Stephen Graham – Bartlett International Lecture Series

Luxified Skies: How Vertical Housing Became an Elite Preserve

Lecturer's Abstract

Stephen Graham presents a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. He seeks to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in cities between the 1930s and 1970s. He compares this to the contemporary proliferation of radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites.

Throughout his lecture, Stephen explores the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.

Biography

Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He has an interdisciplinary background linking human geography, urbanism and the sociology of technology.

Since the early 1990s Stephen has used this foundation to develop critical perspectives, addressing how cities are being transformed through remarkable changes in infrastructure, mobility, digital media, surveillance, security, militarism and verticality.

Stephen's 2011 book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, was nominated for the Orwell Prize in political writing and was the Guardian’s book of the week. His new book, Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers (Verso) – was published in November 2016. Another Guardian book of the week, it was in the books of the year lists of both the Financial Times and the Observer.

Image: 432 Park Avenue, Manhatten, 2015. Creative Commons.