Deconstructing Urban Verticality
I. INTRODUCTION
In Volume I of the thesis, with a working title ‘WHAT IS ADVANCED AIR MOBILITY?’, the central focus lies in the comprehensive deconstruction of Urban Verticality. The point of gravity is the concept of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), a complex question that intersects with questions of urbanization, technology, and environmental degradation. To position this question within a broader conceptual field of scholarly research, within a spatial and technical field of other mobility artifacts and also a contextual field considering aspects of contemporary global crisis, Volume I is divided into three parts: INTRODUCTION, RESEARCH, and PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS. The main body of the research is organized into three components-sections: the CONCEPTUAL, TECHNICAL, and CONTEXTUAL axes. Throughout these sections, Urban Verticality is unpacked, along with the concepts essential for a comprehensive understanding of what Urban Mobility may be.
II. RESEARCH
CONCEPTUAL AXIS: URBAN VERTICALITY
The first section involves a conceptual inquiry into Urban Verticality, a multi-dimensional concept that provides a framework for positioning AAM. To facilitate understanding, a visual glossary was constructed based on the engagement with the literatures. This glossary comprises 16 satellite concepts derived from four different disciplines: Architecture, Urban Studies, Urban Transportation, and Geography and provides a visual representation and metadata, consisting of a constellation of keywords and a single generated definition for each concept based on the extracted quotations.
The timeline of the glossary reveals that, while cities began embracing the vertical dimension in the late 19th century and gradually became more vertical and complex, much of urban research has been dominated by a bias towards ‘horizontalism’ and the normalization of a cartographic, top-down aerial gaze as the default representation of cities. Only recently have researchers started adapting their conceptualizations of cities to understand and analyze the vertical characteristics of urbanization. This ‘vertical turn’ of the last two decades originated within the discipline of geography.
By analyzing concepts based on conceptual affinity, we observe a significant variety. There are concepts more closely related to the process of urbanization, others more tied to the discipline of urbanism, and still more connected to the city itself as the primary device through which we can conceptualize verticality, particularly considering the skyscraper as the main artifact. Adding an extra layer to how the urban is perceived based on spatial dimensions, these concepts can be categorized into three clusters: the first tends to counterpose the vertical against the horizontal; the second views the urban as the intersection of verticality and horizontalism; and the third adopts a more volumetric, three-dimensional perspective.
Urban transportation is undergoing a transition from distinct approaches of vertical or horizontal circulation to a more volumetric approach, aiming to support the complexities of today’s urban life.
Among the 16 concepts, Vertical Urbanism, Volumetric Urbanism, and Vertical Urban Mobility are fundamental concepts that play a crucial role in understanding why the concept of AAM matters.
- VERTICAL URBANISM conceptualizes cities as multidimensional organisms shaped by population density and various concentrations. This encompasses interconnected urban systems that constitute the operational backbone of the city, with verticality representing a multi-dimensional spatial network emerging from density and complexity. This perspective sets it apart from Modernist conceptualizations of verticality, which often isolate buildings from their surroundings, leading to disconnected urban landscapes.
- VOLUMETRIC URBANISM originated in political geography and critical perspectives on issues such as surveillance, segregation, and targeting within the context of Israeli territorial control over the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. It underscores the significance of addressing how horizontal and vertical extensions, imaginaries, materialities, and lived practices intersect and mutually construct each other.
- VERTICAL URBAN MOBILITY, a concept that has recently emerged, emphasizes that efficient urban mobility is multi-modal and multi-dimensional. This concept keenly explores how it could complement today’s horizontal thinking and considers navigating our cities upwards.
TECHNICAL AXIS: TECHNOLOGIES OF CIRCULATION
The second axis is hybrid, organized chronologically in the form of a visual taxonomy. Its purpose is to excavate the invention of real artifacts of mobility, with a specific focus on vertical technologies in circulation over the last hundred and fifty years, and to compare them with the imaginaries of mobility presented in urban sci-fi.
Positioning the artifacts within the urban verticality concepts defined in the previous section, in most cases, the science fictional and prototypes under investigation of the last decade embrace a more volumetric, three-dimensional approach.
Exploring the altitude and range of operation throughout the timeline, it appears that since 2010, we have entered an experimental period leading to the third flight revolution. This revolution is based on reimagining existing, well-established, or underused artifacts by minimizing their scale, converting them into aircraft with low environmental impact through significant changes to engines and fuels, and introducing them into intra and inter-city commuting.
There is a profound correlation between sci-fi and real artifacts. Some of the artifacts depicted in urban sci-fi movies and novels have later become a reality. For example, the skybridges featured in the movie Metropolis were later implemented as pedestrian skyways on a different scale. Additionally, some sci-fi artifacts have an impact on reality and serve as experimentation, challenging contemporary urban transformations. One such example is the flying cars (spinners) in Blade Runner, which have influenced contemporary experimentation with eVTOL aircraft as an alternative mode of transportation in densely populated and complex megacities.
Through the analysis of the scale of infrastructure (in terms of aircraft) and the urban systems associated with other technologies, it becomes evident that there is a shift towards space-efficient artifacts or those with low-impact infrastructure that aim to replace or redefine existing that are characterized by rigid, high-environmental-impact structures, such as the highways.
The taxonomy of real technologies consists of 16 artifacts, while the science-fictional counterpart comprises 8. A second layer of this analysis explores the relationship between the artifacts and their urban infrastructures in both cases. Among them, two key moments are the invention of (delivery) drones and the vertical highway from science fiction. This comparison aims to highlight the contrast and demonstrate how reality has advanced or been prefigured in science fiction. Conversely, it also examines how science fiction can impact the understanding of the field, specifically in urban vertical circulation.
- The DRONE, an emerging artifact of circulation, is transforming the way goods are delivered in cities. Characterized by the remoteness of the technology itself, in its experimental stage, it seems to be somewhat detached from its field—the urban setting. This introduces the need to rethink urban infrastructure, including points of departure, delivery, storage, and parking.
- Sci-fi movies showcase artifacts fully embedded into their urban context. For instance, the movie MINORITY REPORT prompts us to consider how vertical technologies like VERTICAL HIGHWAYS will impact the urban fabric. It depicts buildings affected, albeit with exaggeration, highlighting that these mobilities are not in a blank stage -they interact with the urban infrastructure.
CONTEXTUAL AXIS: ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE
The third axis is constructed in the form of sequential timeline charts that underlie questions of climate, urbanization and mobility crises, along with the imperatives of decarbonization associated with them. It is based on my engagement with two books, The Future is Degrowth: A guide to a World beyond Capitalism and Mobility Justice: The Politics of movement in an age of anxiety
The 20th and 21st centuries are characterized by two dominant processes: endless growth and climatic collapse. Growth is a core feature of capitalism, and if capitalism is understood as a society driven by accumulation, growth is the materialization of this dynamic of accumulation, which is not only social but also biophysical. One way to grasp the material dimension of growth is by measuring the weight of anthropogenic mass, which has increased rapidly, doubling roughly every twenty years. Material growth, therefore, can be experienced through ever-larger cities, taller buildings, urban sprawl, or the construction of more highways
The capitalism of continuous economic growth is fundamentally a fossil capitalism. And while renewable energy has grown exponentially in recent years, this is still comparatively minor and partly offset by the simultaneous growth of fossil fuel energy – instead of a global energy transition, we are largely seeing energy additions.
By comparing key global economic and environmental indicators, we can observe that, despite various policies and measures implemented in recent years, the only historical periods during which total CO2 emissions actually decreased were times of economic decline. The most notable occurrence was during the pandemic when people had to entirely change the way they live. Hence, the question of decoupling growth from environmental destruction is fundamental and challenging.
The climate crisis is, in fact, a mobility crisis, as transportation-related emissions constitute a major contributor to global warming. In 2022, almost 75% of global carbon emissions originated from road transportation, while aviation accounted for just 11%. This highlights that the overconsumption of energy, coupled with culturally and spatially entrenched patterns of automobility and urban sprawl in the Global North, as well as their rapid growth in the Global South, suggests that the transition to a post-car/post-carbon era is not happening quickly enough.
Urbanization crisis is a mobility crisis, related to urban growth, the spread of automobility, extensive urban sprawl and resource demands, growing social inequality, and splintered accessibility. Historians have long noted the many problems generated by the shaping of American cities in the mid to late twentieth century by a system of automobility. The postwar redevelopment of the United States was problematic not only because it helped transform the metropolis into an autopolis but also because simultaneously it facilitated both mass suburbanization at home. The United States has been much slower than other industrialized countries to implement many changes in transport practice, in part because of its entrenched policies supporting a culture of automobility, but also because of the power of “carbon capital”.
Among the implemented scenarios for transforming automobility are the livable city envisioning more localized and energy-efficient practices; the digital city that depends on the rise of digital communication and virtual experience as a substitute for physical movement; and the fast mobility city concept, currently in an experimental stage. The latter intensifies existing fast-paced and extensive mobility lifestyles through innovations around vertical urbanization, made possible by rapid advancements in the viability of some post-carbon fuels. In this context, the concept of AAM can be positioned as a potential future scenario.
III. PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
After a century of carbon-based urbanization and within the context of planetary urbanization and the climate crisis, it becomes imperative to highlight the importance of rethinking urban mobility. Based on the research in Volume I of the thesis, three main statements can be derived, each representing a hypothesis for a specific axis , with each hypothesis accompanied by two main questions.
HYPOTHESES
QUESTIONS
