Tower Block Dialogues / Grands Ensembles en Dialogue

Twenty-first-century Europe has been characterised by its greatest-ever period of high-rise construction. New commercial skyscrapers and luxury residential towers have, literally and figuratively, left in their shadow earlier post-War high-rise residential developments that conjoined state-led welfarism with modernist architectural aesthetics. Through a focus on tower blocks, or grands ensembles, in London and Paris, this project seeks to re-evaluate the role of more ordinary high-rise life in the contemporary European metropolis.

Bringing together perspectives from photographers, urbanists and residents themselves, the project seeks to open new creative, comparative dialogues between Paris and London around vertical urbanism. A central component of the activity will be the new in-person dialogues and comparative exchange it will facilitate between Nathaniel Télémaque, Andrew Harris, Hortense Soichet and Martine Drozdz. The project has three overall aims:

1. to use co-produced photographic research as a means to review and reconstruct the place for everyday vertical life in the contemporary European urban imagination - and indeed the ‘global city’ more generally;
2. to place cultural practices more centrally in ways of pursuing experimental comparative engagement with urban life;
3. and to develop new dialogues between researchers and practitioners across London and Paris, especially to help facilitate further projects and interaction around vertical urban themes. 

The activity builds on a previous collaboration between Andrew Harris and Martine Drozdz, ‘Vertical Urbanism in London and Paris’, funded by UCL’s Global Engagement Unit (2019-2021).

Area

Geography

UCL leads

• Dr Andrew Harris, Department of Geography