Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature

Introduction: Science fiction and the ‘vertical turn’ in urban social science

It requires little excavation to uncover the fascination that vertical urban structures have held for modern architects and planners. The Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia (2009 [1914]: 200), for example, envisioned cities where ‘elevators [would] swarm up the facades like serpents of glass and iron’ and where the street would ‘no longer lie like a doormat … but plunge several storeys deep into the earth’. A few years later, the architect Auguste Perret imagined a Paris of the future with ‘avenues 250 meters wide and on either side houses that reach to the clouds’ (1920, quoted by Passanti 1987: 56). While Le Corbusier – an iconic figure whose preoccupation with verticality and aeriality have cast long shadows in modern urban and architectural history – expressed his ambition to remake the urban landscape of the future as ‘a vertical city … which will pile up the cells which have for so long been crushed on the ground, and set them high above the earth, bathed in light and air’ (1987 [1927]: 280).

Interest in the development of the vertical urban axis has, therefore, been a central strand of the modern architectural imagination and alongside this imaginative preoccupation, supported by the engineering innovations characteristic of the period, processes of urbanisation have also extended over the vertical axis. In the course of their growth and extension, urban development processes have excavated downwards, creating subterranean urban landscapes dominated by the infrastructural plexus that is the prerequisite of modern urban life. At the same time, they have stretched far into the spaces of the air and sky, signalling corporate status, political and economic centrality, and technological mastery as they reach for ever-greater vertical extension.

Vertical aspects of the production, experience and representation of urban space are clearly fundamental to the nature of modern cities. Steve Pile, for example, in assessing what physical attributes might be exclusive to cities, as compared with other places, suggests ‘skyscrapers, underground railways, street lighting (maybe), and not much else’ (1999: 5). As we have agued elsewhere (Graham and Hewitt, 2013), however, critical social science has long prioritised a flat, planar or horizontal imaginary of urban space over a volumetric or vertical one. In the collections of essays that follow Pile’s observation, for example – books which are currently a key reference point for urban scholarship and, particularly, education – the specific and crucial contribution of verticality to the spatiality and intensity of cities is addressed in only the briefest form (see Allen et al., 1999; Massey et al., 1999; Pile et al., 1999).

Cities have been widely explored in terms of distributions, concentrations, stretched-out topologies, corridors, networks, sprawl and extending urban regions. Such a discourse indicates a strong tendency, particularly in urban geography, to normalise the top-down aerial or cartographic gaze as a dominant representational device through which to perceive and analyse cities and systems of cities, and that normalisation has tended to privilege relations across the surface of cities and systems of cities distributed across the planet’s surface. While this dominant horizontalism has bequeathed a rich vein of scholarship, it has also established an epistemological and empirical bias towards geographies of the surface. The metaphors and vocabulary we routinely deploy in discussions of urban growth – for example, sprawl, extension, hyper-urbanisation, the megalopolis, the recent discussion of planetary urbanisation (see Merrifield, 2012) and so on – have thus implicitly but overwhelmingly been used to define the changing urbanisation of space in horizontal rather than vertical or volumetric terms.

However, there is now a growing recognition among contemporary social scientific urbanists and geographers that traditions of scholarly research have tended to privilege the horizontal dimension of space at the neglect of a three-dimensional conceptualisation. Such a recognition is particularly timely, given the continued and deepening urbanisation of the world, rising urban densities and increasingly ubiquitous interests in engineering ever more volumetric and vertically stretched urban complexes. Thus, writers such as Heidi Scott have responded to the prevalence of horizontalism by challenging contemporary scholarship to arrive at ‘stronger theorizations of verticality’ (2008: 1858; see also Weizman, 2002). Such calls for a ‘vertical turn’ in urban social science (see Graham and Hewitt, 2013) have been prompted by the recognition that knowledge of the processes of modern and contemporary urbanisation will remain incomplete and inadequate while urban social science largely fails to engage with the increasingly vertical and volumetric nature of the urban environment and experience that is at the core of contemporary urbanism.

Research that directly or indirectly addresses this problematic has already begun to demonstrate how important and how fruitful it is to challenge the past dominance of the surficial, planar view. Arguably, a ‘vertical’ or ‘volumetric’ turn is already underway. Writers such as Gandy (1999) and Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) have begun to unearth the urban subterranean; Adey (2010) and Cwerner (2006) have started to highlight the social politics of vertical urban splintering; and Dorrian (2011) and Munster (2008) have pointed to the complex visual and cultural politics of the aerial view, not least as it is now popularised by Google Earth. In addition, there is a growing acknowledgement that, like horizontal space, vertical spaces can manifest the inequities and secessionary tendencies surrounding processes of splintering urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001). This paper therefore joins a growing field of scholarship interested in challenging the overly surficial focus of existing urban geography.

Our focus in what follows falls on the widespread imagining within science fiction literature (hereafter, ‘SF’) of the last century – exemplified in the work of HG Wells, JG Ballard and William Gibson – of future urban complexes structured around extremes of vertical extension and distanciation. We focus on these three authors because in combination they offer both a temporal and a thematic breadth that is particularly valuable for our examination of and engagement with contemporary urban thinking. Furthermore, in adopting this focus we also recognise, as others have done before, that fiction can provide a powerful vantage point for insight and critique. Marc Brosseau (1994), for example, has argued that the use of fiction can been seen particularly strongly through the humanist tradition of geographic research, which has sought to refocus scholarship on human experience as opposed to prioritising quantitative analysis, and through the radical tradition of geography which has viewed literature as having an political function.

In this paper, we are concerned with the complex ways in which fiction depicts plausible near-future urban scenarios that overlap with and relate to the extending verticalities of modern and contemporary metropolitan space. Given the critical commentary that has become particularly visible in 20th-century SF (Claeys, 2010) and the powerful way in which fiction and contemporary theory can be brought together (Lewis et al., 2008, 2014; Tyner, 2004), we are also interested in the ways SF has animated some of the political and analytical themes that now, increasingly, interest contemporary thinking about cities. This contribution to urban social science’s vertical turn therefore emerges in a context in which social-scientific studies of SF (and fictional representations more broadly) increasingly demonstrate that, as well as speculations about the future, it can offer powerful commentaries on, and critiques of, the nature of the contemporary social life.

Crucially, too, writers have begun to argue that the epistemological boundaries separating fiction from non-fiction are far more porous than often recognised. Both Carl Abbott (2007) and Nic Clear (2009) have suggested that such boundaries are breached particularly clearly in the case of urban planning, architectural design and SF, since the ‘visionary’ element of the architectural and planning disciplines is a strong, even a central, part of traditional activity. There has been little focused exploration of this shared ground, but Abbott (2007) has argued that what we might call ‘design science fiction’ shares the same purpose as SF, namely that of speculating about what the future might look like if certain tendencies were developed, and is, therefore, itself a type of science fiction. Clear (2009) also follows this argument, however he also suggests that the tendency of architects to locate their speculations in a ‘better’ future has undermined the plausibility of architectural design. ‘The architectural work,’ Clear argues (2009: 6–7), ‘has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold’ and as a result, in comparison, it is the visions of SF that ‘are often more believable’.

Further, as Rob Kitchin and James Kneale (2005) have argued, there is a reciprocity to the relationship, with contemporary urbanism shaping SF, which in its turn works in complex ways to effect the imagination, experience and construction of contemporary urbanism. Specifically in relation to geography, Kitchin and Kneale argue that SF particularly helps to establish an interplay between its writers, its readers and the development of space; it becomes part of a popular and professional imagination that feeds into practice (see also Abbott, 2007). Various illustrations can be cited that demonstrate this observation. William Gibson, for example, indicates the importance of certain contemporary cities for his fictional urban worlds in recent writing. Describing a trip to Tokyo, taken ‘to refresh [his] sense of place’, he explains that the city ‘has been my handiest prop shop for as long as I’ve been writing: sheer eye candy’ (2012: 158).

Our interest in examining and theorising the vertical aspects of urban life through the lens of SF literature is motivated by precisely this kind of dialogue. Further, while we recognise that the relationships between architecture, planning and science fiction are not straightforward, it is nevertheless worth noting from the outset that an ongoing dialogue has been, and remains, clearly visible. According the Ester da Costa Meyer (1995: 137), for example, Antonio Sant’Elia, with little formal training, drew more on the imagery of contemporary SF than on the architectural theory circulating in early 20th-century Italy. Further, the relationship between contemporary urbanism and cyberpunk SF – with its extremes of social polarisation, highly technologised circuits of social control and cyborgian blurring between social, organic and technological life – is particularly multifaceted (see Burrows, 1997; Davis, 1992). Norman Klein (1991: 147) has given the much noted example of five ‘leading urban planners’ publicly expressing their hope that Los Angeles might eventually resemble the landscape depicted in the film Blade Runner (based on Philip K Dick’s influential novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968). And to complicate the connections still further, Ridley Scott, the film’s director, admitted that his iconic depiction of a near-future Los Angeles – replete with extraordinary vertical architecture, gas flares and endless rain – owed much to his childhood in the steel and chemical town of Middlesbrough (see Gold, 2001).

The discussion that follows falls into four parts. The first uses an analysis of two seminal SF novels – HG Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (2005 [1910]) and JG Ballard’s High-Rise (2006 [1975]) – to explore how SF commonly deploys vertical spatial and architectural metaphors to symbolise, posit and expose deepening inequalities and social and class distinctions (which are themselves often traditionally labelled ‘vertical’ within urban sociology). The second part of the paper continues to explore Wells’ and Ballard’s writings to engage with the ways in which the top-down gaze of the high-rise dweller on the city and population below is used to symbolise wider structures of privilege, elitism and power. The paper’s third section strikes out into the profoundly verticalised imaginaries of cyberpunk SF. Here we focus on the architectural bricolage of William Gibson’s writing. We show how his verticalised urban imaginaries work to muddy the conceptual waters of modernist political thought whilst still invoking deep metaphoric connections between urban verticality and social and political power. The paper’s conclusion reflects on how our analyses help to extend understanding of the complex, recursive relationships between the verticalised urban imaginaries of SF an the verticalised spaces of contemporary urbanism.

Vertical space as hierarchical space: Wells, Ballard and stratified urbanism

In the late 19th century the rise of the skyscraper charged the architectural imagination and altered the skyline of those cities that were then at the centre of urban development. Yet, the vertical city, both as it was conceived by architects and as it began to materialise, was not simply a transformation of space; it was fundamentally connected to new forms of social organisation. For example, in London, mansion flats, dubbed by EM Forster as ‘Babylonian flats’ in his 1910 novel Howard’s End, were explicitly marketed as social experiments (see Dennis, 2008). As Richard Dennis has noted (2008: 240), with their communal facilities and varied, mobile populations, these early high-rise residential buildings were described in The Times as ‘very novel and, socially speaking, revolutionary’. But, as Dennis also demonstrates, high-rise buildings could also be subject to strong criticism and the topic of heated political debate.

Speculation about the future of London was often a theme for HG Wells and the potentiality of a vertical future appeared under the spotlight in his novel, The Sleeper Awakes. Published first in serial form in the late 1890s, Wells rewrote the piece for publication as a novel in 1910. The timing of its writing and publication therefore corresponded with early experiences and debates about how high-rise living could be integrated into and might change the social and built landscape of the capital. The narrative of The Sleeper Awakes concerns Graham, a character who, at the outset, has been suffering from insomnia so severe he considers suicide. When he finally falls asleep, the sleep is a trance in which his body suspends the normal aging process (even his hair stops growing) and from which he is never expected to wake. He does awaken, 203 years later, to a world that is transformed and a London that has grown along profoundly vertical lines:

[Graham] went to the railings of the balcony and stared upward … His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him … (Wells, 2005 [1910]: 42).

As the novel progresses, this vision of extraordinary architectural scale is gradually revealed as the embodiment of an acutely segregated society in which Graham himself is implicated as the unwitting symbolic and economic figurehead. The functionality of this socially stratified London relies on a workforce for whom the city is a labour camp from which they cannot escape. Indeed, the only possible escape route, paying for ‘Enthansay’, is beyond the means of most of the workers – ‘for the poor there is no easy death’ – and they are, rather, condemned to a life of hard labour and ill health in the city’s subterranean labyrinths (2005 [1910]: 162). The underground spaces of the city are not visible to Graham as he initially experiences the city, but he is eventually led down to witness the plight of the urban masses, his description evoking the poverty and deprivation of the 19th-century slum:

They penetrated downward, ever downward, towards the working places … through these factories and places of toil, seeing many painful and grim things … Everywhere were pillars and cross archings of such a massiveness as Graham had never before seen, thick Titans of greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath the vast weight of that complex city world, even as these anaemic millions were crushed by its complexity. And everywhere were pale features, lean limbs, disfigurement and degradation. (Wells, 2005 [1910]: 193 and 196)

In its characterisation of urban social relations, The Sleeper Awakes reflects the conviction, prevalent at the time Wells wrote, that the modern city embodied a new political and industrial order, and that urban society brought a greater degree of social polarisation as the city exploited its workforce (see Lehan, 1998: 153 and 158). ¹ Wells explored the same distribution of privilege and deprivation over the vertical axis in his novella, ‘A Story of Days to Come’ published in an early collection, Tales of Time and Space (1900). For example:

In the twenty-second century … the growth of the city storey above storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous hotels in the upper storeys and the halls of the city fabric; the industrial population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement … of the place. (1900: 101)

In this vision of the city Wells presented a powerful piece of ‘cultural prophecy’ (Crossley, 2007: 361). It reflected his own political concerns, particularly his antipathy for unregulated industrial capitalism, and, thus, the city appeared as a closed system –‘a world of dire economic struggle’ – built on exploitative social relationships. Indeed, the functionality of the vertical metropolis which Wells animates through his writing relies on a workforce of labourers who partake in none of the privilege available to those further up the social and spatial scales. However, The Sleeper Awakes also reflects Wells’s interrogation, through fiction, of the nature of modern culture. In 22nd-century London, the political and media institutions have become both powerful and unaccountable and the novel is pervaded by an escalating sense that the city manifests the signals of a moral decline that must lead to violent crisis (for example, 2005 [1910]: 57).

Appearing 65 years after Wells’s speculative engagement with the capital was published in novel form, JG Ballard’s High-Rise (2006 [1975]) offers a second iconic piece of writing about the nature of metropolitan urbanity. The context with which Ballard engaged was significantly altered from that which immediately framed The Sleeper Awakes. From 1956, in a deliberate political attempt to precipitate high-rise building, subsidies for flats in blocks over 15 storeys high were three times more than those for other forms of affordable housing and, until the Ronan Point disaster 12 years later, tower blocks were built rapidly in major cities across Britain (Hall, 2002: 241). However, by the 1970s, the high-rise was becoming synonymous with unsuccessful mass social housing and carried a raft of negative connotations as the tower blocks built to alleviate housing problems began to degenerate both materially and socially (Glendinning and Muthesius, 1994). Ballard’s fictional account of high-rise living was a direct engagement with this deepening trend in urban planning and his exploration of the social implications of high-rise residential building and its material failure explicitly referred to contemporary development. For example, he pointed specifically to the now famous infrastructural and architectural innovation at the Park Hill estate in Sheffield – titling one of his chapters, ‘Danger in the Streets of the Sky’ – of building walkways outside the front doors of flats that were wide enough for milk floats and thus nicknamed ‘streets in the sky’.

Yet Ballard penned a vision that is at least as startlingly relevant today than it was to the context in which he wrote: Ballard’s Highrise is an ultra-modern, technologically sophisticated, luxury enclave – clearly evocative of what De Cauter (2005) has recently called a ‘capsular’ urban space – which is powerfully reminiscent of the verticalised, elite and gated communities that now pepper the world’s metropolitan spaces. The building is ‘a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky’ (Ballard, 2006 [1975]: 9). Yet, despite the overall sense of privilege, the social stratification among inhabitants is a central feature of the novel. The 40 floors are divided along social and economic lines that quickly become solidified as the ‘natural social order of the building’ (2006 [1975]: 14):

In effect, the high-rise had already divided itself into the three classical social groups, its lower, middle and upper classes. The 10th-floor shopping mall formed a clear boundary between the lower nine floors, with their ‘proletariat’ of film technicians, air-hostesses and the like, and the middle section of the high-rise, which extended from the 10th floor to the swimming pool and restaurant deck on the 35th. This central two-thirds of the apartment building formed its middle class, made up of self-centred but basically docile members of the professions – the doctors and lawyers, accountants and tax specialists who worked, not for themselves, but for medical institutes and large corporations … Above them, on the top five floors of the high-rise, was its upper class, the discreet oligarchy of minor tycoons and entrepreneurs, television actresses and careerist academics, with their high-speed elevators and superior services, their carpeted staircases. (2006 [1975]: 53)

This plausibly rendered vision of deeply unsettling dysfunction involves a cast of professionals, entrepreneurs and intellectuals who band together in groups that take on a tribal and ultimately violent character. In Ballard’s dystopic high-rise this social stratification fuels resentment as confrontations develop between floors and intimidation escalates into violence that takes on an increasingly brutal and irreversible quality. Indeed, as the atmosphere becomes brittle with tension, residents form raiding parties and protection groups, elevators are hijacked, cars are smashed and assaults take place.

Despite their differences, both Wells and Ballard powerfully animate the social relationships they analyse through the spatial metaphor of verticality, and in doing so they dramatise an observation that is currently being explored in urban and spatial theory. The use of the vertical axis to explore social divisions appeals to a symbolic gesture that is frequently grounded in the metaphor of spatial geometry. In social terms, the vertical implies hierarchy; deployed in spatial terms the vertical highlights and concretises inequities.

Cultural and urban historian, David Pike, in particular, has developed this point. He argues that the use of such conceptual ordering can be traced back to medieval Christendom, where the ‘vertical cosmos’ located ‘good above and evil below’ (2005: 5; see also Stallybrass and White, 1986). The symbolism reappears, Pike observes, in a variety of forms, pairings and tropes – high and low, up and down, upper and lower, light and dark, north and south – each containing powerful imaginative and conceptual connotations beyond their identification of a space and its relative location. Furthermore, Pike has argued that wherever it occurs vertical space is always hierarchised space (2005: 90). This argument highlights the cultural connotations and moral associations that are frequently subject to spatialisation, but even more than Pike’s observations, the use of vertical space to ground the class-based societies of the speculative futures examined by both Wells and Ballard signals the political potency of high-rise building. What De Cauter (2005) has recently described as ‘the capsular’ nature of contemporary urban space suggests that our current (and future) ability to build up may be increasingly able to sustain extreme forms of social secession through vertical splintering.

The aerial view: Power, distance and the experience of verticality

At the top of Ballard’s dysfunctional vertical enclave we find Anthony Royal, one of the building’s architects. Royal’s positionality ‘on top’ is a source of intrigue and tension for the other residents of the high-rise. He is ‘well-to-do’, arrogant and defensive, ‘determined to outstare any criticism’ of the building he helped to conceive (Ballard, 2006 [1975]: 15, 27). He is also, ultimately, impotent, able only to limp through the building as it crumbles materially and socially and destined to die rambling and starved amongst the human and architectural debris.

However, early on, from his penthouse apartment, Royal is allowed the conceit that he may act as ‘mid-wife’ to ‘a pattern of social organisation that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks’ (2006 [1975]: 70). Royal’s penthouse location, at the pinnacle of social and spatial scales, with an abstracted vision of the whole in the form of his plans and architectural drawings, appeals to a unique positionality on the vertical scale. Indeed, it seems that the ultimate embodiment of power comes from what Topalov (1993) has called the ‘zenithal’ position and the view it affords. Ballard uses that view, and the sense of distance created through it, to frame the increasing detachment of the high-rise residents from the world surrounding them. For Robert Laing, another central figure in the drama of the high-rise and the only survivor of the narrative, it is this mode of perception that explains his removal from his everyday life, his work and the city around him:

Laing made less and less effort to leave the building. He unpacked his record collection and played himself into his new life, sitting on his balcony and gazing across the parking-lots and concrete plazas below him. Although the apartment was no higher than the 25th floor, he felt for the first time that he was looking down at the sky, rather than up at it. Each day the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. (2006 [1975]: 9)

Like Ballard, Wells also utilises the elevated position and the aerial view that it permits to illustrate an experience of profound detachment, this time the detachment of the powerful from the city they rule. In Wells’ novel the streets and houses of Victorian London have been replaced by a ‘vast city structure’ and, while the labouring population live in its depths, the powerful, the city’s Council, occupy an elaborate complex nestled beneath the domed roof of the city onto which Graham makes an early escape (2005 [1910]: 69). This first experience of the highest points of the city and the view they afford causes Graham to experience paralysing vertigo (2005 [1910]: 70), but later, when he goes in search of greater knowledge of the city he finds himself master of, he is shown to ‘the crow’s nest of the wind-vane keeper’ from which the city, despite being gripped by violent conflict looks serene, its ‘luminous landscape undisturbed’ (2005 [1910]: 125). Indeed, viewing from this position Graham:

could almost forget the thousands of men lying out of sight in the artificial glare within the quasi-subterranean labyrinth, dead or dying of their overnight wounds, forget the impoverished wards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses, and bearers feverishly busy … (2005 [1910]: 125).

For both Ballard and Wells, then, the mode of perception offered by the aerial view represents an experience of profound detachment in the fictional worlds they explore. The social life of the High-Rise degenerates into a violent dystopia as its inhabitants retreat from their wider social relationships and become the voluntary captives of the apartment building, complicit in and protective of their collective withdrawal from the world around them. ² For Ballard, such a removal from the surface and detachment from the conventions of ‘normal’ sociability are the prerequisite that allows the violence of the narrative to spiral towards ruin. Wells uses the aerial view to further his exploration of the social stratification and antagonism of his 22nd-century London. In The Sleeper Awakes it is the aerial view and the pinnacle location that emphasises the withdrawal of the powerful from contact with the labouring population of the city, the distance between the two segments of society and the subsequent invisibility both of the poor and their exploitation.

Such an emphasis places the ethics and the politics of the aerial view – the view which vertically distanciates the top-down viewer occupying the architectural heights from the teeming city below – in the centre of attention. Recent contributions to the theorisation of the aerial view have emphasised that this technique of visuality, characteristic of modern cartography and photography, as well as urban planning, has a significant impact on the perception and subsequent relation to space. Adnan Morshed, for example, is among those who have pointed to the centrality of this vision in the most radically interventionist programmes of modernist architecture. Using what Morshed has called the dieu voyeur (the voyeur god), ‘twentieth-century urban planning sought to fulfil the modernist dream of transforming the city into an object of knowledge and a governable space’ (2002: 204; see also Boyer, 2003). Similarly, in his pioneering work on the cultural history of the aerial view, Mark Dorrian has argued that the perspective of distance, abstraction and power secured through ascension has been a key narrative in Western modernity and that the aerial view ‘is conceptually linked to notions of transcendent subjectivity, futurity and abstraction that have the potential to license a violence directed towards the surface’ (2006: 20).

The work of both Morshed and Dorrian deepen the observations and analysis made by De Certeau in his iconic reflections on The Practice of Everyday Life (1988). In those essays, De Certeau drew attention to the ethics and experience of the distanciated top-down view of the city, seen from the top of the World Trade Center, in opposition to the enmeshed corporeal worlds of the walking city below. De Certeau’s concern to recognise and examine the relational implications of perceptual positionality have formed a current of critique, which is visible among contemporary writers such as Morshed, Boyer and Dorrian; that same concern is dramatised in the fictional worlds created by Wells and by Ballard, and these, too, provide insights into and reflections on the social ethics of vertical spatial separation.

Cyberpunk verticalities

Over the later 20th century, keeping time with its technological and philosophical context, SF underwent a series of profound changes in terms of both subject matter and narrative form (see, for example, Levy, 2009; Merrick, 2009). For some, through its engagement with the trajectories of the present, the emergence of cyberpunk has offered a radical departure and a valuable vantage point. Kitchin and Kneale, for example, have pointed out that cyberpunk is ‘one of the first forms of literary genre to recognize, reflect and explore the postmodern condition’ and that, as such, it offers ‘privileged insights into the contemporary’ (2001: 22). Indeed, as commentary and discussion ground, cyberpunk narrativises some of the key critiques that have been made of modernist philosophy. Thus, the traditional binaries of self/other, nature/technology, order/chaos, and so forth, are collapsed by the post-human, technologically driven and volatile worlds of cyberpunk. Furthermore, in relation to space, this has significant consequences for the landscapes imagined. The spaces of cyberpunk leave little room for the stable geopolitics, the stasis and the essentialism characteristic of the accounts of space given by modernist philosophers and writers alike. Instead, the landscapes of cyberpunk are more in keeping with the kind of space theorised by writers such as Doreen Massey (2005); they are heterogeneous, relational and lively. They also, echoing a theme in contemporary critical urbanism which Steve Graham (2010) has powerfully underlined, emphasise the privatisation and the militarisation of urban space.

William Gibson (1995) explicitly signals his distance from the dominant modernist architectural and science fictional dreams of the past by deploying those dreams as hallucinations in his short story, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’. In this engagement with the ‘design science fiction’ of the past, Gibson’s protagonist, an unnamed photographer, takes a job documenting the architectural traces of 1930s American pop culture. Becoming absorbed in his task as he drives across America photographing aging factory buildings, motels and gas stations, he starts to see traces also of ‘a shadowy America-that-wasn’t’ (1995: 41). Appearing first in glimpses, and then in disturbingly convincing three-dimensionality, the city of fictions past bears a striking resemblance to the cinematic depictions of Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Menzies Things to Come (1936). The protagonist is frightened by this American dream, with its towering spires and soaring roads and polished blond inhabitants who have ‘all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda’ (1995: 47). Indeed, Gibson’s protagonist hopes the vision is only an ‘amphetamine pyschosis’ (1995: 46), but as the narrative resolves, he retreats into trashy television and the daily rehearsal of catastrophe found in newspaper headlines; the image of the totalising society imagined by the past, he decides, is far worse than the ‘near-dystopia we live in’ (1995: 50).

The vertical spaces of Gibson’s futures, in contrast, share none of the modernist clarity exemplified by the landscapes of Metropolis or Things to Come; they are fragmented, violent and vulnerable. Furthermore, as Gibson paints them, Nighttown, the San Francisco Bridge and Hak Nam each provide imagery that is strongly at odds with early and mid 20th-century architectural visions. Gibson’s vertical worlds are captured and repurposed enclaves offering the protection of chaos, random accretions materialising an improvised and provisional architecture. Nighttown’s Pit, for example, is where Johnny Mnemonic goes to hide when he is hunted by the multinational Yakuza, because in the Pit ‘any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace’ (1995: 22). It looks like a ‘disused maintenance yard’, spirals up to the geodesic roof structure where the Lo Teks (the local gang) ‘leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy’ (1995: 29–30). And Johnny stays there, secreted away from view, becoming part of the social, spatial and technological network that makes the Pit tick. Neil Campbell argues these architectural figures in Gibson’s work are spaces of resistance and possibility reminiscent of the Bakhtinian carnival (2000: 160–161). The exemplar of this imaginary appears in Gibson’s much quoted account of the San Francisco bridge:

Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy. (Gibson, 1994: 58–59).

This structure is at the centre of the plot of Virtual Light, the first of Gibson’s bridge trilogy. The novel tells the story of the theft of glasses that contains visualisations of a virtual model, a masterplan for San Francisco that would remake the city’s landscape in a cliché of modernist destruction. The San Francisco bridge stands as the embodied antithesis of this vision. It is a bricolage of fragments patched together, ‘a carnival,’ reminiscent of ‘the favelas of Rio’, with ‘a fairy quality to the secondary construction’ that has built up over the ‘verticality of the core structure’s poetry of suspension’ (Gibson, 1994: 58, 1999: 18). As a central space of the plot and a heuristic device for Gibson’s social and spatial reflections, the bridge represents something radically different from both the landscapes of the past and from the privatised, militarised urban splintering that surrounds it. The bridge emerged out of an act of opposition, but not an act those involved are willing to designate as ‘politics’. As Skinner, one of those who initiated occupation of the structure, explains ‘“Shit happens. Happened that night. No signal, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance … that’s over”’ (1995: 86). Indeed, the social commentary embedded in Virtual Light in the form of Yamazaki’s (a Japanese student of existential sociology) reflections indicate that the bridge is a manifestation of a qualitatively different experience, one that partakes in the sense of a fissure in the nature of the times:

Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell …We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure. Modernity was ending. (1995: 89–90)

Gibson’s spaces, then, problematise the metaphorical shift between conceptualisations of social organisation, particularly social class, and vertical space because they do not seem easily to accommodate the modern categorical project of class distinctions and hierarchies. Thus, the sense that social divisions can be mapped through space with clarity and confidence is lost, and what we seem to be left with is a critique of the metaphorical alignments explored earlier in relation to Wells and Ballard. The socio-spatial hierarchies are certainly at moments replaced by something more dynamic and unstable, more creative and provisional, yet Gibson also highlights the vulnerability of these spaces and points to their creation out of necessity. In the case of the Bridge, its inhabitants build upwards because they have little or no space on the surface. Thus, while Gibson’s vertical spaces step well beyond the architectural orderliness of the modern high rise, and while the social hierarchies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries do not map readily onto the landscape Gibson depicts, there remains ground for commonality. In particular, there remains a strong sense of social bifurcation in Gibson’s narratives and his vertical spaces can be read as an architecturally creative solution to the militarisation, privatisation and control of the surface.

Conclusions

In a recent discussion of the way 20th-century literature has represented sociologists and sociology, Diane Bjorklund (2001: 36) argued that novelists and sociologists are competitors, their choice of discipline signifying differing epistemological convictions about how it is possible to engage with, analyse and represent social life. Her suggestion points to questions that are important in the current context, when interdisciplinarity holds a reified position, but the argument that literature and social science are opposing forms of knowledge is difficult to sustain. As we noted at the outset of this paper, the relationship between SF, architecture and planning, and the development of urban space is complex, but fully visible, reciprocal and longstanding. Like Kitchin and Kneale (2001, 2005), we suggest that the critical commentaries of SF offer considerable utility to contemporary urban social scientists. Furthermore, in our view, though SF literature and urban social science represent different ways of investigating and commentating upon urban modernity, rather than the oppositional epistemic modes of art and science, we suggest that drawing SF into a dialogue with urban social science demonstrates important critical and analytical common ground.

In each of the examples of SF that we have examined, the narratives have featured the vertical growth of the urban landscape and identified the ways in which that upward growth reflected, and had implications for, inequalities in urban social life. Urban social science is beginning to recognise and document those development processes which have excavated downwards and stretched upwards so rapidly over the past century of urbanisation, but analytical engagement with that material growth remains embryonic in comparison with the systematic treatment of urban horizontal extension. What is made clear in the novels we have discussed here is that urban life distributed over the vertical axis, built through increasing technological and engineering capabilities, and made desirable and necessary by the increasing density and inequality of urban populations, is one powerful way in which the city can function to spatially differentiate its inhabitants. Indeed, in the spatial metaphor of verticality deployed by Wells and Ballard, the fictional high-rise provides the material frame for explorations of precisely those social inequalities. Furthermore, what both writers identify through their fictional representations of high-rise living is, today, increasingly visible in the verticalities of elite urban living. ³

Such fictional accounts of the future help us to raise questions about the experiences and imaginaries of our contemporary metropolitan landscapes; from a historical distance, they nevertheless offer critiques of present inequalities. They also suggest that to be located and to look down from above is not ethically neutral. The unproblematic and unreflective acceptance of the cartographic view in urban social science, particularly urban geography and planning, which has been related to the treatment of cities as horizontally extending entities, should also be subject to critical scrutiny as our focus of enquiry shifts towards attempting an understanding of that vertical relationship. The epistemological and empirical bias of the top-down gaze becomes ethically questionable as we interrogate the nature of the distanciation on which it is predicated.

As a commentary on and critique of contemporary processes, our selection of novels also highlights the vulnerability of urban space as privatisation, violence and sophisticated technology work to intersect in influencing the functionality of cities. The shift away from a metaphorical alignment of space and social structure, exemplified in this paper by Gibson’s narratives, also brings important analytical themes to the foreground. The violence common to all three novels is pushed further by the cyberpunk imaginary and accompanied by the necessity to build upwards, by a denial of space to those with the least resources. The writings we discuss here share important commonalities in their subject matter; all deal with social bifurcation and with the way urban space both animates and concretises those distinctions. Yet the move into the territories imagined by the cyberpunk genre, and in particular by Gibson, is important because it complicates, presses our thinking further, encompasses the militarisation and privatisation of the urban landscape which is detectable in our present, asks that we take seriously the right to space in the city.

In addressing these themes, what is perhaps most striking is the way SF literature has been consistently interested in analytical and spatial themes that have only recently become prominent in urban theory and research. We argued in our opening discussion that the ‘vertical turn’ discussed by some contemporary writers is an important corrective to the surficial preoccupations that have dominated so much work in the broad field of urban social science. In the temporal breadth of these literary accounts we see very clearly that the recognition of this theme by social scientists comes late, and that it has been prefigured in the critical commentaries of SF writers. The analytical themes and the historical grounding for an extension of the contemporary vertical turn can be, therefore, well supported by a wider engagement with other types of knowledge. Certainly, in addressing the sociologies and power geometries of the verticalisation characteristic of contemporary cities, urban studies can gain much by excavating the deep imaginative histories that have attended vertical cities within literature.