ‘the terrestrial surface itself becomes
manipulated as a media surface, not just virtu-
ally on the GE interface, but literally’. This
democratization of verticality has important
effects. ‘As the audience of geospatial data is no
longer made up of only cartographers, scientists,
military strategists and state operatives but rather
– overwhelmingly – consumers, how commodi-
ties look from the sky, and how they address it,
is a new concern’ (Dorrian, 2011: 169).
On the one hand, here, there is growing evi-
dence that city boosterists increasingly work
to ensure that their branded, spectacularized
urban ‘products’ work well when viewed
through GE. (The construction of corporate
advertising for aerial and satellite consumption
is also increasingly common.) A consultant
involved in the staging of the 2012 London
Graham and Hewitt 77

Olympics remarked recently that ‘it’s a media
event, so it will look great from the air’ (cited
in Dorrian, 2011: 169). It is interesting to note
that vertical ascension within London, on the
huge London Eye viewing device, is also being
marketed now as ‘the way the world sees Lon-
don’ in ways that resonate with the construction
of earlier iconic urban view points such as the
Eiffel tower (Dorrian, 2011). On other occa-
sions – such as the demolition of a US Navy
office complex that resembled a swastika on the
system – built space has been reengineered
because of unwanted vertical associations via
GE (see Perry, 2007). More prosaically, of
course, GE is being used by a wide range of
tourists and travellers as a new medium for
anticipating and planning journeys and check-
ing the validity of claims by the tourism indus-
try, and by urban planners, architects and clients
in the production and design of urban develop-
ment projects.
On the other hand, it is necessary to address
the rapid emergence of megastructural urban
landscapes which are carefully designed from
the outset with their representation through
GE in mind. Most notable here are the ‘Palm’
and ‘World’ developments in Dubai. These gar-
gantuan projects are marketed as ‘today’s great
development epic’ (http://www.theworld.ae/
au_overview.html; see Figure 1). Here, civil
engineering, land art and landscape architecture
blur together to imprint ‘the hybridization of
text, diagram and photograph ... to the terres-
trial surface’ (Dorrian, 2011: 169). The image
from space is appropriated directly into the
process of place marketing and mega-spectacle
formation, just as the rendition of virtual imagery
is actualized through the movement of millions
of tonnes of concrete, rubble, sand and steel.
This combination, in turn, works to materia-
lize what Davis and Monck (2007) have called
a ‘dreamworld of neoliberalism’ – an elite uto-
pia, combining the ultimate in horizontal and
totally privatized urban secession with the
unique marketing device of the archipelago
facsimile of the global cartographic image visi-
ble, as digital urban interface, from space
through GE. ‘Opportunity that’s worlds apart
... Welcome to your very own blank canvas
in the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf’, gushes
the marketing spiel for The World, ‘where
orchestrating your own version of paradise
... is a much needed inoculation against the
ordinary, and where you’ll discover that The
World really can revolve around you’.
Complex reiterations emerge here to connect
the image of the ‘World’ in GE’s ‘data set
patchwork of the virtual globe that serves as the
gateway to the other world towards which we
zoom and where we appear to find the patches
reinstated at another scale, although this time
resolved into real-estate parcels’ (Dorrian,
2011: 168). As in London, we must also add
to this mix the ways in which Dubai is also
operating as a particularly extreme site of urban
spectacularization through unprecedented
upward extension and secession, with the larg-
est constellation of skyscraper construction in
recent history, including what, at least for now,
is the highest building on earth, the 828 m Burj
Khalifa (Figure 2) (see Acuto, 2010).
Figure 1. The terrestrial surface as Google Earth
brandscape: view of Dubai’s ‘World’, and one of the
two ‘Palm’ developments, from the International
Space Station.
Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com; NASA’s Marshall
Space Flight Center, attribution license.
78 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

III Secession by ascension:
perpendicular splintering?
There were the Street People and there were the Air
People. Air people levitated like fakirs ... access to
the elevator was proof that your life had the buoy-
ancy that was needed to stay afloat in a city where
the ground was seen as the realm of failure and
menace. (Raban, 1991)
The Burj Khalifa is an appropriate case on
which to move to the second key agenda for ver-
tical urbanism to address: the ways in which
verticality and ascension are increasingly mobi-
lized to sustain social secession within contem-
porary cities. While not completely ignored (see
McNeil, 2005), the politics surrounding the ver-
tical ‘splintering’ of urban structures, sites and
circulations remain largely neglected, and an
implicit horizontalism still dominates the over-
whelmingly flat discourses surrounding social
fragmentation within neoliberalizing cities.
Crucial questions emerge here. What of the
vertical aspects of urban secession and social
fragmentation within what Henri Lefebvre
(1984: 337) called the growing ‘independence
of volumes with respect to the original land’?
Might the global proliferation of iconic as well
as more prosaic high-rise residential, corporate
and hotel skyscrapers contribute in many cities
to the emergence of a myriad of vertically stra-
tified, gated ‘communities’ which residualize
the surface city as powerfully as exurban gated
communities residualized traditional public
street systems? Does the proliferation of seces-
sionary vertical landscapes, in turn, necessarily
work to exacerbate the polarization of spatial
practices that Michel de Certeau (1984: 82)
famously identified in Manhattan between
urban ‘voyeurs’, lifted up ‘out of the city’s
grasp’ to God-like positions from which they
could ‘see the whole’ of the ‘concept’ city far-
below, and those less privileged walking sub-
jects down below forced to continue inhabiting
the street level? What, in other words, are the
Figure 2. The 828 m Burj Khalifa: the world’s tallest
skyscraper.
Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com; photographer
Ashraful Kadir.
Graham and Hewitt 79

spatial politics through which socio-economic
elites rise upwards into the insulated capsular
heights of vertical structures? And how does
their literal upward mobility set the terms of
contemporary geographical imaginaries and the
tensions between surface, suprasurface and sub-
surface urbanism? Finally, how do these con-
temporary architectures and infrastructures of
ascension connect with ancient, modern and
more recent genealogies of vertical defensive
and military architecture, social stratification
and cultural representation within different con-
texts (modernist mass social housing, Haussma-
nized tenements, previous rounds of
‘skyscraper living’ in North America, and the
deep cultural traditions equating urban social
class with vertical height)?
1 Processes of vertical capsularization
Verticality quite literally means security from the
insecurities below. (Adey, 2010b: 58)
A growing range of urban writers and activists
are starting to address the social politics of ver-
tical urban splintering and what Morshed (2004)
has called the ‘aesthetics of ascension’ across a
range of contemporary cities within a general
context where projects of mass vertical social
housing has been widely abandoned. Anti-
gentrification social movements in San Fran-
cisco and Vancouver, for example, now actively
suggest that the central landscapes of these two
cities are being rapidly transformed through pro-
cesses of ‘vertical sprawl’ erecting archipelagos
of ‘vertical gated communities’ – solipsistic cap-
sular spaces for elite groups – into the sky (see
SFConnection, 2007; Waterhouse-Hayward,
2010).
Ayoub (2009) meanwhile, speaking about
London, interprets the startling implantation of
large numbers of locally novel, very tall build-
ings in the City since the early 1990s as the
product of: a familiar concoction of global-
city governance boosterism; efforts by elites to
construct icons symbolizing global power,
‘national arrival’, innovation and centrality (see
also Bunnell, 2004); the demands generated by
London’s centrality to transnational corporate
and financial geographies; the re-regulation of
global finance; and speculative property booms.
However, she also underlines the ways in which
residential skyscrapers are marketed as unal-
loyed elite spaces of social secession and aspira-
tion for the London’s growing population of
u
¨berwealthy. Marketed using the iconography
of traditional, street-level public space, the
various ‘sky lobbies’, viewing ‘plazas’ and gal-
leries, and rooftop restaurants in these com-
plexes offer what she calls ‘allusions to the
open and free character of public space’
(Ayoub, 2009: 93). But, as with horizontally
connected skywalk cities built in US cities like
Houston since the 1970s, Ayoub stresses that
such complexes are starkly capsular spaces
of social secession – ‘analogous cities’ (see
Boddy, 1992) which are access-controlled, only
partially accessible, increasingly securitized
and intensively surveilled and policed (see De
Cauter, 2005). In the heavily privatized and
securitized spaces of London’s Canary Wharf,
Ayoub notes, access to the skyscraper structures
since the 2005 terrorist attacks in central
London entails negotiating various security
checkpoints to demonstrate in advance one’s
legitimate reasons for access.
It is thus necessary to consider how hori-
zontal and vertical geographies of secession
are mutually constructed within complexes
like London’s Docklands or Houston’s cen-
tral skywalk system. Flusty (1997), writing
about the then-new Bunker Hill downtown
complex in LA, tells the story of trying to
reach the complex from the streets below
by foot:
the Hill’s designers are not too keen on pedestrians
coming up from below (except janitors) ... The
entire Hill is ... separated from the adjacent city
by an obstacle course of open freeway trenches, a
palisade of concrete parking garages and and a
80 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

tangle of concrete bridges linking citadel to citadel
high above the streets ... We could attain the sum-
mit from the south, but only by climbing a narrow,
heavily patrolled stair ‘plaza’, studded with video
cameras and clearly marked as private property.
(Flusty, 1997: 53)
In Manhattan, meanwhile, Zukin (2010) also
notes a palpable ‘luxification of verticality’ in
the design, material culture and marketing of
contemporary skyscraper condominiums in
Manhattan. One upmarket $8 million condomi-
nium, she finds, is marketed as a ‘pin-drop quiet’
space of ‘800 square foot loft floating 28 stories
above Lower Manhattan’. Similar tropes domi-
nate marketing of elite vertical housing in Mum-
bai. ‘Reach for it!’ screams the real-estate
billboard surrounding the new IB Sky tower
complex in the city. ‘Consider it a blessing to
share the same address as God’ (Figure 3) (see
Harris, 2010). Another shouts ‘the higher you
go, the cooler you get’, hinting at the dreams of
private solipsism and bourgeois environmental-
ism that sustain the rush to ascend in such a tro-
pical, megacity environment.
In most Global South cities, it is the complex
relations between proliferating verticalized
enclaves, prevailing networks of urban infra-
structure and circulation and the wider,
majority-city of informal settlements that cur-
rently dominates the politics of the verticality.
Appadurai, speaking about Mumbai, argues that
we must contrast the ‘vertical city’of modernity –
with its often hidden, subterranean infrastructure
networks and political ecological and hydrologi-
cal engineering – with the contemporary ‘hori-
zontal’ condition in the city characterized by
informal ‘infrastructure-free’ settlements where
everything is ‘fully available to the gaze’
(quoted in Gandy, 2009: 230). Vikas Oberoi,
of Oberoi constructions – developer of many
vertical enclaves in Mumbai, points out that
these spaces are attractive to urban elites and
middle classes precisely because they bundle
together a wide range of services, introduce
access-control checkpoints and walls against
the perceived threats of the externalized city
and allow reliable, high-quality infrastructures
and immediate environments to be offered to
residents on a club basis. ‘I would call the
[developments] in Mumbai vertical gated com-
munities’, he recently said, ‘because they take
care of virtually all of [residents’] needs’.
Dwivedi characterizes such enclaves as ‘hea-
venly enclaves surrounded by slums’ (quoted
in Bharucha, 2010).
Perhaps the most extreme and notorious Mum-
bai example of elite, vertical secession is the
recent construction of a 27-storey, 400,000 square
foot tower which houses only one family – the
Ambani family – of five (see Figure 4). The
tower houses a six-storey vertical parking gar-
age, three helipads, hundreds of servants and a
series of airborne swimming pools.
Rao (2007: 245), in an insightful analysis of
links between the neoliberalization of planning
techniques and imaginations of density in Mum-
bai, stresses that the widespread sprouting of
secessionary towers across Mumbai ‘has added
a three-dimensional twist to the drama of
Figure 3. ‘The same address as God’ and ‘The higher
you go, the cooler you get’: advertisement hoardings
around new residential skyscraper towers in Mumbai
Source: Photograph by Adam Cooper, reproduced with
permission.
Graham and Hewitt 81

hierarchy, exclusion and dispossession’ in the
city. The construction of this new archipelago
of towers works, she suggests, to render con-
crete long-standing imaginations of futurity and
globality which, in turn, are woven into com-
plex landscapes of displacement and predatory
speculation against surrounding informal cities.
‘This emerging vertical city’, Rao (2007: 245)
suggests, ‘thus renders these landscapes [of
surrounding, informal urbanism] obsolete by
the sheer force of juxtaposition against this
fabric, now perceived as one of dereliction’.
Such structures, as Adey (2010b: 58) writes, ‘sit
uncomfortably above the violence below’.
Crucially, in Mumbai, the widespread con-
struction of vertical ‘islands within cities’, mar-
keted to middle classes and elites as solutions to
perceived problems of insecurity and infrastruc-
tural and environmental degradation, are being
complemented by complex assemblages of
vertical circulatory, ascension and separation.
Harris (2010) points out that Mumbai is now
encircled by over 60 ‘flyover’ raised highways
and over 50 raised pedestrian-only skywalk
systems. The latter evoke the earlier and rather
different experience of the construction of tun-
nels and skywalks in the centres of North Amer-
ican cities since the 1960s (Boddy, 1992). It is
unclear, as yet, however, whether the Mumbai
skywalks are working as surveilled, securitized
and access-controlled systems which work to
suck urban middle classes from traditional street
systems, which, consequently, become residua-
lized and criminalized. ‘Precisely because
downtown streets are the last preserve of some-
thing approaching a mixing of all sectors of
society’, Boddy (1992: 125) wrote, ‘their
replacement by the sealed realm overhead and
underground has enormous implications for all
aspects of political life’.
At the very least, and resonating with our
broader theme here, Harris (2010: 2) empha-
sizes that Mumbai’s new highway and skywalk
developments ‘show ... how new three-
dimensional frames of analysis are required if
we are to begin to open up the social and polit-
ical complexities of urban change in a mega-
city such as Mumbai’. What is needed, clearly,
are detailed studies of the lived situated prac-
tices and experiences surrounding urban life for
verticalized elites in a variety of contexts. Such
work would provide fascinating contrasts to that
which has so powerfully revealed the complex
technoscientific and cultural politics of life in
mass social housing blocks (see, for example,
Jacobs et al., 2007; McGrail, 1999).
2 ‘Where are the fastest elevators?’ The
politics of vertical transportation
A crucially important dimension to the new
politics of urban secession by ascension are the
Figure 4. The 27-storey Ambani ‘family tower’, Mumbai
Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com; photographer
Jay Hariani.
82 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

configurations of the often hidden and neglected
structures of vertical transportation that sustain
it. Social historian of technology Ithiel de Sola
Pool (1977) stressed that the history of the
skyscraper is inseparable from the history of
both the elevator – which allowed ingress and
egress of required office workers – and of the
horizontally stretched networks of electronic
transportation communication – that allowed
those people both to commute to work and to
attempt to exercise control at a distance over
dispersed sites once there. Unfortunately, how-
ever, the geographies of vertical transportation
within and between built structures have been
overwhelmingly ignored by critical social sci-
ence. Entire disciplines and myriads of journals
and professional bodies concentrate on engi-
neering and analysing the geographies of hori-
zontally distributed systems of urban mobility;
the social scientific literature on lifts, elevators
and vertical people movers remains both minus-
cule and esoteric (see Goetz, 2003).
It is noteworthy, though, that rapid advances
in lift/elevator technology are as fundamental to
the global proliferation of mega-skyscrapers as
are innovations in materials science and civil
engineering (Strakosch, 1998). Ever since
Elisha Otis invented the first example in 1852,
lift technology has been central to what Sayre
(2011) has called ‘the colonization of the up’.
‘‘‘Up’’ has of course always existed’, he writes,
‘but not until the late 19th century had it become
a place to work and live. Up as a habitable ter-
ritory had to be made, sometimes forcefully but
always without precedent’. It is equally notable
that even positivist and technocratic debates
within transport geography are now starting to
address the vertical geographies of movement
within and between the extending worlds of
built, indoor environments stretched across
extending cityscapes. In overcoming one promi-
nent manifestation of the horizontalist tradition
of human geography, this work is starting to
move from a preoccupation with what Thill
et al. (2010) call ‘two-dimensional geographic
space’ – as represented by top-down cartogra-
phy – to begin to address the complex circula-
tory technics and politics sustaining
complexes of ‘vertical sprawl’: multi-use,
megastructural buildings scattered across the
extending three-dimensional urban spaces of
fast-growing cities. ‘The comprehension of the
very nature and complexity of spatial and func-
tional relationships between these spaces’, Thill
et al. (2010: 405–406) suggest, ‘framed by the
indoor and outdoor infrastructures supporting
human movement (hallways, elevator shafts,
walkways, and others) is enhanced once it is
recognized that the city is not flat’.
In Japan, new elevator technology has been
central to relatively recent moves beyond
long-standing earthquake-limited height con-
trols that have spawned a series of multi-use
‘city within city’ vertical complexes (for exam-
ple, the Roppongi Hills; see http://www.roppon-
gihills.com/en). These ‘vascular shafts’ (Sayre,
2011: 11), encompassing super-thin malls, elite
condominiums, corporate HQs, expensive
hotels and restaurants, are serviced by some of
the world’s fastest elevators. These are marketed
publicly as icons of national modernity every bit
as powerful as the more familiar Shinkansen bul-
let train networks that lace the country’s cities
horizontally. ‘If you want to know where the
world’s hottest economies are’, Forbes maga-
zine gushes, ‘skip the GDP reports, employment
statistics and consumer spending trends. All you
need to do is answer one question: Where are
the fastest elevators?’ (Van Riper and Malone,
2007, quoted in Sayre, 2011: 10).
As ever-more extraordinary vertical mega-
projects are imagined, marketed and con-
structed, whether as putative responses to
sustainability challenges, demographic growth,
or the changing possibilities of speculation
and construction technology (see Al-Kodmany,
2011), so the uneven social geographies of verti-
cal mobility are likely toproliferate.The extreme
vertical urbanism embodied in possible future
projects like Dubai’s projected 2.4 km high,
Graham and Hewitt 83

400-storey ‘Vertical city’ tower, for example,
are deliberately being designed with ‘internal
elevator layout[s] splitting the working popula-
tions from the residents and providing high
speed VIP express services to designated areas’
(Khaleej Times, 2008). Such emergences under-
line the importance of Cwerner’s (2006, 2009)
innovative work on the normalization of perso-
nalized helicopter travel among Sa
˜o Paulo’s
elites. His is one of the first bodies of work to
connect the ‘aeromobilities turn’ in critical
social science to the material politics of ascen-
sion and vertical splintering in Global South
megacities. Showing how this process resonates
with long-standing imaginaries of personalized
air travel within the history of modern and
modernist urban planning, Cwerner elucidates
the complex assemblage of technoscientific
practices and political affordances that work to
bring Sa
˜o Paulo’s elites to ascend over, and resi-
dualize, the City’s chronically saturated ground-
level streetscapes. This occurs as they move
to inhabit instead complex archipelagos of
helicopter-pad accessible secessionary capsules
spread across the city-region. Cwerner carefully
exposes how personalized helicopter travel is
marketed and imagined as a frictionless and
detached form of point-to-point mobility for
security-obsessed elites who have gained
extraordinary wealth as intermediaries within
the neoliberalization of Brazil’s economy.
Finally, he stresses the ways in which access
to personal helicopter travel works as a power-
ful status symbol in ways that resonate with
long-standing equation of height with power
in the history of urbanism.
Cwerner’s work is thus a very useful early
example of analysing the social and political
geographies of what he calls the ‘tri-
dimensional city’ (Cwerner, 2006: 203). It is
crucial, though, to stress that socially progres-
sive vertical mobility systems are also possible.
Brand and Da`vila (2011), for example, explore
how a vertically organized mass transit system
utilizing cable car technologies has worked
powerfully against logics of secession and
splintering in Medellin, Colombia, by radically
improving the mobility opportunities of margin-
alized informal settlements strung out across the
mountains of the City’s periphery.
3 The politics of urban air
Air matters too little in social theory ... Air is left
to drift ... neither theorised nor examined, taken
simply as solidity’s lack. (Choy, 2010: 9–11)
Choy’s detailed analysis of the politics of urban
ascension, environment and air quality in Hong
Kong are also especially apposite here. Ascend-
ing up the proliferating skyscrapers in this most
vertically structured of ‘global’ cities, Choy
(2010: 27) notes that ‘the rich have access to
good air while the poor are relegated to the
dregs, to the smog and dust under flyovers or
on the streets’. Choy’s work demonstrates that
horizontal political-economic geographies and
political ecologies surrounding the exporting
of bad air from global cities – as manufacturing
and waste are offshored – need to be addressed
along with the contested politics of urban ascen-
sion. Elite expatriates, for example, can seek
refuge from bad air, noise, heat and humidity
by colonizing Hong Kong’s ‘airy refuges’ – in
skyscraper penthouses located in the
topographic heights of the Peak or Mid-Levels
on Hong Kong Island.
Just above the teeming street, meanwhile,
covered, extending, air-conditioned escalator
systems snake to connect archipelagos of elite
spaces of consumption, work and leisure. Choy
(2010: 29) talks of a day spent in the company of
an executive from the Tsing Tao beer company
as he ‘wends his way expertly through Wenchai,
a government and nightlife district on Hong
Kong island, without ever touching the ground’.
Above all, in Hong Kong, as elsewhere, Choy
(2010: 28) stresses that the city’s ‘air spaces are
visibly marked by the racialized and classed
bodies that live, work and play in them ...
84 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

Much of Hong Kong seems designed to get off
the ground – into the air, and out of it’.
IV ‘The sky kills’: urbanism, vertical
orientalism and the politics of
burrowing
The geography of occupation has ... completed a
90-degree turn. The imaginary ‘Orient’ – the exotic
object of colonization – was no longer beyond the
horizon, but now under the vertical tyranny of West-
ern airborne civilization that remotely managed its
most sophisticated and advanced technological plat-
forms, sensors and munitions above. (Weizman,
2009: 325)
A third key theme for a vertically sensitive crit-
ical urbanism to address surrounds the complex
connections between neo-Orientalist practices
of vertical urban surveillance and targeting by
states and security forces, and a growing world
of active, subterranean burrowing to escape ver-
tical scrutiny. Whether it be through helicopter-
borne paramilitarized policing above the favelas
of Rio (Adey, 2010b), police helicopter patrols
over LA (Herbert, 1996), military satellite sur-
veillance (Harris, 2006; MacDonald, 2007),
drone-based assassination raids by Israel above
Gaza or the west Bank (Weizman, 2009) or the
continuous use of aerial lethal force via armed
drones in Pakistan or Afghanistan (Graham,
2004; Gregory, 2011), complex practices
through which technophiliac, verticalized state
power is launched against Orientalized rendi-
tions of surface or subsurface cities are a domi-
nant feature of contemporary security politics
(see Graham, 2010).
1 Vertical military technophilia and the city
as camouflage
In a classic neo-Orientalist tradition, cities are
widely projected by state, military and security
elites as complex, exotic and intrinsically
devious three-dimensional spaces in which
adversaries of verticalized state security forces
actively seek shelter, protection and anonymity
as part of a pervasive ‘urbanization of insur-
gency’ (Taw and Hoffman, 2000). As Weizman
(2009) argues, it is therefore imperative that
critical geographers and urbanists explore
attempts at verticalized domination, where the
latest innovations in military technoscience,
linked to imperial discourses and imaginaries,
permeate three-dimensional geopolitical strug-
gles in Gaza Strip, Pakistan, Afghanistan and
elsewhere – as well as their increasing deploy-
ment above strategic global cities or mega
sporting and political events within the capital-
ist heartlands of global city me´tropoˆles.
Davis (2006) talks of the increasingly wide-
spread ‘hornet-like helicopter gunships’ above
Rio, Gaza and elsewhere, which ‘stalk enig-
matic enemies in the narrow streets of slum dis-
tricts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing
cars’. Adey (2010b: 52), meanwhile, suggests
that helicopters and drones offer the technophi-
liac agencies of state military and security
operatives ‘machinic prosthetic view[s]’ facili-
tating ‘a perspective which may be simultane-
ously distant and abstract while near and
vertically present’. In megacites like Rio, he
argues, the helicopter, in particular, ‘performs
the longstanding role of making-legible
amongst other devices of the state’ (see also
Scott, 1998). This history, of course, overlaps
powerfully with the longer cultural history of
the enrolment of the aerial view into cartogra-
phy, modernist urban planning, authoritarian
state building, colonial urbanism, urban coun-
terinsurgency warfare, strategic urban bombing
and Cold War nuclear targeting (see Dorrian
and Pousin, 2012; Vidler, 2000).
By rendering complex urban places as verti-
calized digital imagery, sensed automatically
from afar through machinic prostheses (missile
heads, helicopter sensors, drone cameras, but
also satellite imagery) these practices tend
towards ethical thinning and distanciation from
the lived socialities of the targeted places
(Dorrian, 2009). Often, they dehumanize and
Graham and Hewitt 85

Other such places as they are consumed and dis-
tributed through YouTube, voyeuristic TV
shows or state propaganda. ‘In an aerial
sleight-of-hand’, suggests Adey (2010b: 62),
describing the rendering of Rio’s favelas into
imagery by militarized state helicopter sensors,
‘official portrayals of the megacity avoid any
mention of its disorder or the helicopter’s
ambiguous and vertical visualities’. Such places
– Rio’s majority-city – are therefore fully obfus-
cated from the official place marketing and
branding imagery so central to Brazil’s efforts
to stage the Olympics and World Cup. Within
such cliche´d urban imagineering, ‘the horizon
between land and sky, beach and water is given
primacy in almost every single image, moving
or otherwise’ (p. 62).
A broader vertical geopolitical process is at
work in the ways in which military-security
complexes of states project cities as intrinsically
problematic because of the ways in which they
are deemed to interrupt the vertical surveillance
and targeting processes (Graham, 2004). The
US Marine Corps Intelligence Agency (1997:
11), for example, predicted that extending
global urbanization, combined with the prolif-
eration of ‘asymmetric’ conflicts pitching non-
state fighters against state militaries, will neces-
sarily mean that ‘opposition forces will camou-
flage themselves in the background noise of the
urban environment. Within the urban environ-
ment, it is not the weapon itself rather the city
which maximizes or mutes an arm’s
effectiveness’.
Essentializing all cities, everywhere, as mere
spaces working to camouflage threats secreted
into quotidian urban life, is proving essential
to legitimize very heavy investment in new
surveillance and targeting systems in state mili-
taries and paramilitarizing security forces: new
micro-drones, swarms of half-manufactured,
half-organic cyborgian insects; myriads of
robotic devices spread generously through the
‘urban battlespace’ which use computer code
linked to vast databases to automatically define
and even destroy ‘targets’. Such emerging tech-
noscientific complexes – illustrated well by the
suite of drones projected to loiter above the
megacity of Jakarta within a US military simu-
lation of a full-scale counterinsurgency opera-
tion there set in 2015 (Figure 5) – are being
designed to permanently permeate and system-
atically unveil urban environments, so allowing
military theorists to fantasize once more about
long-standing dreams of verticalized omnis-
cience and domination.
Crucially, with military-industrial-security
complexes seeking to normalize drones, satel-
lites and other vertical surveillance and target-
ing systems across the widest possible
markets, what Michel Foucault (2003: 103)
called ‘boomerang’ effects are operating
between armed, counterinsurgency operations
in the cities of colonial frontiers and the increas-
ingly militarized ‘urban operations’ of policing
and security operations within cities in capitalist
heartlands. One recent advert for helicopter-
based infra red sensor by the FLIR (Forward
Looking Infra Red) corporation, for example,
portrayed a two-sided front elevation of a
Figure 5. The range of unmanned drones predicted
by the US military as part of its 2003 ‘Urban Resolve’
exercise to be deployable above Jakarta within a
hypothetical full-scale counterinsurgency operation
there in 2015.
Source: Anastasiou (2006: 32) (public domain).
86 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

helicopter with an armed, military one on the
left and the unarmed, police one on the right
with the strapline ‘Every Night, All Night –
From Baghdad to Baton Rouge [the largely
African-American capital of Louisiana] –
We’ve Got Your Back’ (Graham, 2010: 26).
2 Subterranean insurgency: the ‘last
symmetry’ or ‘final frontier’
Importantly, the demonization of cities as sites
interrupting attempts at vertical domination
increasingly extend below the urban surface to
encompass subterranean domains. Such pro-
cesses build on the long-standing rendition of
the urban subterranean by social and political
elites as a literal ‘underworld’ of criminality,
filth, death, legendary occupation and internal
strife (see Gandy, 1999; Pike, 2005, 2007;
Stallybrass and White, 1986, on links between
imaginaries of the urban subterranean and
above-surface rationalization and planning of
urban space). Through them, national militaries,
security forces and military-industrial com-
plexes are increasingly (re)imagining the spaces
below ground as sites beyond aerial and vertical
scrutiny that thus require systematic exposure,
targeting and, if need be, destruction (see
Graham, 2004).
Rather than in the mass, mutual urban bur-
rowing of both strategic blocks during the Cold
War, then (Vanderbilt, 2010), contemporary
‘asymmetric’ conflict renders the burrowing of
the adversary as inherently problematic (while,
of course, national security states in the USA
and Israel continue to burrow). Norgard et al.
(2005) of the US Air Force Academy, for exam-
ple, talk of a ‘proliferation of strategic subsur-
face sanctuaries’ within both the main cities
and remote hinterlands of US adversaries,
geared towards the production and storage of
weapons of mass destruction and the protection
of leaders. The widespread argument within
military and security publications is that such
subterranean complexes represent one of the
greatest challenges for the American military
(Sepp, 2000), and the vertically organized
matrix of satellites, aircraft, drones and ground
sensors is built to allow them to occupy what
a RAND report called the ‘ultimate high
ground’ (Lambeth, 2003) of space-based sur-
veillance and targeting. Kennedy (2002), dis-
cussing the construction of dedicated tunnel
warfare training facilities for US special forces,
laments the way in which non-state insurgencies
and terrorist movements like the Taliban and Al
Q’aeda now routinely burrow into ‘large honey-
combed complexes of natural caves and man-
made tunnels, often cleverly disguised, booby
trapped and filled with food, water and
ammunition’.
To expose these ‘deeply buried facilities’ to
vertical destruction, the US military is develop-
ing and deploying a whole suite of conventional
and nuclear ‘bunker-busting’ bombs. These
have startling names such as ‘Deep Digger’,
‘Rods from God’ or even the ‘Robust Nuclear
Earth Penetrator’. Even more startling, the Pen-
tagon is investing in a whole new generation of
sensors and imaging systems designed to detect
and visualize underground structures. The
‘Transparent Earth’ program, for example, is
being developed to send sensors down existing
pipe systems to help build up a Google Earth-
like 3D interface ‘that would display the physi-
cal, chemical and dynamic properties of Earth
down to a 5 kilometre depth’ (Drummond,
2010). Smith, of the Geospatial Corporation –
the company tasked with part of the analysis –
reflects that the ‘underground is truly the final
frontier’ (cited in Drummond, 2010). The hope
is that, when complete, the ‘Transparent Earth’
program may mean that ‘for enemies of America,
going underground may no longer be an option’
(Dillow, 2010).
More prosaically, the greatest effort and
research addressing the subterranean realm
among national security states is targeting the
less elaborate tunnel systems now routinely
constructed to allow surreptitious or
Graham and Hewitt 87

proscribed movements, migrations and econo-
mies to flourish despite intensifying surface
and above-surface surveillance and targeting.
Such illicit tunnel complexes are reminiscent
of the Viet Cong’s subterranean burrowings
during the Vietnam war (Bishop, 2010). Moti-
vations here vary – from illicit drugs smug-
gling, people trafficking and the
‘tunnelization of migration’ (Finoki, 2009) to
sustaining basic economic flows or full-scale
subterranean insurgencies. Nevertheless,
broadly similar cartel-controlled and ever
more elaborate subterranean complexes are
emerging in a wide range of cases: beneath the
Gaza-Egypt border (with almost 1,000 tunnels;
Lerner, 2008); the US-Mexico border (espe-
cially around Tijuana and Nogales, Arizona);
and even beneath the US-Canada border. The
perceived strategic importance of these tunnel
complexes is such that NORTHCOM, the
newly installed US strategic command for
North America, has set up a special Task
Force to address them. Specialized tunnel war-
fare training facilities are now proliferating
(Figure 6). In 2006 the US Congress also
passed a special law to specifically criminalize
transborder tunnels.
In Israel-Palestine, meanwhile, Eyal Weiz-
man, updating his initial politics of verticality
work cited at the start of this paper, now care-
fully links subterranean burrowing to the poli-
tics of airspace and the (attempted) territorial
lock-down of the surface. ‘The territorial logic
of Israel’s occupation is increasingly manifest
along a vertical axis’, he writes (Weizman,
2009: 253). ‘The more efficient the destructive
capacity of the Israeli air force has become [in
drone operations and targeted assassinations],
the deeper the resistance has had to retreat
below ground.’ What Weizman calls the ‘last
symmetry’ of so-called asymmetric conflict,
thus, is that between virtually total control of
airspace and space domains by military secu-
rity states, mirrored in ‘the enemy’s mastery
of subterranean warfare’ (p. 253) – hence the
broader theme of Weizman’s (2007) book Hol-
low Land.
Weizman’s observations of tactics and coun-
tertactics are instructive. IDF operatives routi-
nely use simple gravity as a weapon by
pouring raw sewage into newly discovered tun-
nels (Weizman, 2007: 257). Tunnels beneath
the now-defunct ‘international airport’ in Gaza
demonstrate how ‘tunneling has replaced fly-
ing’ within a three-dimensional frame of strate-
gic infrastructure, and the 2006 war in Lebanon
ended up a major victory for Hezbollah because
of a baroque complex of 40 m deep ‘under-
ground villages’ prepared over a period of years
with the help of Iranian engineers (p. 258). ‘The
Figure 6. The US Army’s newly opened Joint Tunnel
Test Range (JTTR) at the Yuma proving ground,
Arizona.
Source: http://www.yuma.army.mil/index.asp (public domain).
88 Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

[2006] Lebanon war was waged between
two spheres of extra-territorial sovereignty’,
Weizman contends. ‘An ‘‘upper Lebanon’’ of
Israeli-controlled airspace, and [a] ‘‘lower Leba-
non’’ dug beneath villages, civilian neighbour-
hoods and open land’ (p. 258). Finoki (2009),
author of the excellent Subtopia blog on military
urbanism (see http://subtopia.blogspot.com),
suggests that the lesson to state security engineers
is thus quite simple: ‘prepare for tunnels!’.
It is certainly imperative for critical urban
and political geography to link the proliferation
of tunnel complexes with the extraordinary
intensification of state-backed technoscientific
scrutiny that has marked vertical geopolitics
over the past few decades. ‘Despite advances
in satellite imaging, infrared and sensor technol-
ogy, and a flexing global panoptic muscle’,
Finoki (2006) continues, ‘detection methods
have suffered accuracy due to the expansion
of a subterranean urbanism that’s become
increasingly more sophisticated at deflecting
aerial surveillance’. Thus, as with all the
research themes highlighted in this paper, criti-
cal attention needs to fall on the mutual consti-
tution of vertically separated levels, domains
and relationalities within broader volumetric
frames. By merely concentrating on surface-
level borders, or the intensification of above-
ground surveillance, Finoki (2006) stresses that
crucial subterranean realms are obscured – com-
plexes where, as he puts it, the ‘limits of power
are undone by the primordial urge to human inge-
nuity persistent in its crudest form, in its naked
right to move freely beyond all constraints and
survive, snoop, escape, evade, profit’.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
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