Theorising vertical urbanisation

Taller, denser and more diverse city skylines are a hallmark of 21st century urban change. Although vertical urbanisation is increasingly ubiquitous, this development has not followed a single universal pattern. It is not uniform in its scale, its target neighourhood types, nor in its design, which spans ‘starchitect’-designed skyscrapers and generic tower blocks. Urban scholars have traditionally considered vertical development via less specific concepts such as intensification, and only recently has the expression ‘vertical urbanisation’ risen in prominence. There remains however a lack of integration and theorisation of vertical expansion across social science debate. This siloing of diverse perspectives encourages isolated accounts and hinders shared understandings around the processes it entails. Yet interest lies not only in examining the specifics of each new local crop of towers, but also in explaining the process of vertical expansion itself as performative and constitutive of shifting social relations. Equally, integrating distinct local, historical, and institutional trajectories within robust theoretical schema can enhance understandings of vertical expansion in particular times and places. This paper steps towards these ambitions by conceptualising residential vertical urbanisation as a special kind of spatial fix. Using intertextual theorisation and drawing upon Aalbers and Christophers’ recent theorisation of housing’s functions under capitalist political economy, this article positions residential high-rise development within the circuitry of capitalist accumulation. In particular, and independently of national or local specifics, it develops an exploratory conceptual schema for high-rise housing development based on its three interrelated functions as: labour and capital intensive commodities; as investments on real estate markets tied to financial markets; and as cultural artefacts of distinction both in inter city competition and geopolitics, and in class relations. The proposed theorisation does not explain vertical expansion in every case, indeed it emphasises the importance of interrogating the role of intermediaries, states, and local opportunity structures in understanding the local contours of vertical expansion. Nonetheless, by providing a theoretically informed heuristic that is sensitive to temporal and geographic contingencies, and into which specific occurrences of vertical expansion can be embedded, this framework offers to promote communication between these occurrences as related yet locally contingent phenomena of financialised capitalism.