EXPLORE
The Franco-Brazilian High-Rise research project looks at issues raised by the accelerated residential verticalization of contemporary metropolises, not with the goal to compare metropolises, but to put them into perspective as instances of the way local societies are reworking global processes. Questioning the notion of inclusiveness of residential high-rises grounded in empirical data we investigate: what links can be made with the global financialization processes? The narratives produced by developers and municipalities to attract capital and people into these high-rises promote a more equitable city? What are the experiences of their residents? How do high-rise living change the experience of the city? Is this trend alleviating or deepening segregative processes?
These are the major questions our research tries to answer through case studies. To ground theoretical discussions, case studies allow to see if and how the theories are translated into actual processes and practices, how they are accommodated, negotiated, confronted, transformed at the local level. The case studies were selected not on the merits of any hypothetical and elusive similarity or comparativeness, but on the only condition they are participating in the processes we are studying. Cases include Lyon and Sao Paulo where the partners of the project are based (USP and Université Lyon2, with collaborations with the Municipal Agencies of both cities), London as a benchmark, but also, among others, Brasov, Buenos Aires, Dallas, Melbourne and Santa Fe.
London has experienced a rapid verticalization process since the beginning of the 2000s. Hundreds of residential high-rises are planned, proposed or under construction, in Inner London but reaching also suburbs further afield. The following material is drawn from Manuel Appert HDR thesis published in 2016. The author reflects on the contemporary geography of residential towers in London but also on the politics of vertical urbanism and the socio-spatial consequences of rapid vertical expansion.
London: the verticalization of a horizontal metropolis
A geography of contemporary residential towers in London
A contested verticalisation
Vertical regeneration of Vauxhall-Nine-Elms: the mirage of affordable housing
The London plan: verticalisation as a key for densification
Regenerate, verticalize, luxify: the fabric of contemporary vertical London
Contribution by Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS
Introduction
"The beginning of the Monthy Python's last film, The Meaning of Life (1983), which sees the venerable Victorian building of a dusty London financial firm storming a Manhattan skyscraper, would be anachronistic today: the rise of financial globalisation, urban marketing and the interpretation of the precepts of sustainable development by developers and the city council have all contributed to the recent verticalisation of the city. " (Appert, 2012b)
From the surrounding hills of London, such as Parliament Hill, the city, until the 1990s, had a horizontal urban sprawl that was punctuated by a few prominent buildings. The resulting skyline was more reminiscent of Paris and Vienna than of New York and Chicago. Until the 1960s, only the Houses of Parliament (Victoria Tower 101m and Big Ben 86m), St Paul's (111m), several other churches and the chimneys inherited from the industrial era stood above a relatively low, if not homogeneous, urban canopy. In 2020, the tower became one of the most striking markers of London's morphological transformation, including in the bastion of Victorianism that was the City of London. A look back at an accelerated history of towers in London.
Grandeur et Décadence of modernism
In the course of London's long history, its religious buildings have indeed long held an undivided throne until political and then industrial powers came to dispute their domination (Figure 1). From the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, the architectural modernism then in vogue in the cities of industrialised countries resulted in a multiplication of office towers (Millbank Tower, 1963, 118m; Centre Point, 1966, 117m), telecommunications (BT Tower, 1965, 188m), public services (Guy's Hospital Tower, 1974, 143m) and housing, known (Balfron Tower, 1967, 84m; Trellick Tower, 1972, 98m) or less known, in the Estates (large housing estates).
The multiplication of high-rise projects in the early 1960s was indeed a dilemma for town planners. In 1968, 109 buildings over 46m were erected and 32 were already over 76m high (Catchpole, 1987). These towers were mainly residential, but they were also offices, hotels, or administrative centres. Aware of the need for reconstruction, but also sensitive to public opinion, which was opposed to the towers, town planners continued to procrastinate until the end of the 1980s, evaluating the projects submitted with varying degrees of severity. The period was therefore characterised by a regulatory inconsistency which blurred the rules of the game and allowed the urban canopy to be broken through more accidentally than planned (Holmes, 2004). In fact, the period saw very divergent urban planning currents, between the modern movement and its declinations such as High-Tech and the irruption of the Townscape movement, in a country where the intervention of the state in urban planning was not consensual. The planning implemented since the aftermath of the Second World War was called into question at the beginning of the 1980s by the coming to power of the conservatives. The neo-liberal orthodoxy was applied to town planning from this period onwards and was not really challenged by New Labour from 1997 onwards.
The number of social housing towers and bars has not been as high as in other European cities such as Paris. The demographic pressure in London between 1955 and 1975 was much lower. The city was experiencing a demographic decline, the result of a policy of population deconcentration and, to a lesser extent, the boom in activities in the surrounding counties. At the same time, the green belt decided in 1945 contained the spatial expansion of the conurbation, and the population settled beyond its perimeter, mainly in new towns and so-called expansion cities (Figure 2). The need for housing in the conurbation corresponded above all to the eradication of slums and the reception of immigrant populations.
The London estates were thus not built only on the outskirts of the conurbation, unlike French cities such as Lyon and Paris (Figure 3). Many sites with low urbanisation or wasteland in the pericentre of the city have been targeted by London County Council town planners. With the exception of the large developments of Enfield in the north, Barking in the east and Brentford in the west, all have been realised in Inner London, the pericentre. These cities, which totalled nearly a hundred towers, were quickly built.
With few exceptions, they were of poor quality and provoked discontent and resistance from the public and elected representatives of the Greater London Council, the predecessor (1965-1986) of the Greater London Borough Council. This resistance gradually turned to rejection when the Ronan Point social housing tower in Newham collapsed in 1968.
Docklands regeneration
Combined with the effects of the economic crisis from 1974 onwards, there was a sharp slowdown in the construction of high-rise buildings in the city. During the second part of the twentieth century, the evolution of the number of high-rise projects therefore fluctuated according to the economic situation, the adherence and then rejection of the precepts of modernism and the Charter of Athens, and the rise in heritage values. London has never embraced verticality and has always endeavoured, in a more or less formalised manner and with varying degrees of success, to control the production of high-rise buildings (IGH) close to its monuments in a logic of preserving strategic views from parks around central London.
During the 1980s and 1990s, successive legislations continued to reflect this dilemma, but this time in a context of renewed economic and then demographic growth. The pressure for the construction of office buildings then mainly manifested itself in the City, where groundscrapers replaced buildings from the 1960s that were considered obsolete. This period also saw the emergence of a planned high-rise district on the former Isle of Dogs docks at Canary Wharf. Built in 1991, One Canada Square (235m) stood alone for almost ten years. It was joined by the head office towers of HSBC and Citigroup Europe in 1999. Canary Wharf quickly became a competitor to the City, attracting several American banks following the extension of the Jubilee Line (Holmes, 2004; Michon, 2008).
Until the creation of the London City Council in 2000, the legislation implemented to regulate the city's skyline reflected a tolerance of high-rise buildings. Ensuring the development of the city, and particularly that of the City in relation to other metropolises or even the Docklands, remained a determining factor in dissuading the authorities from putting in place a virtual moratorium on high-rise buildings, as was the case in Paris. During these two decades, the construction of residential towers collapsed and only the luxury tower Belvedere was built in Chelsea Harbour, south-west of the city centre.
The 2000s: the craze for residential and office towers
Since the approval of the building permit for the Heron Tower in the City in 2001 and the arrival of “The Gherkin”, official known as 30 St Mary Axe, in 2003 on the site of the Baltic Exchange, a historic building damaged by an IRA bomb in 1993, Several hundred high-rise projects have been submitted to the Greater London Borough Councils, not only for the City but also for Westminster, Camden, Islington, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Southwark and Lambeth in Inner London, and Croydon, Barking and Dagenham in Outer London. A new development in the British capital is that the vast majority of the towers on offer are residential. These towers, which are more reserved in height than office towers, generally between 50 and 100m high and with a more conventional design, are multiplying and now make up the bulk of the IGH cohort in London.
The spatial distribution of the towers reveals several logics (figures 4 and 5). Contrary to previous decades, more than 85% of the towers are located in Inner London, the centre and pericentre of the city. A first characteristic of the location of the verticalisation phenomenon in London thus appears: a concentration in the space which is already the most densely occupied. These towers are not distributed homogeneously throughout Inner London, because there is first of all a west-east asymmetry, with the vast majority of the buildings concentrated in the East End of the City, as far as the Royal Docks, Canary Wharf, the Greenwich Peninsula and the banks of the Thames in Woolwich.
Competing with Canary Wharf, the City reacts. Led by a renewed municipal team and more open to foreign capital (Kaika, 2010), it approved several tower projects from the early 2000s. Considered emblematic or iconic, highly publicised, and today given nicknames such as Cheesegrater1, Helter-Skelter2 or Walkie-Talkie3, these towers are the trees that hide the forest of relatively anonymous residential towers built during the 2000s (Figure 5).
The construction of four towers housing international banks at Canary Wharf (Barclays, Citigroup, HSBC, the late Lehman Brothers) has precipitated the City Council's attitude towards the towers. As early as 2004, the authorities identified a space suitable for the construction of towers (Eastern Cluster), which is recalled in the London Plan of 2004 as well as in the City's 2005 local urban plan. In total, more than 300,000 sq.m of office space in the towers were delivered between 2003 and 2015, and 400,000 sq.m are planned for 2020.
The City's business centres and Canary Wharf, two of the city's three financial hubs, now house the vast majority of office towers. Their construction accompanies a wider movement of reconcentration of the office supply, to the detriment of Outer London. This reflects the financialisation of office property and the internationalisation of investors looking for "trophy" assets in the city's most established markets.
More recently, a line of contested residential and hotel towers has emerged along the right bank of the Thames from Vauxhall-Nine Elms in the west to Canada Water, east of Tower Bridge (Figures 4 and 6). This is followed by a more punctual distribution of residential towers around public transport nodes, Elephant and Castle or Stratford in Inner London, and Brent Cross, Barking, Ilford, and Croydon, in Outer London. The latter cases illustrate most urban regeneration operations on brownfield, under-utilised or social housing sites.
To put this general scheme into even more perspective, London's West End, despite being the most expensive space in the capital, escapes the logic of verticalisation due to very strong heritage constraints. As for the line of high-rise buildings along the Thames, which the multiplication of public enquiries (Shard, Vauxhall, One Blackfriars, Doon Street, Elizabeth House) has given media coverage, the prices charged are out of all proportion to those of the districts in which they are built. At One Blackfriars, a 52-storey tower (163m) directly on the riverbank, the cost of the 50m² F1bis amounts to £1.15 million. The photograph below (figure 7) illustrates the transformations of the Bankside district, around Tate Modern (a thermal power station converted into a museum of contemporary art). Further right, One Blackfriars under construction and the Southbank Tower4, an office tower converted into luxury housing in 2016.
These towers along the Thames, highly visible to residents, commuters, and visitors, are erected near UNESCO listed sites (Parliament, Tower of London). They crystallise much of the tension between heritage preservation associations and organisations on the one hand, and builders of contemporary London, developers, Greater London and the financially troubled boroughs on the southern banks of the Thames (Lambeth and Southwark) on the other. They alone account for more than half of the city's public enquiries. In trying to take advantage of the views of London's landmarks and the river, developers have faced strong opposition, mainly from the Royal Park Agency, English Heritage, and local pressure groups such as the Vauxhall Civic Society.
The height of the towers reveals, not surprisingly, a marked centre-periphery land value gradient, with the City, Southwark and Canary Wharf with the highest land costs concentrating all the towers over 200m. By contrast, in Outer London, no tower exceeds 100m with a few rare exceptions. Among these exceptions, a number of projects embody attempts to raise land and property values in the context of urban regeneration operations carried out jointly by developers and municipalities. This is particularly the case in Stratford, the area that hosted the 2012 Summer Olympics. Housing prices in Stratford increased by 60 per cent between 2010 and 2015, when they rose by 36 per cent for the Greater London area as a whole (Table 1).
A comparison of the prices per square metre of housing in 12 residential towers built since 2010 in Stratford with prices in 8 programmes without towers shows a difference of 23% on average in favour of towers (Borel, 2014).
Stratford is one of 38 Opportunity Areas, a territorial scheme set up by Greater London to target public-private urban regeneration operations. Section 2.58 of the London Plan (2011) identifies more or less vast Opportunity Areas (16 hectares for the Euston Opportunity Area versus 3884 hectares for the Upper Lee Valley Opportunity Area), made up of industrial wastelands considered as land reserves for the capital. Each can accommodate at least 5,000 jobs and/or 2,500 housing units. These areas are characterised by good accessibility - actual or potential - to public transport. The opportunity zones are mainly concentrated in the pericentral parts of the city, close to the economic heart of the metropolis, embodying "Greater London's desire to target urban renewal on areas with relatively high economic potential" (Drozdz, Appert, 2012, p.7).
Above all, these areas represent opportunities to correct real estate markets that are considered dysfunctional, those in which land and property values are much lower than their accessibility would suggest. The high-rise buildings built there are no longer the work of starchitects because the simple fact of introducing verticality into urban projects is sufficient to visually mark urban renewal (Figure 8).
Stratford Riverside emerges from the ground on Stratford High Street, close to the London 2012 Olympic venue. It is the eighth tower built since 2005 on the High Street to be upgraded to a wide-format urban boulevard.
The towers growing on its courtyard were approved before a mass plan for the district was voted on in 2012. In spite of the efforts made for the requalification, the atmosphere is icy, lifeless, which is highlighted by the bluish tint of the image.
The ground floors dedicated to deliveries and boiler rooms and the canyon effect produced by the towers are reminiscent of the urban solutions of the 1970s.
References
APPERT M., 2012b, Les nouvelles tours de Londres comme marqueurs des mutations d’une métropole globale, Observatoire de la Société britannique, n°10.
APPERT M., DROZDZ M., 2012, Retour sur l’outillage territorial de la « métropolisation in situ ». Les « zones d’opportunité » de Londres, entre instrument de gouvernance et nouvel ordre spatial, Communication pour le colloque Gouverner la métropole, pouvoirs et territoires, bilans et directions de recherche, Paris, 28, 29 et 30 novembre 2012. URL: https://governingthemetropolis.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/session-1-4-drozdz-appert.pdf
BOREL C., 2014, Le retour des tours dans les villes européennes : analyse statistique et cartographique, mémoire de Master 1, Université Lyon 2, 109p.
CATCHPOLE T., 1987, London Skylines: A study of High Buildings and Views, London, London Research Centre, Research and Studies Series, vol.33.
HOLMES S., 2004, The history and effects of changes, past and present, to London’s skyline. URL : http://wwwusers.brookes.ac.uk/01231893
MICHON P., 2008, L’opération de régénération des Docklands : entre patrimonialisation et invention d’un nouveau paysage urbain, Revue Géographique de l'Est, vol. 48, n°1-2. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/rge/1104
1 Cheese grater
2 The slide
3 The Walkie-Talkie
4 www.southbanktower.com
Geography of contemporary residential towers
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
The demise of high-rises In Europe 1980-2000
The post-war verticalization of Europe
Observations on Inclusiveness, Equality and Equity in the Urban Space in the city of São Paulo
The Production of Residential Buildings in São Paulo Metropolis
Contribution by Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS.
Introduction
High-rise residential developments have sprung in different parts of London since the begining of the 2000s. Far from following randomized locations they are built in specific areas that are attractive for developers. Attraction is highly based on accessibility and proximity to employment centres. Preferential locations also reveal the residentialization of business disctricts and spatial diffusion of high-rises further into the suburbs.
The geography of the contexts in which high-rise housing is located is varied. Several socio-demographic variables or variables relating to property prices and their dynamics constitute avenues for interpreting preferential locations. Together, these variables make it possible to draw up a typology defining a centre-periphery geography. The geography of the towers is more concentrated, with the centre and the pericentre concentrating 93% of the residential towers built or under construction in 2014.
The hyper-centre: the "Luxification" of the skies
The hyper-centre is the first sector, not in terms of the numerical importance of the towers (1 housing tower built or under construction per km² since 2000) but rather the international profile of the actors, producers, financiers, designers and buyers of the towers and the visibility of the constructions. This area is the most densely populated and built. It is an area concentrating a large number of jobs relative to the resident population. Households are small and affluent, and housing prices per square metre are well above average. The space is largely heritage protected, doubly protected by the sight and visibility corridors of the monuments and by the conservation areas, heritage protection zones. The potential for verticalisation is very localised in the north-eastern fringes of the city centre and on the southern bank of the Thames, which is less protected by heritage. This is the heart of the city's showcase, where the regulatory constraints on the erection of towers are stronger than elsewhere. As British town planning is negotiated and the impact of high-rise buildings on heritage is subject to interpretation, high-rise projects, such as those on the banks of the Thames, are negotiated on a case-by-case basis. In the north-east of the City, the area is designated by the City of London Corporation, the city council, as a mixed and vertical densification zone, due to the scarcity of land and competition from offices near the heart of the business district. This area is intended to house most of the few housing units built in the business district as well as hotels, as both a horizontal and vertical projection of the sanctuarisation of the city centre for office real estate (Appert, Drozdz, 2010).
The housing towers that are being developed are of very high standing and are products of international coalitions of financial, real estate, architectural and construction players. The offer is mainly made by foreign developers, particularly from South-East Asia, or British developers who target international clients. The flats are marketed in Hong Kong, the rest of China, as well as in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. According to a CBRE study, 67% of the flats delivered are acquired by foreigners. This offer is characteristic of the skyline's luxification, which is denounced by S. Graham (2015b).
As in the excellent investigation into the identity of buyers of luxury flats in New York high-rise buildings conducted by journalists from the New York Time1, these investments accompany the expansion of an international elite. An investigation into London, carried out by journalists from The Guardian newspaper, confirmed the revelations of their American colleagues. They sought, not without difficulty, to obtain information on the owners of the flats in the Saint George's Tower in Vauxhall2, in the borough of Lambeth (Figure 1). Completed in 2014, with 52 floors and a wind turbine at the top, the tower has been the target of opposition from critics of the towers on the banks of the Thames since it received planning permission in 2006. Today, the debate on its landscaping impact has been replaced by a controversy on the purchasers of the tower in a context of housing crisis. Guardian journalists reveal that:
"The £51 million, five-storey penthouse flat with a view across the Thames to the Palace of Westminster is finally owned by the family of former Russian Senator Guriev (...) Further down the tower is a £2.7 million flat owned by Ebitimi Banigo, a former Nigerian minister. In 2012, other owners named in the Land Registry records include a Kurdish oil magnate, an Egyptian fast-food magnate, an Indonesian banker, a Uruguayan football manager and a former Formula 1 driver."
Journalists have done the math: the tower has no affordable housing and of the 210 flats sold, 131 were sold to foreigners. 181 have no registered voters. In an area ranked as the 14th most deprived area in England, where 38% of households live in social housing3, 81 flats were sold for over £2 million, compared to the (already high) average price of £493,000 in the borough.
In the pericentre: vertical "new-build gentrification"
London's pericentre is the most popular space for developers, with 4.5 towers of housing built or under construction per km² since 2000. They correspond to geographical areas that are accessible but considered obsolete or insufficiently dense by the municipality. They can be counted in numbers from the northern fringes of the hyper-centre to Tottenham and as far as the working-class areas south of the Thames, such as Vauxhall, Elephant & Castle or Deptford, via the East End, from the City to Canary Wharf and now further east towards Woolwich.
The intensity of the verticalisation of the residential offer is here to be related to the urban regeneration operations that have been taking place there since the end of the 1990s, whether in response to land opportunities or within the framework of opportunity areas (OA). In the latter, the local authorities and Greater London act together to make urbanisation viable by negotiating the regrouping of land, selling public land and, more rarely, due to lack of means and will, by building infrastructure (schools, transport, etc.).
Regeneration in these sectors is therefore mainly driven by private developers, a process which British colleagues have interpreted as a new form of gentrification. The expression "new-build" gentrification in fact specifies a modality of gentrification through real estate programming. It is a new form of elitisation by other actors and other spaces (Davidson and Lees, 2005). New-build gentrification refers to the construction of new housing for the upper-middle classes, particularly in the context of urban renewal or the reorganisation of urban wasteland (Davidson and Lees, 2010). Such projects are part of a gentrification process, as they are characterised by the same dynamics of revaluation of urban centres by and/or for the upper-middle classes. According to P. Rérat:
"They represent a reinvestment of capital in central areas that have been neglected, implying a modification of the built environment and of the urban landscape with regard to the same social categories, and this leads to a process of eviction4." (Rérat, 2012)
The vertical residentialisation of Canary Wharf
The business district, which was decided in the 1980s, but which only reached maturity as an office real estate market later - towards the beginning of the 2000s - deserves special attention, as more than 30 high-rise residential buildings have been built there or were under construction in 2016 and almost 40 projects have been proposed for the years to come. In total, more than 14,000 flats will be delivered once the towers under construction since 2000 are completed. This represents a significant transformation of the profile of the district, which remained almost exclusively oriented towards office activities until the mid-2000s. The verticalisation movement has even tended to accelerate since developers anticipate an increase in property values associated with the opening of the west-east RER, Crossrail. The latter will open in 2021 and will make it possible to reach the City in 6 minutes (instead of 21), the West End in 17 minutes (instead of 33) and Heathrow airport in 39 minutes (instead of 55) (Figure 2).
The marketing of the Maine Tower flats immediately south of the Canary Wharf office towers took just 5 hours: Greek, Chinese, Italian and French buyers rushed to sell one of the last remaining high-rise flats in the business district5. As the journalist points out:
"As well as European and domestic buyers, there is a strong demand from South East Asian buyers around Canary Wharf (...) They appreciate the modern aesthetic that resembles that of their home region - high-rise buildings and the water around them. Nothing else in London really looks like this6.”
However, the developer, Galliard Homes, hastened to announce that 50% of the homes were first sold in the UK to British buyers. A way of nipping in the bud any controversy since the local press had shown that most of the housing in the towers was marketed by South-East Asian estate agents. The property programmes delivered at Canary Wharf are of particular interest to occupying buyers, given the particularly favourable conditions for access offered by the West-East RER. However, they are also of interest to investors who see these properties as assets that will add value or, at best, as sources of rental income. Some Asian buyers also see it as an opportunity to buy rather than rent for their offspring who will be studying at London's higher education institutions. London is seen as a safe investment location and tends to attract capital from higher-risk countries such as Greece and China.
This type of real estate development is therefore much more cyclical than structural, as it depends on the major global macroeconomic aggregates, oil prices, exchange rate conditions and the comparative volatility of real estate markets. Since the 2000s, an enormous surplus of capital in circulation, reinforced by the accommodating policies of the central banks, has tended to settle more and more in "stone". Alongside New York and Paris, London is one of the most attractive cities over the long term. David Harvey shows, for example, how the city, and more particularly real estate, constitutes a "spatial fix". The notion refers to a new geographical anchoring of resources or outlets, but also underlines the temporary nature of such a process (Harvey, 2008).
The allocation of property investment between the retail, office, logistics and residential sectors then fluctuates according to property values and expectations of property value and rental growth. The popularity of residential investment at Canary Wharf reflects a reversal of values between the residential and office sectors in favour of the residential sector. Residential property prices have outpaced office property prices since the Great Recession of 2008, a phenomenon not seen in London since the 1970s.
The number of high-rise flats is now increasing at the rate of about one delivery per year. The residential verticalisation of the district now occupies the entire northern part of the Isle of Dogs, with the exception of the financial core (Figure 3).
Further on, the towers for those relegated from the centre
Further east, along the route of the future regional express network Crossrail, Woolwich. The town has long been the poor part of the borough of Greenwich. The site of an old arsenal reactivated during World War II, Woolwich is characterised by a small historic centre, primarily built in the Victorian era, surrounded by bars and towers built in the 1960s and 1970s. The urban environment has deteriorated since the economic crisis of 1974 and the population has become poorer than in the rest of the city. However, since the arrival of the Docklands Light Railway in 2009, Woolwich is also experiencing regeneration. Initially modest in scale and achievements, it is now accelerating as the regional express network delivery date approaches (2018).
The city remains largely unknown to international investors, judging by the marketing, which is entirely organised in the United Kingdom. Only national developers are in charge of property programmes. The architecture of the buildings, initially in the "Atlantic" style at the very end of the 2000s, now echoes the city's industrial past. The towers are adorned with briquettes or earthenware, as in the rest of the city.
With improved accessibility, which will continue to increase with relatively low prices compared to the rest of Inner London, UK developers such as Berkley Homes have targeted the upper-middle classes, for whom property developments further west have become too expensive for their incomes. The construction of high-rise buildings in low-cost areas is then a way for developers to correct the market by creating a niche offer, which will gradually spread to increase property values.
They also expect the domino effect of rising prices in Inner London. The boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Southwark and the City have in fact recorded a price increase of between 49% and 87% from 2008 to 2014, while it did not exceed 37% in the borough of Greenwich, where Woolwich is located. The increases observed are the result of twofold pressure, from, on the one hand, the internationalisation of the hyper-centre market (City, Westminster, Camden, Southwark), and from, on the other hand, the pressure exerted by opportunity areas and those of other urban regeneration programmes that create new niche markets where previously no developer would have wanted to take a risk.
Municipalities dependent on funding from developers authorise them to build in parts of the city where the same amenities, the same types of architecture, the same services, lifestyles, etc. are proposed. These spaces are decontextualised from the geographical sectors in which they are located in terms of lifestyles, while sometimes reviving what architects consider to be local architectural features (Figure 4), such as the use of brick to adorn the facades of the towers.
Developers then justify new property values, sometimes at 30% to 50% higher. The programmes sell very quickly (often within a few weeks) because supply is scarce, shared by an oligopoly of large developers (Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Berkeley Homes, Bellway, Galliford Try).
The housing issue in London has become a major political issue, to the point that it was at the heart of the campaign for the election of a new mayor in May 2016. The local and national press continues to cover the irregularities of London's housing market and to question the construction of high-rise buildings, which, instead of rebalancing supply and demand, only addresses part of the demand, partly determined by the level of foreign investment by individuals or, at the other end of the scale, by sovereign wealth funds or pension funds.
References
APPERT M., DROZDZ M., 2010, La géopolitique locale-globale aux marges de la City de Londres : conflits autour des projets de renouvellement urbain de Bishopsgate, Hérodote, n°137, p.119-134.
APPERT M., MONTES C., 2015, Skyscrapers and the redrawing of the London skyline: a case of territorialisation through landscape control. Articulo-Journal of Urban Research (Special issue 7). URL : https://articulo.revues.org/2784
DAVIDSON M., LEES L., 2005, New-build gentrification and London’s riverside renaissance, Environment and Planning A, vol.37, p.1165-1190.
GRAHAM S., 2015b, Luxified skies: How vertical urban housing became an elite preserve, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, vol.19, n°5, p.618-645.
HARVEY D., 2008, Géographie de la domination, Paris, Les Prairies Ordinaires, 118p.
RERAT P., 2012, Choix résidentiel et gentrification dans une ville moyenne, Cybergeo, Espace, Société, Territoire, document 579. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/24931
1 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html?rref=collection%2Fnewseventcollection%2Fshell-company-towers-of-secrecy-real-estate&action=click&contentCollection=us®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&_r=0
2 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/24/revealed-foreign-buyers-own-two-thirds-of-tower-st-george-wharf-london
3 http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ec-lambeth-council-state-of-the-borough-2014_0.pdf
4 This definition of gentrification has been discussed in special issues of Environment and Planning A (Smith, Butler, 2007) and in Espaces et Sociétés (Bourdin, 2008; Rérat et al., 2008).
5 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/11734133/The-200-home-tower-block-that-sold-out-in-under-five-hours.html
6 "As well as European and domestic buyers there is a lot of demand from South East Asian investors who gravitate towards Canary Wharf", (...) "They like the modern aesthetics which are in keeping with where they come from - the high-rise buildings and the surrounding water. There is nowhere else really like that in London."
London: the verticalization of a horizontal metropolis
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
The demise of high-rises In Europe 1980-2000
The post-war verticalization of Europe
Sao Paulo: Verticalization timeline
Contribution by Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS.
Introduction
The verticalisation of London is not only accompanied by morphological or landscape transformations and demolitions that make way for new luxury real estate programmes contributing to accelerating the process of gentrification and, more generally, to profound changes in the profile of the resident population. These changes, which create tensions, are increasingly contested.
Verticalisation and displacement at Elephant and Castle
Elephant and Castle is an area at the interface between the hyper-centre and the recent gentrification fronts of Southwark, south of the Thames. It is an iconic case of the transformation of a large complex of bars and towers by towers, which met with major local opposition (Figure 1).
The district was modernised in the 1960s and 1970s after bombing partially destroyed it during the Second World War. Reconstruction gave pride of place to the automobile and to rational urban planning consisting of parallel bars connected by bridges in the air. The district then physically deteriorated, and with it, its image. The social precariousness did not diminish, but communities of African origin adapted to this environment, as the shopping centre transformed into a bazaar. The last bar was demolished in 2015 and the shopping centre is now closed. On the other side of the roundabout stands Strata, a 148 m high residential tower, completed in 2010 and equipped with integrated wind turbines at its top.
Next to Strata, cranes are now being erected on four other residential towers under construction and no less than eight more will be erected in the neighbourhood by 2025. These towers are part of an extensive urban regeneration programme that aims to transform the district physically and socially by 2030. Around the conversion of the large Heygate complex undertaken by the Australian developer Lendlease, a series of real estate programmes are being developed in response to land opportunities. The complex, which is undergoing transformation, extends within a radius of 700 m around the railway station and a metro station on the Northern Line.
The urban renewal in progress bears witness to the scissor effect already mentioned, because in connection with the material and symbolic deverticalisation of the large complex, a phase of reverticalisation has begun, marking the organised gentrification of Elephant and Castle. The real estate operation also reveals the renunciation of the local authorities in the face of the developers, but also the opposition of the population.
Australian developer Lendlease has never expressed a desire to regenerate the Heygate Estate. They decided to demolish it completely, except for the mature plane trees, which will provide a green setting for the new residents of the towers (Figure 2). Even more brutally, the municipality of Southwark could not oppose the non-replacement of a large majority of the social housing, despite the promise made in 2007. Of the 1,054 social housing units demolished, only 550 will be replaced in and around the site. For example, landlords who had acquired their homes under the right-to-buy1 scheme were offered £95,000 for a studio or £107,000 for a three-room apartment as compensation, while the price of studios in the surrounding area is £330,0002 People have been forced to migrate to cheaper areas, particularly further east, both within and outside the Greater London area (Figure 3).
The development plan proposed by Lendlease was approved in 2013, against the opinion of the population and some local elected officials. It paved the way for a radical morphological and social transformation. What was supposed to be a flagship district for regeneration, a model of socially sustainable eco-renovation, proved to be a counter-model. Associations made a request to Southwark City Council for access to information about the economic viability of the Lendlease project. These documents, provided by the developers to negotiate with the municipalities on their financial contribution and/or the volume of social housing they wish to keep within, are confidential. However, under the Freedom of Information Act (2000), a third party can request access to them. After refusing several times, Southwark Council was therefore compelled by the Administrative Court to disclose them. The associations were told that the viability calculations were based on a 25% profitability of the project3, which was much higher than the average (around 15%).
The regeneration of Elephant and Castle is emblematic of the convergence of interest between municipalities and developers. It explains to a large extent the trivialisation of towers in urban projects. It is also an example of the role of the counter-expertise of associations in the governance of urban projects.
This convergence of interests results first of all from the new macroeconomic context, a neo-liberal model which aims to have the private sector finance and/or operate a certain number of activities, services and housing, which until now could be taken over by the public sphere. It then results from the increased dependence of municipalities on developers (Drozdz, 2014). The context of reduced public spending, particularly in infrastructure and "social" housing, leads municipalities to negotiate constantly with developers, with new power relations and new objects of negotiation, such as high-rise buildings.
The transcendental interests of real estate players, whether international interests or interests linked to very local opportunities, are then asserted. This transformation of the balance of power contributes to the creation of urban regeneration solutions which are, in the end, quite similar from one space to another. In the British case, the internal capacity of municipalities to build expertise, and more precisely counter-expertise, becomes quite decisive. The balance of power, and therefore the final result, depends on the capacity of public actors to formulate a criticism or to have an alternative to the proposals of private developers. In negotiations, inequalities of expertise increasingly weigh more and more, for which access to information can compensate. The mobilisation of the local associative fabric, analysed by Ben Campkin for example (2013), which has been able to develop counter-expertise, has proved to be a major, albeit insufficient, counter-power.
The London Plan and its ambiguities
The debate on the landscape impact of high-rise buildings in London is an old one. As early as the end of the 19th century, opposition having arisen in reaction to the construction of Queen Anne's Mansions at Westminster, the London Building Act was passed in 1894. "Considered an emergency measure, it set a desirable but not mandatory maximum height (100 feet), in response to complaints about the shadows cast by the 14 floors of the building" (Appert, 2008). A little later, the 1937 St Paul's Heights Code of 1937 set maximum heights in relation to the visibility of the cathedral. The directive was the result of numerous objections to the erection of the Faraday Building 300m south of St Paul's. The directive was also the result of a number of objections to the erection of the Faraday Building. "The principle was then to safeguard the visibility of the silhouette of the cathedral from the Thames by imposing limits on buildings in the immediate vicinity" (Appert, 2008). The regulation of the landscape impact of the protected view corridor towers of London's monuments was born. This is still in place today in the form of the London View Management Framework (LVMF, 2007).
A neoliberal agenda: the redistributive effect of private investment
Although the system for preserving views of monuments, which has been stabilised since 2007, finally gives an elected entity, Greater London, a decision-making role in arbitrations, the complexity linked to the multiplication of consultations between the parties upstream and the lively debate between those who are pro-towers and English Heritage, the Royal Park Agency and Save Britain's Heritage, often makes it inevitable for the State to intervene in the debate (public enquiry). The debate is all the more lively as nearly 340 towers are proposed or approved. The election of Boris Johnson as mayor of London in 2008 was to sound the death knell for the intense verticalisation that the approval of a large number of high-rise building permits between 2000 and 2008 foreshadowed. But once in office, the new mayor of London, with new powers such as overriding the building permit arbitrations entrusted to borough councils, finally approved a greater number of high-rise buildings. The number of high-rise projects approved during his eight-year term was 198, compared to 44 for his predecessor. Although initially unfavourable to high-rise buildings, Boris Johnson gave in to pressure from the real estate lobby, driven by the continuous rise in property values in the capital, which, despite very high prices, made it an investment considered profitable over time (the quasi-prohibitive price of land making the tower the best solution). Even more than during the term of his predecessor, the municipality and the boroughs are dependent on financial contributions from developers, as the British government's allocations have been steadily decreasing since 2010. The London Plan reflects the ideological orientation of the public authorities, acquired through the trickle-down theory of private investment. The growth agenda conditions the elaboration of the London Plan for 2004 and 2010. While it still contains recommendations aimed at preserving the living environment and improving housing conditions, they are subordinated to the redistributive effect of private investment.
The debate, which initially focused on the landscape impact of the towers, was coupled with socio-economic considerations; the growth agenda was put in tension with the landscape impact of the towers, a way of de-prioritising the landscape issue in times of crisis. Towers are presented by developers, some borough councils and Greater London as a response to land pressure, support for economic growth and as a financial resource. As government allocations to boroughs have been reduced by an average of 40% since the Great Recession of 2008-2010, municipalities have become more dependent on financial contributions from developers (Section 106). Once planning permission has been granted, developers pay a flat fee (up to several million pounds for the most ambitious projects) to contribute to the collective costs borne by the borough, including the provision and maintenance of social housing, vocational training and cultural and sporting facilities. In urban planning documents and political discourse, these arguments are mediated by the sustainable injunction to make London denser and more functionally mixed.
Revived disputes
In the run-up to the 2016 municipal election, a new mobilisation has been structured under the impetus of the New London Architecture centre (NLA) and the specialist journals Architects' Journal and the Observer. An exhibition to raise public awareness of the 240 tower projects proposed in 2014 is being organised by the New London Architecture centre, directed by Peter Murray. In March 2014, the Skyline Campaign collective (http://www.skylinecampaign.org) was structured around Barbara Weiss4 and a list of signatories from the world of architecture and urban planning.
They campaign by raising awareness among the general public, architects and developers and by carrying out media operations against new high-rise projects such as Renzo Piano's Paddington Pole5 (Figure 4). Rosemarie McQueen, formerly Director of Town Planning at Westminster - she worked with the ANR SKYLINE team as a practitioner referent - is a member of the Skyline Campaign collective. She has thus been able to transmit to the mobilised people the target objectives concerning the spatio-temporal characteristics of the verticalisation process in London. We worked with her on developing and carrying out an evaluation of the objectives of Boris Johnson's municipal team.
Members of the Skyline Campaign as well as the heritage protection organisation English Heritage denounce the "obsession" with towers. They would not be an answer to the housing crisis, since they are largely small, luxury homes, when the demand is for large or medium-sized surfaces at affordable prices. Finally, they formulate a sharp criticism of the growth agenda of the municipalities, which thus oppose the protection of the urban landscape from economic development injunctions.
The work carried out concerns the evaluation of three ambitions declared by Greater London, but whose means to achieve them are questioned by the associations. Firstly, the regulations concerning the landscaping impact of the towers. Then there are policies aimed at directing densification through verticalisation around the most accessible places in the city. Finally, it is a question of development practices which lead to the trivialisation of the verticalisation of luxury residential real estate programmes, the relevance of which can be questioned in order to alleviate the housing crisis which the city is experiencing.
High-rises to address the housing shortage?
"The debate on high-rise buildings has always been about their appearance, the graphic image on computer presentations, the models that were introduced to be shown to successive mayors. The debate has very rarely been about who they were built for, whether this was the best use of the land, what kind of housing could be built.6”
The social crisis, which, combined with housing conditions, is gradually worsening, and the Great Recession have only represented a pause in the growing tension between housing prices and incomes. It mainly affects the poorest households in the capital, where the issue of poverty and precariousness is being vigorously addressed. It is estimated that 224,000 London households lived in overcrowded housing in 2008/2009. To cope with this crisis, it is then estimated that Greater London would need an additional 354,000 dwellings in the decade 2010 (Gleeson, 2011). The situation is so critical that even the very conservative Confederation of British Industry - the British employers' association - is alarmed at the housing difficulties faced by London workers. It points out that the labour market would become less fluid, which would lead to a shortage of labour and thus to an increase in its cost.
People with insufficient income would then be condemned to leave the city because of a lack of affordable housing. In the United Kingdom, the provision of affordable housing has been provided by the private sector since the early 1980s. Housing associations and developers have been equally responsible for the provision of affordable housing, sold or rented at less than 80% of market rates. Developers provide a number of affordable dwellings according to the size of their housing programme and the recommendations of the London Borough Development Plan.
Within the stock of so-called affordable housing, social housing, the most heavily subsidised, has been steadily declining since the introduction of right-to-buy housing in 1980, from 37% of the total number of dwellings in 1980 to less than 23% in 2011 (ONS, 2011).
However, what interests British employers is not so much the housing issue as the labour market, which is crucial for the economic development of the city. The price of a square metre of housing is €25,000 in central London, €10,000 in the East End and even Stratford, where the 2012 Olympics were held, is approaching €10,000 per square metre. The nature of the accommodation on offer, mainly studios, two and three-room flats, is also a thorny issue. Housing for families is very rarely built in high-rise buildings because it is not very lucrative.
After a period of "wait and see" by the players at the time of the 2008 recession, the city is once again experiencing a phase of intense housing construction in Inner London. After dropping to fewer than 15,000 homes per year in 2009, 35,000 homes will be delivered in Greater London in 2014. The stock of housing delivered in high-rise buildings represents between 12% and 17% of the total volume per year, a significant increase since 2005. However, as we have seen, a number of these programmes in the hyper-centre and sometimes also in the peri-centre, such as at Canary Wharf, meet investment needs. Investors who have been seeking to diversify their assets since the 2000s are increasingly targeting real estate. In a context of economic and political instability, it is more particularly real estate in the major metropolises that interests these players.
References
APPERT M., 2008, Ville globale versus ville patrimoniale ? Des tensions entre libéralisation de la skyline de Londres et préservation des vues historiques, Revue Géographique de l’Est, vol.48, n°1-2. URL : https://rge.revues.org/1154
DROZDZ M., 2014, La construction territoriale de la compétition et de la redistribution à Londres entre rééchelonnement (rescaling) de l’Etat et enclavement stratégique, in LE BLANC et al. (dir.), Métropoles en débat : (dé)constructions de la ville compétitive, Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest.
GLEESON J, 2011, Housing: A growing city, Focus on London 2011, London, GLA Economics.
1 Through this scheme set up by the Conservative government in 1980, one million dwellings were transferred from public to private ownership between 1980 and 1987. Social tenants had the opportunity to become owners of their housing and could resell it at the market price after a few years. This helped to accelerate the replacement of the existing populations by more affluent populations.
2 http://heygatewashome.org/displacement.html
3 http://heygatewashome.org/timeline.html
4 Barbara Weiss is a practising architect in London. Link to her architectural practice: http://www.barbaraweissarchitects.com
5 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/30/paddington-skyscraper-scrapped-after-fierce-opposition
6 "The debate about tall buildings was always about their appearance, the graphical image on the computer presentations, the models that were brought in to show to successive mayors. It was very rarely about who is this for, is it the best use of the land, what kind of housing can we build. " Interview with Duncan Bowie conducted by Sara Ibos for Skyline in 2015 (Ibos, 2015). Duncan Bowie, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Westminster, was also the Planning and Housing Advisor to Greater London. He helped draft the London Plan's recommendations on affordable housing and density matrices.
Verticalization as a key for densification in London
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
France: A socially selective verticalization?
Verticalization as a key for densification in London
Observations on Inclusiveness, Equality and Equity in the Urban Space in the city of São Paulo
High-rise Buildings, Urban Tissue and Urban Regulations: some questions in São Paulo
Contribution by Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS
Introduction
Vauxhall-Nine-Elms has become one of the most emblematic playground for vertical regeneration in London. This Opportunity Area show how local authorities and the Mayor of London are dealing with vast swath of logistics land next to the CBD. The regeneration framework is no « laissez faire », public investments and expertise is key for enabling private developments. Housing provision in the area is running high but it is socially selective.
Vauxhall Nine Elms opportunity area: an emblematic surplus capital development zone
The Vauxhall Nine Elms Opportunity Area, a muddy urban regeneration area, is emblematic of surplus capital investment. Until 2010, the area was one of those areas where no developer would ever want to venture. The housing crisis in Vauxhall has taken on a high-profile profile. The former thermal power station is being converted into luxury housing. Several projects had followed one another for about twenty years, without any result, until one developer proposed a purely residential programme, betting on the rise in housing prices, with a very high profitability, compensating for the costs of the rehabilitation that this developer is obliged to ensure.
The highly accessible Vauxhall-Nine Elms Opportunity Zone is also characterised by important transport infrastructures which have contributed to its marginalisation:
As a result of the "real cuts", they have led to the spatial fragmentation of the district. The few residential areas in the south of the area also suffered from this fragmentation, exacerbated by large industrial estates, warehouse areas and the inherent lack of public space". The rest of the Opportunity Zone, "between the fruit market, Battersea Park and Queenstown Road Station, is dominated by industrial functions and extensive transport infrastructure leaving little room for residential space, encased (sic) between the fruit market and the station1." (Ibos, 2015) (Figure 1).
Greater London has set the framework for the reorganisation of Vauxhall-Nine-Elms by publishing a coordination document for the municipalities of Lambeth and Wandsworth on which the area of opportunity lies. It does not set out the vertical super density project but insists on the ambition to create a varied housing offer in an attractive urban setting. The quote below shows how urban regeneration revenues have not changed since the early 2000s and the Blair government:
“By 2030 the 195 hectares of the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea Opportunity Area will become an exemplar and distinctive quarter of central London. As an integral part of the London offer, defined by Lambeth Bridge through Vauxhall to Battersea Power Station and Chelsea bridge, high quality buildings and public spaces will provide opportunities for jobs and the choice of a variety of homes. New cultural and leisure development in this Thames River front location, supported by high quality services, especially public transport, will make this a successful and sustainable place where people will want to be2/sup>."
The Vauxhall-Nine Elms (VNE) Opportunity Zone extends over 195 hectares from Battersea Thermal Power Station in the west to Lambeth Bridge in the east. It was set up by the first London Plan in 2004, under the aegis of the Great London Authority, which, as we have seen, intends to continue the process of urban regeneration via this territorial tool, the objective being to requalify this industrial and logistical space, whose density of jobs and residents is low relative to its proximity to the centre of London.
Greater London, which is in charge of drawing up the strategy for this area, plans to transform the sector into a new economic and strategic heart for the capital. By 2030, Vauxhall-Nine-Elms is expected to host 18,000 new housing units, 25,000 new service sector jobs and commercial activities, while keeping the wholesale flower market active (figures 2 and 3).
To enhance the attractiveness of Vauxhall-Nine-Elms, Greater London has secured government funding for the extension of the Northern Line underground line, which will have two new stations at Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station. The government's financial commitment has been secured through the creation of a new tax on property developers in the area, a way of capturing land rent. With the assurance of an extension to the metro, two events have secured the reorganisation of the area. First, the relocation of the US embassy to the zone of opportunity and then the conversion of the Battersea thermal power station into a residential and commercial complex.
By 2030, more than thirty high-rise buildings - mostly residential or mixed-use with a residential component - are to be built in the opportunity zone (Figure 4).
If the Vauxhall Tower, inaugurated in 2014, was intended to be the pinnacle of the Vauxhall-Nine-Elms cluster, this is no longer the case today. Indeed, the new tower projects do not respect the 150-metre limit established by the orientation plan for the zone of opportunity (Figure 5). The title will go to the One Nine Elms City Tower3 (200 metres) built by the world's largest developer, the Dalian Wanda Group (China). Since then, a significant proportion of the cluster's tower proposals have exceeded the limit recommended by Greater London.
This flexibility towards developers finds a first favourable ground in the regulations themselves: the flexibility of the regulations leaves a large margin of interpretation to the developers and architects in charge of the tower project. Indeed, the Opportunity Area Planning Framework (OAPF) of Vauxhall-Nine-Elms does not offer a strict regulatory framework but rather a set of recommendations regarding the construction of high-rise buildings.
The changes made to the OAPF of Vauxhall-Nine Elms between 2009 and 2012 are indicative of Greater London's readjustments in the face of the appetite of developers who will pay for part of the extension of the Northern Line: the 2009 OAPF Consultation Draft set out the height limitations relating to the cluster in these terms:
"At Vauxhall, the Vauxhall Tower c. 180 is considered to be the pinnacle of an emerging cluster of tall buildings, other buildings in the cluster should have a secondary relation to it. Buildings in the region of 150 metres are likely to have such a relationship and anything taller is unlikely to be acceptable4."
In the revised 2012 version, "anything taller is unlikely to be acceptable" no longer appears. Finally, as Nigel Barker, director of heritage at English Heritage, explains, it is a progressive loss of control, resulting from the ambiguity of the regulations, which has led to the emergence of this cluster of towers:
"It is not proper planning and that is what happened here. And because it happened once, everyone else will come and say '150 metres was just a guideline and you GLA accepted it can be 160 meters'. So I can now say it needs to be 180 metres and someone else will come along and say that 'actually if you are going to 180 metres, the point of the cluster needs 200 metres5."
In return, the developers could have committed themselves to solving the housing crisis directly. This is not the case, on the contrary. Not only does the supply on offer in Vauxhall-Nine-Elms correspond to only a very small part of the internal housing demand in London, but the number of affordable housing units is lower than what Greater London and the Borough of Lambeth recommend. The contribution of developers is indirect, through their financial contributions. Douglas Black, head of urban planning at Lambeth Borough interviewed by Sara Ibos, appears resigned:
"The 100 or so units in the tower on the Albert Embankment will not necessarily meet the needs of our community in need of housing, but their value will create a lot of suitable housing where values are cheap. It's a sensible approach in our view." (Black, 2015)
Finally, the synchronisation of public investment with private property programmes leads to the sudden creation of new property values that instantly become a benchmark for competitors' property programmes and for older property. Vauxhall-Nine-Elms is becoming an unaffordable area for a large part of the population. Like Stratford or Canary Wharf, it is a New-build gentrification, but even more so than in these two neighbourhoods, the mechanisms of physical and financial transformation are faster and more intense.
Non-compliance with affordable housing quotas
The 2004 London Plan was based on a fixed rate of 50% affordable housing recommended for all new residential construction (of which 70% is so-called social housing and 30% is intermediate housing). The 2010 London Plan replaces this rate with a volume target of 13,200 affordable housing units per year, of which 60% are for social housing and 40% for "intermediate" housing within the Greater London area. The new monitoring indicator therefore leaves even more flexibility: offsets between major geographical areas are possible, or more locally between property programmes. At the local level, each borough sets housing targets, as for example here Lambeth which decides to maintain the rate of 50% affordable housing, and 40% if no public subsidy is committed.
The supply of affordable housing in the Vauxhall-Nine-Elms cluster's high-rise projects is well below the rates originally planned by the borough of Lambeth. Out of 10 approved high-rise projects, 6,028 dwellings are planned, but only 15.6% are designated as affordable. The recommended mix is therefore not achieved on the scale of the Opportunity Area Planning Framework. At the scale of each programme, only the Vauxhall Tower and the Skygardens Tower are close to, but do not reach the 50% target (Table 1).
| Cluster tower | Total number of dwellings created |
Number of affordable dwellings (Social + Intermediate) |
Percentage of affordable housing |
| New Covent Garden | 2431 | 365 | 15% |
| Keybridge house | 441 | 19 | 4,4% |
| New bondway | 250 | 90 | 20% |
| Vauxhall Cross Island | 291 | 58 | 20% |
| Market Towers | 487 | 51 | 10,4% |
| Vauxhall Tower | 274 | 51 | 40% |
| Vauxhall Square | 520 | 109 | 21% |
| 12-20 Vyvil Road | 219 | 44 | 20% |
| Sky Gardens | 178 | 62 | 34,8% |
| Nine Elms Sainsburys | 737 | 92 | 12,5% |
On an even larger scale, the municipalities do not envisage gender diversity. The Vauxhall Tower residential complex, with a 40% proportion of affordable housing, in fact masks a very distinct internal distribution. The tower is entirely occupied by housing sold or rented at market prices and the affordable housing is all grouped together in a small screen bar on the edge of the large roundabout at Vauxhall Cross.
The construction of high-rise buildings in the Opportunity Zone and particularly in the Vauxhall-Nine Elms cluster is justified by both the Greater London Authority GLA and the boroughs by the urgent need to tackle the housing crisis. The housing crisis particularly affects low- and middle-income households, who are excluded from a housing market that is becoming increasingly expensive in central London. The City Council's approach is therefore to "deliver" affordable housing to meet the demand of Londoners. Targets in terms of the supply of affordable housing have not been met in the Vauxhall-Nine Elms cluster even though the housing argument is the main justification for the construction of the high-rise buildings.
The issue of house prices is also central and the current situation in Vauxhall-Nine Elms underlines once again the existing contradictions between the content of the regulatory documents and the reality of the high-rise projects. While the London Plan encourages social mix - including the provision of affordable housing - it is clear that the majority of new housing is sold at market prices in a range of luxury flats. Indeed, the price of a one-bedroom flat at Vauxhall-Nine Elms is expected to average £600,000 in 2015. Prices then vary from tower to tower depending on the services available (swimming pool, spa, gym, private cinema, restaurants, bars), the view, the architect etc.
Part of this housing is reserved for so-called "affordable" rental housing, intended primarily for low- and moderate-income groups. However, given that the law considers housing to be "affordable" when its value is at most 80% of the market price, it seems clear that the price of "affordable" housing in the Vauxhall-Nine Elms cluster remains far too high to address the social categories directly affected by the housing crisis.
The Vauxhall-Nine Elms cluster is primarily aimed at the privileged social classes and especially at international buyers as we have seen for Canary Wharf. In this perspective, the architecture of the towers constitutes a strong marketing tool by which the promoters tend to create a new image, a demand around the kind of life, a very international way of life, a demand also around the notion of view and what it implies in terms of domination over the city. Flats are very often sold decorated and furnished. The interiors are often reminiscent of those of large international luxury hotels, combining neutral tones (beige, cream, taupe), noble materials (granite worktops in the kitchens, exotic wood, or marble in the bathrooms), and neo-baroque decorative objects (chandeliers with pendants, etc.) which Chinese customers are particularly fond of (Figure 6).
The supply of housing is therefore in most cases aimed at an international market, attracted by the investment that London property represents rather than by the actual occupation of the premises. At Vauxhall-Nine Elms, a large proportion of the property developments are presented to international clients before being put up for sale in the English market. This is because buyers - mostly from the Middle East and Asia - buy off-plan plots, which increases their resale price.
Finally, these flats are investment opportunities in a market where real estate values are growing and provide wealthy buyers with safe-deposit boxes in which to make their investment grow. In conclusion, I agree with Duncan Bowie:
"In recent years there has been further development in the sense that a lot of the development we have been building has been aimed at an international investment market, not on occupation. (...) The fact that this is where the money is coming from is driving the output, so increasingly, significant proportions of the housing we are building in London is not meeting London's needs6."
References
GLA, 2009, Vauxhall-Nine Elms-Battersea Opportunity Planning Framework Consultancy Draft, London, Greater London Authority.
IBOS S., 2015, Négocier le skyline de Londres à l’ère de la régénération : le cas de Vauxhall-Nine Elms, mémoire de Master 2, ENS de Lyon, 119p.
1 « Véritables coupures, elles ont engagé la fragmentation spatiale du quartier. Les rares secteurs résidentiels du sud de la zone ont également souffert de cette fragmentation, exacerbée par d’importantes emprises industrielles, zones d’entrepôts et le manque inhérent d’espace public ». Le reste de la zone d’opportunité, « entre le marché aux fruits, le parc de Battersea et la gare de Queenstown Road, est dominé par les fonctions industrielles et d’importantes infrastructures de transport laissant peu de place aux espaces résidentiels, encaissés (sic) entre le marché aux fruits et la gare » (Ibos, 2015)
2 GLA, Vauxhall-Nine Elms-Battersea Opportunity Area Planning Framework, p.8.
4 (Vauxhall-Nine Elms-Battersea Opportunity Planning Framework Consultancy Draft, Greater London Authority, 2009, p. 142).
5 Interview conducted on April 9, 2015, by Sara Ibos, Master 2 student at the ENS de Lyon and who worked in the SKYLINE programme.
6 Interviewed by Sara Ibos in April 2015.
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
France: A socially selective verticalization?
High-rise living in Dallas: towards vertical exclusion?
Residential verticalization in Hanoi
Contribution by Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS
The London Plan to Accommodates Growth
The Greater London Development Plan designed in 1944 under the leadership of Sir Patrick Abercrombie initiated one of the most important urban de-concentrations of cities in the industrialised world: London lost nearly 2 million inhabitants in 40 years to its distant outskirts (1951-1991). Fifty years later, Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London, wrote about the Shard skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano: "This very high-density project above a major public transport interchange hub in central London is exemplary for the city's development plan1". A radical political U-turn has been made, and compact urban growth has become a shared goal beyond the political teams. However, the compact city understood as a verticalized city is also a reflection of other issues such as heritage preservation.
The last three decades have seen the population of Greater London grow to almost 9 million people, surpassing its 1951 level. The metropolis, which is growing faster than the national average, is therefore facing demographic pressure which raises the question of urban sprawl and the associated social and environmental issues; a question that is all the more urgent as growth projections anticipate that London will exceed the 10 million mark in 20302.
This growth must be within the limits of the London Green Belt established in 1945. This urban containment system, which has become sacrosanct in public policy, led Ken Livingstone, Mayor of the new London City Council created in 2000, to implement the first urban development plan for the city in over 30 years. The London Plan (Great London Authority, 2004) aims at urban densification coordinated with a proactive policy to improve the supply of public transport. This change of direction marks the desire to control daily mobility and particularly to reduce the use of cars.
The London Plan (2004) aims to increase the overall density of new housing and office construction. Greater London then sets optimum density ranges based on the level of public transport accessibility (see Public Transport Accessibility Level below). The City intends to maximise the accessibility of network nodes from time to time by promoting a concentration of employment and housing. Terminal stations, intermediate stations and metro stations considered as multimodal platforms (Croydon, Stratford, Wood Green, Canary Wharf) have become priority densification centres. In addition, the town council would like to see existing centres strengthened, as is the case for the City, Westminster, and Canary Wharf.
As Duncan Bowie points out, a combination of factors and converging interests ensued that made the towers popular with the GLA, some municipalities, political parties, and developers:
"There was also another perspective: the compact city. London's population was growing, and this growth was taking place within the city. This was another fact that encouraged high-rise projects, because if you can't build outwards, you build upwards. There was a strange combination of the environmentalist lobby - presenting arguments which I think were completely false in favour of high-rise projects to avoid urban sprawl - the symbolism of the global city and its argument about urban renaissance, densification combined with the whole perspective of the developers: how did they make the most money? " (D. Bowie, 2015)
The Public Transport Accessibility Level (PTAL) indicator was designed as a decision support tool for Greater London and its boroughs. It characterises sites in terms of accessibility in order to assign them a densification capacity. It is now widely used in Greater London. It differs from other accessibility models and planning tools in that it only deals with public transport accessibility at a given point (the hyper-centre of London) and not between places. Each site is rated on a six-point scale using a fixed time scale, considering walking time to services close to public transport, the number of services available, average waiting time and reliability of service.
Transport accessibility as a common interests between municipalities and developers
Given the convergence of interests between municipalities, seeking selective densification according to accessibility, and developers reluctant to risk locations on the fringes of exclusive right-of-way public transport, it is not surprising that the number of high-rise housing units is relatively well correlated at the level of PTAL. This is true for the period 2000-2014 and for the projects in progress.
Due to the fine mesh of the hyper-centre, the best accessibility is generalised. Very classically, a centre-periphery gradient takes the shape of a glove finger. The highest levels of accessibility are then recorded around nodes between public transport networks or between lines of the same network.
The geography of accessibility is becoming a determining factor in the developers' tower siting strategies. The prospectuses that accompany the marketing of real estate operations attest to this. With very few exceptions, all of them emphasise the proximity to a particular transport infrastructure, indicate actual (never door-to-door) or planned travel times with future transport infrastructure (Figure 1).
It must be said that, since it is not possible to build high-rise buildings in the most accessible area, the heart of the city, due to heritage regulations (view protection corridors and historical preservation zones), developers focus their attention on sites closest to the centre, accessible on foot or by public transport.
In Aldgate, Old Street, in the north-east of the City, proximity to restaurants, cafes and other amenities is valued. As is walking and cycling. For example, in the 250 City Road project near Old Street, the pair of towers designed by Norman Foster and marketed by Berkeley Homes, have a parking area for 1,486 bicycles. For the Stage Tower at Shoreditch, it is the distance to the university institutions that is notified to future purchasers, which the developers anticipate as wealthy parents anxious to provide quality housing for their offspring (Figure 2).
Accessibility is an obvious selling point, as in other real estate programmes3. The argument is then refined by the promoters according to the anticipated clientele. When it comes to the middle and upper classes, high-rise buildings are generally on the fringes of Inner London, as the aim is to enable them to buy or rent accommodation in a very tense price environment. This would explain the real estate craze for Croydon, 18km away but only 13 minutes by train from London Bridge4, but also for Woolwich, soon to be served by the west-east RER or Deptford. These areas have a bad reputation and yet the flats on offer are sold out. Here the tower represents a safe solution for future residents in an environment that is sometimes perceived as hostile or difficult. The unique access allows a separation of households from the immediate environment. Given the prices charged and the low number of affordable housing units provided, suburban residential towers would make it easier to avoid otherness. While it is difficult to conclude at this stage on the subject of self-determination, Louise Dorignon's thesis (2019) on living in high-rise residential buildings on the outskirts of Melbourne should shed some stimulating light on this subject.
In the margins of the hyper-centre, such as in Aldgate, Old Street, City Road, Southwark, Vauxhall and Canary Wharf, the potential customers are more heterogeneous. As most of these towers are marketed in the United Kingdom and abroad and the selling prices are higher, developers use accessibility as a guarantee to secure investor buyers. Given the proximity to the historic centre, they also value the pedestrianised city. This is even more obvious when developers exploit the term village to refer to secondary central locations in central London. For example, in their brochures, they promote the life of trendy districts such as Shoreditch or Dalston by associating the image of the hipster or the businessman sipping his Italian coffee, cycling, walking, the feel of the European street, the international architectural grammar of the tower and contemporary interior design. The Main Tower at the interface between Shoreditch and the City, which was the subject of a dispute between local residents and developers - a dispute that Martine Drozdz and I analysed (2010) - is emblematic of this trend. The city, as sophisticated as its staged occupants, is practised in the street, to do business (man on the left in Figure 3), or more idly for the woman, to do her shopping: the young woman is in fact heading for 'Albion', a 'trendy' brasserie/grocery shop.
Although the analysis of the location of residential towers built since 2000 (including future projects) shows that the accessible to very accessible areas (categories 4, 5 and 6 in Figure 4) are very clearly favoured, a significant part is approved outside these areas, and therefore against the London Plan.
38% of the towers built between 2000 and 2014 were built in neighbourhoods with poor public transit access. This proportion drops to 23.6% for the high-rise projects identified in 2015. The improvement should be compared with the map (Figure 66) which shows an increasingly marked concentration of high-rise buildings in areas of opportunity or in areas attractive to developers, such as the banks of the Thames, which are particularly suitable for enhancing views of the city.
The boroughs that have approved the most towers outside accessible areas are Wandsworth, Lambeth, Newham, and Greenwich. The first three anticipate the construction of the RER and the extension of the Northern Line (Wandsworth and Lambeth) when Greenwich has the largest land reserve in Inner London.
Peter Minoletti5, head of the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation in 2011, points out that municipalities in the East End are particularly dependent on developers to regenerate brownfield or sparsely occupied spaces. He emphasises the importance of two factors in tower siting strategies and the arbitration of the authorities. Firstly, as we have seen, the developers provide financial contributions, which are all the more necessary as the State has reduced its allocations. Secondly, in certain sectors where land is initially inexpensive, strategic sites (because they are highly visible or provide a link between two areas) are still not very coveted. Very often contaminated, these sites must be thoroughly cleaned up. However, without public funding, this is the responsibility of the developers: the costs are therefore added to the cost of the land and the construction. According to him, it is for these reasons that the solution proposed by developers is the tower. By mobilising an architectural symbol of success and modernity, they are creating a niche in a relatively depressed market. Selling prices are around 25% higher than in the old surrounding area and the duplexes on the highest floors are used to generate high margins (30%) to compensate for the extra costs.
The City’s skyline as a collateral damage of verticalisation
The landscape impact of high-rise buildings is undoubtedly the most mediatized and controversial dimension since the reactivation of high-rise building projects in the early 2000s. The current situation is not new, as London has already experienced polemics which, because of their scale, have become political problems leading to the introduction of legislation designed to arbitrate divergent opinions and interests. The latter have taken the form of a set of protected views towards buildings designated as monuments and, more recently, the encouragement of the clustering of high-rise buildings.
Regulatory technicisation as a response to conflicts
Since the 1930s, planning guidelines have explicitly regulated London's skyline. Initially formulated by the City of London in response to attempts to break through the urban canopy near Saint Paul's Cathedral, the legislation was then clarified and generalised to the whole city (1956-1991), notably through the use of protected viewing corridors (since 1991) (Appert, 2008). These protective corridors aim to preserve the view of monuments in their context from strategic locations in the city. Conservation areas, a zonal regulatory system for heritage preservation, then guarantee the architectural integrity of a given area. However, these two systems are part of a double context. Firstly, that of negotiated town planning, without a code, and therefore open to interpretation and discussion. Second, that of the acculturation of urban planners and city professionals to the perspectives of the Townscape movement, which emphasizes staging, composition and the picturesque in the landscape approach.
These arrangements can be seen as attempts to reconcile the tensions between conservationists and builders in London, in a metropolis whose urban landscape has been greatly disrupted over the last two centuries: first came industrial expansion, the status of imperial capital and the seat of one of the most influential democracies in the world, but also the bombings of the Second World War and post-war reconstruction.
The preservation of monumental views has its origin in the protection of the silhouette of St. Paul's Cathedral. The pictorial representations of the cathedral by Canaletto, Turner and Claes Van Visscher or the photograph of the building standing in the midst of the smoke from the Luftwaffe bombings in the 20th century have contributed to the construction of a landscape in which the cathedral symbolises both London and the spirit of conquest or resistance. This is how St. Paul's still monopolises the attention of the curators of the built heritage and its staging as a prominent and majestic monument. Since the 1960s, successive legislations have extended the protection by view corridors to other emblematic buildings of the city (Parliament, Tower of London...).
The multiplication of high-rise projects in the early 1960s created a dilemma for town planners. Despite the acknowledged need for intensive reconstruction, the proposed high-rise buildings in central London are likely to 'fundamentally alter the skyline and views of St Paul and Big Ben from several vantage points' (Simon, 1996, p.3). From this period until the election of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London in 2000, successive legislations reflected this dilemma, which was not only a difficult conciliation between economic pressures and heritage preservation, but also a reflection of negotiated town planning.
The preservation of views is therefore at the heart of the debate on the landscape impact of the towers. The visual impact on the ground is hardly ever debated. It is at stake in a few conflicts between local residents and developers in the pericentre of London. The debate has been and still is about the skyline, and through it, a quest for identity is at stake. In the context of globalisation and metropolisation, London's new municipality has had to respond to the multiplication of skyscraper projects whose impact on the skyline is unprecedented. The Greater London Authority (GLA), which is in charge of London's urban planning, had set itself the objective of avoiding the multiplication of conflicts that arise during the examination of building permits. Mobilisations by associations, appeals and delays expressed opposition and were at the same time a source of uncertainty and therefore of risk for developers.
Once elected to London City Council, Ken Livingstone (r)assures that "London is admired for its heritage of prime importance and for its historic monuments dear to Londoners and visitors". But he also states that he is clearly opposed to the idea of a velum or any other height restriction (GLA, 2004). He explains: "for London to remain a competitive global city, we 'must respond to the drivers of economic growth and continue to develop the metropolis in a dynamic, spontaneous manner, without undue restrictions." (GLA, 2007)
The system put in place was largely inspired by the one proposed by the State in 1991. The visibility of the monuments was to be ensured by viewing corridors from strategic points in the conurbation. In these cones of view, the height of the constructions is limited so that the silhouette of the monuments is defined against the sky. The buildings to be protected were not modified, only a view was added (towards the Tower of London from the new town hall) and the angle of the viewing corridors reduced.
The second scheme proposed under the London Plan for 2011 refers to the distribution of towers. Through the revision of the London View Management Framework (LVMF) in 2011, the Great London Authority recommends the clustering of towers and invites boroughs to identify existing concentrations to be intensified.
"New development should safeguard the setting of landmarks (including Strategically Important Landmarks and World heritage Sites) and, where tall, should ideally contribute to the development or consolidation of clusters of tall buildings that contribute positively to the cityscape. New development should not harm a viewer's ability to appreciate the Outstanding Universal Value of a World heritage Site6."
Based on these sophisticated recommendations, as with the 1991 legislation, the principle is to allow for negotiation in the planning process. Proposing a tower in a viewing corridor is not a priori prohibited. However, it is very difficult to get it accepted unless the developer can convince the district concerned, the municipality and any actors involved that his project is of very high architectural quality and that it improves the presentation of the monuments.
Tower clustering: the tension between seeing and being seen
Municipalities have integrated the clustering of high-rise buildings into their local urban development plans (LDF) through specific zoning. However, the recommendation is neither precise nor prescriptive. Moreover, its application is not monitored by Greater London. Its principle is intuitively simple: grouped together, towers have less visual impact than isolated ones: the probability of the visual occurrence of an isolated tower in the urban view experience (from the street or from a high point) is higher than for a cluster. Things get more complicated when it comes to defining what a cluster is: are these the clusters identified by the planners in the first London Plan? Or are they clusters formed between 2000 and 2014? On a more technical level, at what number of towers is it considered a cluster? What should be the maximum spacing between towers? All these questions remain unanswered to date.
Faced with these ambiguities, an analysis of the share of towers concentrated in the clusters of the first London Plan of 2004, i.e. the City, Canary Wharf and Croydon in the south of the city can be carried out. Together they represented 19% of the towers in 2000 (all functions taken together) (Figure 68). This proportion is modest, especially in comparison with the - implicit - downtown model of the American city. In the European context, which is characterised - at least in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom - by a large number of high-rise buildings, the configuration is probably fairly traditional. The recommendation was, again implicitly, based on concentrations of office towers, because until the 2000s they were the highest and therefore the most visible. Except that for several years now, the residential towers proposed in London have been much higher than 100m and sometimes 200m, particularly at Canary Wharf. However, their share has reached nearly 28% for towers built between 2000 and 2014. This can be explained in particular by the exclusive concentration of office towers in the City and Canary Wharf. It is difficult to attribute this result to the recommendation of clustering, insofar as investment in office real estate has refocused on the two CBDs during this period, due to the financialisaton of the market on the one hand and the maturing of the Canary Wharf business district on the other.
As a counterpoint, it would seem that, combined with recommendations aimed at functional mix, the concentration of new residential towers at Canary Wharf has contributed to the strengthening of the Docklands cluster. However, 247 towers have been built or are planned outside these districts! While a theoretical improvement is noted, in terms of the visual experience, the impact of all the other towers is major.
We then analysed the recommendation less strictly, considering that the three spaces identified in the London Plan were not the only pre-existing clusters. We were equally flexible in defining a cluster as a grouping of more than two towers spaced less than 250m apart.
73% of the towers built before 2000 belonged to a cluster, including 30% in clusters of more than 3 towers (Table 1). The distribution reveals, firstly, the concentration of office towers in the three clusters of the London Plan, but also the spatial configuration of large housing estates, which generally have several social housing towers. These figures also show that 121 towers do not belong to any concentration supervised according to our criteria, reflecting a relatively chaotic skyline punctuation, which the town planners of the 1970s and 1980s regretted, particularly when comparing London to Paris (considered intramuros). The sites damaged by the Second World War and the maximisation of profit by developers in the face of a set of negotiable urban planning recommendations largely explain this distribution.
|
|
Total number of laps |
Number of turns in cluster* (unsupervised) |
City, Canary Wharf, Croydon |
|
Before 2000 |
439 |
318 (72.5%) in 87 clusters (26 with more than 3 towers) |
82 (18,7%) |
|
After 2000 |
342 |
Combined with the previous 159: 46.5%. |
95 (27,8%) |
|
Grouped in new clusters (1): 130 (38%) |
|
||
|
Isolated towers: 53 ( 15,5%) |
|
Of the 342 towers built or planned after 2000, only 15.5% are insulated, compared to 28% before 2000. The improvement is significant, even if there is still room for improvement. In absolute terms, this still represents 53 towers. These are mainly residential, or hotel towers built in small urban regeneration operations, outside the large complexes. Their isolated character is recognised as a visual asset by the municipalities that have approved them, as they bear witness to the transformations of a district that is called upon to renew itself physically and socially. Lewisham and Deptford to the south of Canary Wharf, Stratford, Ilford and Barking in the north-east, Tottenham in the north and Wandworth in the south-west are examples of this.
While the isolated tower is rarely favoured by municipalities, developers can, on the contrary, enhance the 360-degree views enjoyed by a large majority of dwellings in a relatively isolated tower (Figure 7). This can become an argument that compensates for the location of the tower or the poor quality of its finishes. According to the CBRE property valuation firm, the view may result in an overcut in the price of dwellings per square metre. They show for some examples of towers built at Canary Wharf and Elephant and Castle, that for each additional floor, the price increases by an average of 1.5% (Table 2).
The second cohort of towers is concentrated in existing clusters and represents 46% of the total built and planned since 2000. A little less than half of the towers are therefore approved in accordance with the clustering criteria established by Greater London. These towers not only strengthen the City, Canary Wharf and Croydon but also cluster around pre-existing concentrations at Elephant and Castle in the south, Vauxhall-Nine Elms and Wandsworth town centre in the south-west, and Brentford further west along the Thames.
Some of these towers are part of large developments of social housing towers, such as Strata and One the Elephant at Elephant and Castle. However, if they complement a high-rise development, they can replace them in the long term, when they are completely or partially demolished (Woodberry Down Estate for example). The cluster can be gradually expanded as new property market values are confirmed. Pioneering developers are not the most numerous, as financial risk aversion can be high and most prefer to invest in niche markets that are already established or mature.
| Ref | Scheme name | Builder | Highest storey | Uplift per floor |
| 1 | Strata | Brookfield | 43 | 2,0% |
| 2 | Pan Peninsula | Ballymore | 48 | 1,9% |
| 3 | The Landmark | Chalegrove | 44 | 1,3% |
| 4 | West India Quay | HOK International | 34 | 1,8% |
| 5 | Altitude 25 | Plumbdean | 25 | 2,2% |
| 6 | Discovery Dock | Capital & Provident | 24 | 1,3% |
| Average | 1,5% |
In the configuration where a single developer is in charge of the construction of a set of towers, the cluster could have been coherent in terms of height, mass, and design. The mass plans approved by the municipalities generally refer to an architectural code, whether for the treatment of public spaces, the building envelope, or heights. In the case of the Greenwich Peninsula, by virtue of the scale of the building programme and the phases necessary for its completion, consistency is not assessed at the scale of the entire site but at that of the successively delivered blocks. While clustering effectively reduces the likelihood of experiencing the visibility of a tower in a heritage space or elsewhere in the city, the clustering of towers does not necessarily result from a planned skyline composition. As Nigel Barker points out :
"We're ending up with a series of groups, not clusters, they are groups of buildings, scattered across London, which have no rationale and no clear sense of design.”
The urban skyline compositions resulting from the various planned projects show above all the erection of a wall of towers along the banks of the Thames. The principle underlying this composition is the maximisation of the view from the towers and not the coherence of the composition from points of view outside the Peninsula, notably from Greenwich Park or the opposite banks. The enhancement of the view through real estate development refers to the skyline discussions conducted previously. This is a typical example of the deprivation of views for housing already built and the de-structuring of skyline views (whether enhanced or not) in favour of the creation of new views that only the more affluent populations benefit from.
The position of the Great London Authority is ambiguous to say the least, as it clearly uses real estate production, especially the visibility and contemporaneity of skyscrapers, to strengthen the economic attractiveness of the city (Appert and Montès, 2015). The redesigned skyline, in the hollow of a legislation which defends the preservation of narrow cones of view over the city, thus becomes a lever of urban communication and marketing in the era of inter-metropolitan competition. The State and the bodies linked to it are both judge and party. Failure to mitigate conflicts leads to a crisis in the meaning of public action.
Judging by the recurrence of public surveys, the regulatory measures put in place in London only imperfectly meet the expectations of the city's heritage protectors. Neither do they seem to take on board the fears and demands of the associations that are more than ever mobilised in the negotiated British urban planning (Skyline Campaign).
In the context of a negotiated urban factory and a participatory turn in urban planning, the motives, modalities, framework, and implications of the exchanges between actors often reveal a technocratic and elitist debate, the regulation of which would leave aside the essential representations and aspirations of the residents when promoters, investors and governors draw the skyline of a contemporary metropolis. The disputed modification of the London skyline would then be proof of the dysfunctions of a metropolitan governance that finds it difficult to imagine the skyline space as public, as could the street space, which is now widely analysed and theorised.
References
APPERT M., 2008, Ville globale versus ville patrimoniale ? Des tensions entre libéralisation de la skyline de Londres et préservation des vues historiques, Revue Géographique de l’Est, vol.48, n°1-2. URL : https://rge.revues.org/1154
APPERT M., MONTES C., 2015, Skyscrapers and the redrawing of the London skyline: a case of territorialisation through landscape control. Articulo-Journal of Urban Research (Special issue 7). URL : https://articulo.revues.org/2784
DORIGNON L., High-rise living in the middle-class suburb:a geography of tactics and strategies, PhD thesis in Geography and philosophy, University of Melbourne / Université Lyon 2 Lumière, May 2019.
GLA, 2004, The London plan, London, Greater London Authority.
GLA, 2011, London view management Framework, LVMF, London, Greater London Authority.
1 "The proposal is for a very high density development over a major transport interchange in Central London (...) and in this respect it meets the requirements of the emerging London Plan." Planning Report PDU/0238/01, February 19th 2002, Greater London Authority.
2 http://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/2015-round-population-projections
3 Unless you invest in a Cellier-type tax scheme in France.
4 Railway station which gives access to the City in 15 minutes walk (to the Bank of England).
5 Interview conducted by Manuel Appert in March 2011.
6 GLA, 2011, p. 29.
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
The return of residential towers in France
Transit Oriented Development as legitimization of residential towers
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
The Production of Residential Buildings in São Paulo Metropolis
High-rise Buildings, Urban Tissue and Urban Regulations: some questions in São Paulo
Contribution by Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS
Download original version in French at the end of the text
A photographer geographer
My approach consists of taking inventory, witnessing but also of transforming the materiality of urban territories into an aesthetic object. The construction of the photographer-geographer that I am has come about through the way I have mastered the lessons I have been given, through my acculturation to different scientific fields, as different as botany is to urban studies, but also through certain aspects of the visual arts such as photography, architecture and design.
My practice could be summed up as the highlighting of a globality, structured by geometrical compositions made up of lines and plans that stage and put into perspective an intelligible globality, contrasts or clues that I consider as revealing the space of the city photographed.
My photography style is somewhere between a documentary and pictorialist approach, in a process of illustrating territories, particularly those of cities. In turn, depending on the purposes and the objects captured, on the in-situ conditions of the shooting, on the choices of post-processing, the cursor moves between documentation and aesthetization of reality.
Each of these photos refer to a situation in which the photographer-geographer within me has chosen to trigger the shooting, while defining its framing and exposure. The photographic moment then represented a particular moment where knowledge and mental representations crystallized. Materiality was not the only factor responsible for triggering the shooting. It was rather a meeting between materiality and a multiplicity of scientific knowledge. It is a process of emergence of a knowledge about the aestheticized space, where learned knowledge is tied up with experience and expressed through technical-aesthetic devices.
Vertical regeneration against the city?
The series of photographs bears witness to what we have formally considered to be the spaces of regeneration in London: whether they are transformed, undergoing transformation, or coveted. These sites are or will be the subject of vertical real estate programs, at a time when more than 400 skyscrapers are planned for or under construction in London. Beyond artefacts, the skyscraper is most often a lever of urban transformation, a beacon of land and property development for areas deemed obsolete or economically undervalued.
The slideshow is based on excerpts from several photographic reports carried out between 2010 and 2019. The presentation of these reports demonstrates the added value of the co-presence of photographs. Beyond the individual meaning behind each of them, the whole ensemble gives an insight into the driving forces, manifestations and impacts of vertical regeneration operations in London. I show clues through selected pieces that draw attention to the morphological, social, and political dimensions of a process of urban renewal, obsessed with verticalization.
The photographs are highly publicized expressions (suggestions) or, on the contrary, very immediate testimonies of the transformation of neighborhoods, deemed obsolete or degraded in the metropolis, into spaces of financialized and globalized real estate. The documentation of urban transformations is adorned with a denunciation of the fabric of the contemporary city, where urban planning negotiated with the private sector also sounds like a renunciation of the municipalities.
Collection of 10 photos from several photography campaigns between 2010 and 2016. Geo-localized photographs.
Camera used: APN NIKON D90 until 2013, then NIKON D600. Lens: NIKON AFS NIKKOR 18-300mm DX (18-200 until 2013)
Coveted
Aerial view of Canning Town and Canary Wharf from the Emirates Airline gondola, Royal Docks, July 2016.
51,505884, 0,015719
Like the River Thames, the aerial metro, built in the 1980s, meanders through London's old docks that are currently being converted. Along its route, there are large complexes, vast areas dedicated to logistics and the storage of aggregates for construction sites, as well as industrial and port wastelands. Canary Wharf, the business district that brings together the main American banks that took up residence in Europe after the financial Big Bang, has long represented the eastern limit of the urban reconversion front. Since the end of the 2000s, projects have multiplied further east, with the help of Qatari and Chinese sovereign funds.
50,000 housing units are planned here, without new employment centers being truly envisaged. The residential market is the most coveted market by international investors, since residential values exceeded those of offices at the beginning of 2010.
Condemned
The Heygate Estate before demolition, Elephant and Castle, Southwark, September 2013.
51,493773, -0,098582
The Elephant and Castle district was modernized in the 1960s and 1970s after bombing partially destroyed it during the Second World War. Reconstruction gave pride of place to the car and the functionalist town planning of the Heygate Estate, a complex of parallel bars connected by walkways in the air. The district then physically deteriorated, and with it, its image. The social precariousness did not diminish, but the communities of African origin adapted to this environment, the shopping mall which transformed into a bazaar is testament to this. The large complex was demolished in 2014, despite opposition from residents and activists.
Deverticalize
The Heygate Estate before demolition, Elephant and Castle, Southwark, September 2013.
51,493773, -0,098582
The regeneration of Elephant and Castle is emblematic of the convergence of interest between municipalities and developers. It is first of all the result of the new macroeconomic context, a neo-liberal model which aims to have the private sector finance and/or operate a number of activities, services and housing, which until then could be taken over by the public sphere. It then results from the increased dependence of municipalities on developers. The context of reduced public spending, particularly in infrastructure and "social" housing, leads municipalities to negotiate constantly with developers, with new power dynamics and new objects of negotiation, such as high-rise buildings. The Australian developer Lend Lease has never expressed a wish to redevelop the Heygate Estate. The Southwark municipality could not oppose the non-replacement of a large majority of social housing, despite the promise made in 2007. Of the 1,054 social housing units demolished, only 550 will be replaced in and around the site. For example, landlords who had acquired their homes under the right-to-buy regime were offered £95,000 (approx. $129 500) for a studio or £107,000 (approx. $146 000) for a three-room apartment as compensation, while the price of studios in the surrounding area was £330,000 (approx. $450 000).1 The government has also offered to pay for the replacement of some of these units1. People have been forced to migrate to cheaper areas, particularly further east, within and outside the Greater London area.
In a recent interview by Property Week Magazine, Terry Redpath, former owner of social housing, regrets that he can no longer afford to stay in the area: "The £45,000 compensation I was given, and my life savings enabled me to buy a small terraced-house 14 miles outside the city. I feel like I have to give up living here so that wealthy foreigners can do it".
Reverticalize
Strata Tower from Crampton Street, Elephant and Castlel, Southwark, March 2010.
51.490954, -0,100711
The last bar of the Heygate Estate was demolished in 2015 and the "ethnic" shopping malls now closed. Cranes are now being raised for 4 more residential skyscapers that are under construction and no less than 8 more will be erected in the area by 2025. The development plan proposed by Lend Lease was approved in 2013, against the opinion of the population and some local elected officials. It paved the way for a radical morphological and social transformation. What was supposed to be a flagship district for regeneration, a model of socially sustainable eco-renovation, turned out to be a counter-model, that of organized gentrification. The district bears witness to the scissor effect associated with the material and symbolic deverticalization of the large complex and the reverticalization of housing for the elite and international investors.
Threat
Tarmac Aggregates, Cement Quay, 21 Greenwich Riverside, Greenwich, May 2014.
51,493639, 0,023669
Downstream on the banks of the Thames; industrial, logistical and construction activities are still being resisted, but for how long? Sites with a view of the river are coveted by developers: the river stages the city's skyline and can increase the price of flats by 20 to 30% depending on the floor. However, housing construction requires building materials that can be transported and redistributed by water via the still active wharfs (quays). They make it possible to minimize the flow of lorries and reduce pollution. Densification and safeguarding of construction activities are causing tension, behind the discourse of sustainability.
Closing, building the landscape, neutralize
New Providence Wharf, 1 Fairmont Avenue, Blackwall, Tower Hamlets, May 2014.
51,505428, -0,004975
An old rail yard on the edge of East India Docks, which used to allow goods to be loaded onto the docks, was demolished in the 1980s. On the site, which had been vacant for almost 20 years, a luxury residential tower complex, New Providence Wharf, was built. In contrast to the pioneering work of the National Trust, which brought many waterfront sites into the public domain and created many coastal paths, the pedestrian routes along the Thames are discontinuous, depending on the access limitations of the landowners. Access to the water and to the view is therefore sometimes exclusive. The landscaping treatments deployed are standardized by the major architectural and landscaping firms. One drives around, one does not stop. It creates the conditions for a decor whose experience is partial, visual and remote.
Confronted
Robin Hood Gardens and the towers of New Providence Wharf, Woolmore Street, Tower Hamlets, May 2014.
51,509386, -0,007745
Two hundred metres (220 yards) back from the Thames, on the edge of the expressway approaching the Blackwall Tunnel, are the bars of Robin Hood Gardens. From the "street in the air", beyond the aerial metro line that marks a material and psychological boundary, one can see New Providence Wharf obstructing the view towards the Thames. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and delivered in 1972 by the Greater London Council, this residential complex is an example of Le Corbusier's adaptation of the Unité d'Habitation to the British context. Now in a very poor state of repair, the large complex is threatened with demolition despite the protection campaign undertaken by famous international architects including Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers. Robin Hood Gardens embodies the normative and technocratic debate on social housing in the UK, between the demonization of urban forms and the emerging heritage of 20th century architecture. Its media coverage is matched only by its failure to take resident’s voices into account.
Substitute
Stratford looking south towards Stratford Station and High Street
51.543201; -0.008212
From the Stratford City shopping mall, built just before the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, the view is over Stratford High Street and the multiplication of residential towers built in 2008. This suburb in East London has undergone a major morphological and social transformation as a result of settlement by a middle class that is struggling to find housing in the rest of the city. The social mix as measured by the proportion of each social class has improved, at the price of a very clear spatial confrontation between working-class neighborhoods, which have not seen their lot improve, and vertical islands for the middle and upper classes. Stratford presents the face of a fragmented city, where both worlds have their own amenities.
"Luxify"
One Blackfriars, Southwark, 2019.
51.510290 ; -0.104460
One blackfriars, one of the luxurious residential towers that has been carried by foreign investors on the banks of the Thames. Designed by starchitect Ian Simpson, the skyscraper is reminiscent, in a smaller scale, of the large projects dedicated to the elite that stand around Central Park in New York. These towers reflect a trend towards the verticalization of very high-class housing which, according to Steve Graham, contributes to "luxuriating the skies". Indeed, they both have the fact that they are located in sites that embrace broad landscapes of the most symbolic buildings in common. For €1.2m (approx.$4.7m), the buyer can buy a studio on the 20th floor to enjoy a view from Big Ben to Canary Wharf, passing by Saint-Paul and the City, with the Thames at its foot. The developer has been authorized to contribute to the construction of affordable housing several miles further south, in place of an initially planned mixed program.
"High Hopes?"
Granary Square, 1-3 Stable Street, King’s Cross, Camden, September 2013.
51,535614, -0,125199
Director Mike Leigh's film High Hopes (1988) is a disillusioned account of the effects of the Thatcher era on the living conditions of the residents of King's Cross and on relations between social classes, particularly with the colonization of the area by the middle class gained through individualism. 28 years later, the "station district" is no more, the wasteland has given way to the new high-speed train terminal in Saint Pancras. Around it, the head offices of large groups such as BNP Paribas or Google are under construction. Hangars and other warehouses have been redeveloped in to shops, restaurants and an Art school. King's cross is a new economic hub for the metropolis and a playground for executives and "creative" people.
High-rise living in Dallas: towards vertical exclusion?
Residential verticalization in Hanoi
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
The Production of Residential Buildings in São Paulo Metropolis
The case of Lyon (about half a million inhabitants in its municipality and 2.3 million in its metropolitan area) is emblematic of market led real-estate and governance, although with strong influence of public actors and institutions, especially with the provision of public housing. Lyon is also emblematic of modernist high-rise social housing built in the 1960s-1970s but also, and less known, for the middle classes. These high-rises tend to be scattered across the city, while latest developments of exclusive and mixed-use high-rises are located in areas of urban renewal.
This section will study high-rise living in middle-class tower blocks of the 1970s (views, perceptions, socializations, valorization of height, experience of the elevator) as well as in tower blocks located in social housing areas. It will also propose an analysis of the discourse on residential high-rises by the actors of Transit Oriented Developments.
France: the return of residential towers
Transit Oriented Develoment (TOD) as legitimization of residential towers
The re-verticalization of French cities: a socially selective verticalization?
The elevator as experience of high-rise living
Exploring the heights of the Metropolis of Lyon – An ethno-photographic look at residential tower blocks
Understanding residential socialization: Large luxury housing estates seen by their inhabitants
The valorization of verticality
Wealthy housing estates
For an ecological approach to high-rise living. An anthropological cross-section of two French-Romanian case studies (Introduction)
Two case studies: urban renewal in La Duchère (Lyon, France) and the transformation of post-communist urban spaces in Braşov (Romania)
Politics of verticality and affordances of height
Housing or dwelling : space-times of high-rise living. Case studies in Romania (Braşov) and France (Lyon, La Duchère)
Contribution by
Geoffrey Mollé
PhD student in urban Geography, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (UMR 5600) and Institut de Recherches Géographiques, Université Lyon 2 Lumière
Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS
Hélène Mathian
Research engineer in spatial analysis, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (UMR 5600), CNRS, Lyon
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Introduction
In another contribution, Manuel Appert shows that the return of residential towers occurs in Europe from the 2010s [Appert, 2015; Appert et al., 2018], but this phenomenon initially excludes the French case, which occurred later, and with less information about research in geography and urban planning. This contribution sheds light on this particular case.
The data mapping of the BaseProjet at the scale of the French territory by urban unit shows that contemporary high-rise buildings are mainly concentrated in the most populous municipalities in France. 19 cities are concerned, including the first 11, namely Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Bordeaux, Lille (figure 1).
Confirming the location trend identified in the other European cities [Appert, 2016], residential towers are mostly found in metropolitan contexts, even if we note to date an over-representation of projects in Nantes, Rennes and Marseille, and on the contrary, an under-representation, in Lille and Toulouse.
The preference for pericentral and highly accessible locations
By varying the scales, we tried to estimate the locations of contemporary towers within each urban unit. After having fixed an urban perimeter for the entire period (2010 definition), we calculated for each of the 3,176 towers (BaseEmporis + BaseProjet) its relative distance from the center of its urban unit before and after 2015. In order to compare between urban units, the distances were made comparable, regardless of the extent of the urban unit, by expressing them relative to the radius of the circle with the same area as the urban unit.
Considering the extent of the urban unit, a value of 1 reflects a very off-center position of the tower, while the closer the value tends to 0 the closer the tower is to the center. It is therefore a "relative distance to the center". The box diagram below shows the evolution of the distribution of these positions before 2015 and after 2015 (Figure 2).
The global comparison, then by urban unit of the distances relative to the center of the towers before and after 2015, shows a greater spatial proximity of the towers carried out after 2015 compared to the center. Rather than on the outskirts, according to the urban development model of large housing estates in the 1960s and 1970s, a turning point is taking place through the emergence of more pericentral locations, outside the often heritage areas of the urban hyper center. For the majority of urban units, the pericentral or even “less peripheral” character of housing towers built after 2015 corroborates the work that has studied, particularly in London, the implementation strategies of mixed real estate programs that invest the spaces of urban regeneration. [Appert, 2011; Drodz, 2012].
These spaces are characterized by significant land reserves on formerly urbanized land, whether they are former industrial or logistics sites, or on land for which the density of use is low compared to the surrounding neighborhoods. In France, it is the same land, re-urbanized through ZAC (Zone d'Aménagement Concertée) systems that include contemporary towers (Figure 3).
Within urban redevelopment strategies based on pericentral spaces, transport provision is a key parameter. Using an evaluation grid by analyzing the availability of public and individual transport, we constructed accessibility scores for contemporary residential towers. The following two tables (Tables 1 and 2) provide additional information on the interdependence of tower projects with transport networks. 87% of projects have at least three points, which means either that the three criteria at one point each are met (proximity to light transport, intermediate station, rapid road access) or that one of these criteria is combined with another worth two points (central station or major transport hub), which sometimes testifies to a multimodal service. We will retain in particular the high scores for proximity to major transport hub (70%), as well as to intermediate stations (63%). Finally, these projects are preferably located near high-speed roads (65%).
|
Distance to a network node |
Weight |
Percentage |
|
< 500m non-heavy transport axis (bus) non-heavy transport axis (bus) |
1 |
100% (97) |
|
< 1km intermediate station |
1 |
63% (61) |
|
< 1km quick road access |
1 |
65% (63) |
|
< 500m heavy transport axis (tram-metro) |
2 |
70% (68) |
|
< 1km central station |
2 |
26% (25) |
|
Score |
Number of towers |
|
(not very accessible) 1 |
6(6,1%) |
|
2 |
7 (7,2%) |
|
3 |
20 (21,4%) |
|
4 |
19 (19,5%) |
|
5 |
16 (16,2%) |
|
6 |
13 (13,4%) |
|
(very accessible) 7 |
16 (16,2%) |
The return of residential towers in French cities is anchored in a metropolitan geography with the logic of differentiated suburban locations. The proximity of contemporary towers to transport networks and their interconnection spaces constitutes a diagnosis to be refined at the local or even micro-local level. This is what we have chosen to do, in a second contribution through the specific case of the metropolis of Lyon, one of the most affected by the phenomenon of residential verticalization in France and whose projects have been the subject of interviews with stakeholders in the urban fabric.
References
APPERT Manuel, 2011, Les nouvelles tours de Londres comme marqueurs des mutations d’une métropole globale. Observatoire de la société britannique [En ligne], 11, p105-122, mis en ligne le 01 août 2012, consulté le 11 octobre 2013. URL : http://osb.revues.org/1243 ; DOI : 10.4000/osb.1243
APPERT Manuel, 2015, Le retour des tours dans les villes européennes. Métropolitiques, URL : https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Le-retour-des-tours-dans-les.html
APPERT Manuel, 2016, Les formes de la métropole : du réseau à la canopée, de la mesure au paysage : Tours, skyline et canopée, Géographie. Université Lyon 2, 293 p.
APPERT Manuel, HURÉ Maxime, LANGUILLON Raphaël, 2017, Gouverner la ville verticale : entre ville d’exception et ville ordinaire. Géocarrefour [Online], 91/2, Online since 15 February 2017, connection on 01 June 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/geocarrefour/10013.
DROZDZ Martine, 2014, Regeneration b(d)oom. Territoires et politique de la régénération urbaine par projet. Londres, Thèse de doctorat en Géographie, Université Lyon 2.
Transit Oriented Development as legitimization of residential towers
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
Observations on Inclusiveness, Equality and Equity in the Urban Space in the city of São Paulo
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil: microscales and narratives
Residential verticalization in Hanoi
Contribution by
Geoffrey Mollé
PhD student in urban Geography, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (UMR 5600) and Institut de Recherches Géographiques, Université Lyon 2 Lumière
Manuel Appert
Geographer, professor at École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon, Member of the executive committee of Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (EVS) and member of LAURe-EVS
Hélène Mathian
Research engineer in spatial analysis, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (UMR 5600), CNRS, Lyon
#Transport, mobility, accessibility, density, strategic planning, urbanism
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Introduction
Lyon, like many other French major cities, is experiencing an increasing number of residential high-rise projects. 97% of them are part of wider public-private urbanization projects called Zones d’Aménagement Concertées (ZAC) that usually draw from the political framework of projets urbains (Pinson, 2009). These projects have in common an abundant availability of land, multiple stakeholders and, in terms of urban context, they sit in accessible pericentral areas of French cities. Their planning principles derive from those of Transit Oriented Developments (TODs), planning tools for the compact city model that so many cities follow to address environmental concerns associated with contemporary expansive urban growth. In this context, municipalities and developers have found a common ground to densify cities around transport hubs, responding to the compact city agenda while also maximizing the profitability of new developments.
The return of high-rise housing in Lyon can be seen with the naked eye, through the emergence of six projects located within the Greater Lyon area (figure 1).
Existen’Ciel
Villeurbanne
La Soie
Completed
PetitDidierPrioux
AltareaCogedim
57m
Sky Avenue
Lyon
Part-Dieu
Under construction
Christian de Portzamparc
Bouygues Immobilier
50m
Ycone
Lyon
Confluence
Completed
Jean Nouvel
Vinci
65m
Résidence BelvY
Lyon
Confluence
Completed
Herzog et de Meuron
Icade
52m
Figure 1: Photographs of residential towers in Lyon-Villeurbanne. Source: G. Mollé, 2019
Figure 2: Location of residential towers in Greater Lyon. Source : H. Mathian et J-B. Bouron, 2019.
By plotting the new high-rises in a map resulting from the overlay of the ProjectBase and EmporisBase datasets, we began by studying their locations by putting them on the same map as their older counterparts within the Greater Lyon area (Figure 2).
The contemporary tower blocks are rather pericentral, i.e., closer to the centre of the city of Lyon than the others, which are mainly located in the peripheral communes of Villeurbanne with the Tonkin district, Vénissieux or even La Duchère and Rillieux-la-Pape. The integration with the so-called heavy transport networks (train, metro, tramway) for the contemporary tower blocks is obvious, which is less the case for the other tower blocks, which are more connected to the road networks. While social housing districts have often suffered from their isolation from the city's networks, the new projects have strong transport connection potential from the outset. A paradigm shift is taking place between two types of high-rise buildings, the older of which still weighs upon representations of the modern city.
Residential towers as instruments of TOD policies
Transit Oriented Development policies are embodiments of compact city planning [Bentayou et al, 2015]. They aim to coordinate the development of public transport networks with urbanisation in order to reduce the number and length of car journeys. On the basis of these principles, TODs formalise schemes to reduce urban sprawl and car dependency as it gradually built up during Les Trente Glorieuses. Peter Calthorpe [1993, p. 56], the originator of TODs, defined them as mixed-use neighbourhoods close to public transport nodes in the pericentre of cities. TODs combine residential, commercial, service, recreational and public purposes in neighbourhoods where the use of green modes of transport should be favoured. According to Peter Calthorpe, TODs are based on four principles. First, a mix of housing, services and jobs are organised around public spaces that link public transport nodes. Second, the built and pedestrian environments must be attractive and safe for users of green modes of transport. Thirdly, the development of compact TODs should be planned on a metropolitan scale and carried out along public transport corridors, on vacant sites or sites to be redeveloped (brownfields). Finally, these areas should preferably be located within the built-up area of cities in order to contain urban sprawl.
While several studies carried out in London have shown that TODs legitimise the verticalisation of symbolically requalified spaces called Opportunity Areas (Drodz, 2012; Appert, 2016), similar logic can be found in France. TODs appear to be closely linked to the dynamics of urban regeneration, sometimes confused with the urban projects themselves, and which mainly concern the land reserves provided by former military, industrial, logistics and craft sites. These sites, which are considered obsolete from a functional point of view, were often the result of urbanisation in the 19th and first part of the 20th century. As a result, they are often located in the pericentral parts of cities, close to the main waterways and land transport routes, including the rail network. The case of Lyon reveals this convergence between urban projects and new tower blocks, which is demonstrated by their location, design and legitimisation.
A strategic position at the heart of Lyon’s projets urbains
The Zones d'Aménagement Concertées (ZACs, Mixed Development Zones) are the main mechanisms for re-urbanisation in the era of the projet urbain [Pinson, 2009]. In France, they represent 97% of the high-rise projects listed in our database. In Lyon, high-rises (or developments comprising them) are located in the main ZACs of the city, where the main urban projects are currently under construction. (Figure 3). On the map, we have chosen to distinguish them from urban renewal programmes, represented in blue. Urban Renewal projects also involve ZAC schemes but within the framework of the PNRU (National Urban Renewal Plan). These historic modern districts of the city of Lyon have not seen the emergence of contemporary high-rise projects, which maintains the hypothesis that high-rise buildings are still associated with the failures of large housing estates in these peripheral areas [Gilbert, 2012]. The PNRU planned more demolitions than constructions, which testifies to the aversion to residential verticality in institutional representations [Veschambre, 2011]. Nevertheless, it is possible that other more contemporary tower blocks will appear in the future, as shown by the case of London, which has seen the advent of luxury housing tower blocks in several large housing estates targeted by urban renewal (Appert 2016).
Figure 3: Spatial distribution of high-rise buildings built or planned after 2015 and location of urban projects emblematic of Greater Lyon's strategy. Source: G. Mollé 2019
The figure shows that some of the ZACs in which the residential tower blocks are located already benefit from good accessibility on a metropolitan scale (Part-Dieu), but that others would benefit from a substantial improvement in their access conditions.
The cartographic approach showed that contemporary residential towers were mainly located in pericentral districts, close to transportation nodes, in strategic spaces for the metropolis, i.e., in line with TOD policies. Subsequently, we worked backwards, focusing first on the discourses of the stakeholders who promote them today.
The registers of the re-legitimisation of towers in contemporary urbanism
Since the 1990s, the autonomy of local municipalities in terms of urban planning competences has been counterbalanced by logics of dependence which stem from increasingly close relations with the private sector (Harvey, 1989). The emergence of residential tower blocks in France is no exception to this logic. It is conveyed by the increasingly prominent position of the major French developers who, by associating themselves with architects, whether renowned or not, have won most of the tenders relating to ZACs since 2015. Their long-term solvency means that the top 10 French developers have the largest market share in the French housing sector [Pollard, 2011], including in the manufacture of contemporary tower blocks (Table 1).
|
Project owner |
Span |
Top 20 |
Number of rounds |
|
Nexity |
International |
Yes |
13 |
|
Eiffage Immobilier |
International |
Yes |
7 |
|
Kaufman & Broad |
National |
Yes |
6 |
|
Icade |
National |
Yes |
6 |
|
Bouygues Immobilier |
International |
Yes |
6 |
|
Altarea Cogedim |
National |
Yes |
5 |
|
Linkcity |
International |
Yes |
5 |
|
Vinci Real Estate |
International |
Yes |
4 |
|
Paris Habitat OPH |
Local |
No |
4 |
|
Sadev 94 |
Local |
No | 5 |
At the top of the list in terms of the number of tower blocks completed or under construction, the 8 largest French developers are considered to be leaders in urban development. In charge of the entire production chain of residential tower blocks, from their construction to the sale of housing units, as well as the development of semi-public spaces around the project or even the road network, they appear to be key players in understanding the modalities of the re-emergence of tower blocks in France. This is why we addressed both the public and private stakeholders in charge of the manufacture of high-rise buildings through a series of about twenty semi-structured interviews with developers, members of the Grand Lyon and the Sociétés Publiques Locales.
With the return of high-rise buildings in France, the debate associating tower blocks and urban densification has resurfaced (Paquot, 2008). Less compact and dense than a Haussmannian building of lower height, a group of tower blocks leads to the development of outdoor spaces which reduce the density of the project to a smaller scale. However, the argument of densification through tower blocks appears in the interviews as a major key to understanding their justification.
"Today in the urban form, it seems interesting to us on the one hand to densify with towers, because also the fact of having a public transport node nearby means that it is in our interests to concentrate the maximum number of people in direct link with a fairly important hub and therefore rather than creating urban sprawl, everywhere around Lyon... There are economic reasons, urban reasons which mean that we are going to densify...1" (Guillaume Bruge, Director of Communications, SPL Part-Dieu)
Focused on the connectivity of spaces, public discourses prioritise firstly a functional and economic register in the justification of the tower blocks. In its preferred locations, the densification process resonates with the logic of TOD:
"The important thing is to know where (we densify), how we do it and in what proportions we do it, because we will not entertain doing it everywhere. In the Part-Dieu district it's possible, there are centralities, Gerland, Confluence, it's true that we're not going to do that in Montchat. For the moment, there's really this urban vision here, of land use planning and development of public spaces...2" (Bérengère Bouvier, branch manager, Bouygues Immobilier)
Densification is selective. It is established through the transformation of strategic districts, "centralities" that are supposedly attractive because of their new offer in terms of mobility, housing and public spaces. The tower blocks thus appear as means through which the city of Lyon maintains its metropolitan ambitions, while guaranteeing its lifestyle.
"It's the location and all the services around it, such as the ability to get to my job as quickly as possible, that there are schools nearby for my children, that there is nature nearby, the riverbanks, etc., which are decisive elements, perhaps more so than the services (...) Housing projects to be attractive, even if you are in the best place at the best price, etc., you have to bring other things. They have to be conceived in terms of their centrality, we have public transport, there are public facilities, that there are jobs..3" (Bérengère Bouvier, France) (Bérengère Bouvier, branch manager, Bouygues Immobilier)
In the interviews, the lexical field used by the promoters is in line with that of the SPLs. The issue of high-rise buildings reflects a growing convergence of the interests and objectives of the private and public sectors in terms of urban planning. The tower block takes part in the design of a new urbanity, which makes it possible to consider densification not only as an operation on urban materiality but also on social interactions. The verticalization of a space thus contributes to giving it a centre, a neuralgic centre, polarizing a system of transport flows, a centre for intensifying the social life of the neighbourhood, but also a centre visible in the landscape.
"The tower really functions as a marker of urban projects and I would even say of territorial strategy logics. The question of public transport services, the major projects in the urban area, the question of the view, and also the fact that in urban projects, in the ZACs, the land is less expensive (...) The idea was to densify, to bring a population back to the district, to make this metro line, which is not yet of much use, profitable... With the ZACs, we are on a lower land rate, that is the guiding principle (With the ZACs, we are working on a reduced land area, which is the guiding principle (...)4" (Valérie Munier, Housing referent for the Lyon-Villeurbanne area, Greater Lyon)
In districts that are often deprived, the signal dimension of the tower represents a lever for symbolic revaluation. It is used as an instrument by stakeholders inthe urban fabric and is linked in the discourse to the strategies of making the metro profitable and to the issues of land devaluation in the ZAC. Often built before any other building, the tower catalyses urban transformations and draws the eye to the metabolism of the metropolis. The symbolic dimension of the projects, exacerbated by the signatory at work, marks the acceleration of the transformation of the target spaces, not only in the physical scale of the mutations but also in the minds of the stakeholders, the future residents and the onlookers.
A socially selective verticalization?
With regard to the issue of high-rise buildings, the results of the survey show that the 'urban vision' of the developers coincides with that of the public actors. It is governed by three main types of argument. The first concerns urban densification, the second concerns the question of accessibility as an argument of attractiveness for the sale, including the quality of green transport, and finally the third concerns iconicity, i.e. the capacity of territorial marking of the tower. The question then arises of the social repercussions induced by TOD strategies. As vectors of 'urban intensity' (Fouchier, 2010), such strategies aspire, according to the strakeholders in the urban fabric, to urban compactness and the composition of a new urbanity based on social and functional diversity. If it is true that the projects respect the percentages of social housing built for each programme according to the SRU law, what type of population are the new towers aimed at? The reverticalisation process in French cities is based on selective spaces, but is it socially selective?
References
APPERT Manuel, 2016, Les formes de la métropole : du réseau à la canopée, de la mesure au paysage : Tours, skyline et canopée, Géographie. Université Lyon 2, 293 p.
BENTAYOU Gilles, PERRIN Emmanuel, RICHERAL Cyprien, 2015, Contrat d'axe et Transit-Oriented Development : quel renouvellement de l'action publique en matière de mobilité et d'aménagement ? (Point de vue d'acteurs). Flux, 3 (N° 101-102), p. 111-123.
DROZDZ Martine, 2014, Regeneration b(d)oom. Territoires et politique de la régénération urbaine par projet à Londres, PhD thesis in Geography, Université Lyon 2.
CALTHORPE P., 1993, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.
Fouchier, Vincent. "Chapter 7 - Spatial stakes of the Ile-de-France metropolis", Laurent Cailly ed, La France, une géographie urbaine. Armand Colin, 2010, pp. 129-148.
GILBERT Pierre, 2012, L'effet de légitimité résidentielle : un obstacle à l'interprétation des formes de cohabitation dans les cités hlm. Sociologie, 2012/1 (Vol. 3), p. 61-74.
HARVEY David, 1989, From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation of urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler B, 71(1), p. 3-17.
PAQUOT Thierry, 2008, La folie des hauteurs, François Bourin, 219 p.
PINSON Gilles, 2010, La gouvernance des villes françaises. P.le Sud, 1 (n° 32), p. 73-92.
POLLARD Julie, 2011, Les groupes d'intérêt vus du local. Real estate developers in the housing sector in France. Revue fran.aise de science politique, 4 (Vol. 61), p. 681-705.
VESCHAMBRE Vincent, 2011, La rénovation urbaine dans les grands ensembles: de la monumentality to banality? In: Ioana IOSA and Maria GRAVARI-BARBAS, Monumentalité(s) urbaine(s) aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Sens, formes et enjeux urbains, Paris, L'Harmattan, p. 193-206.
1 « Aujourd’hui dans la forme urbaine, il nous semble intéressant d’une part de densifier avec les tours, parce qu’aussi le fait d’avoir un nœud de transport en commun à proximité fait qu’on a intérêt à concentrer le maximum de monde en lien direct avec un hub assez important et du coup plutôt que de faire de l’étalement urbain, partout autour de Lyon...Il y a des raisons économiques, des raisons urbaines qui font que on va densifier voilà... » (Guillaume Bruge, directeur de la communication, SPL Part-Dieu).
2 « L’important ça dépend d’où (on densifie), comment on le fait et dans quelles proportions on le fait, parce qu’on ne va pas s’amuser à le faire partout. Là dans le quartier de la Part-Dieu ça s’y prête, il y a des centralités, Gerland, Confluence, c’est vrai qu’on ne va peut-être pas faire ça à )Montchat. Pour le coup ici il y a vraiment cette vision urbaine, d’aménagement du territoire d’aménagement des espaces publics… » (Bérengère Bouvier, directrice d’agence, Bouygues Immobilier.
3 « Ce sont quand même le lieu et tous les services autour comme la capacité d’aller au plus vite à mon travail, qu’il y ait des écoles pas loin pour mes enfants, qu’il y ait de la nature pas loin, les berges etc., qui sont des éléments déterminants, peut-être plus que les services (…) Des projets de logement pour qu’ils soient attractifs, on a beau être au meilleur endroit au meilleur prix etc., il faut amener d’autres choses. Il faut les concevoir de par leur centralité, on a les transports en commun, il y a des équipements publics, il y a de l’emploi… » (Bérengère Bouvier, directrice d’agence, Bouygues Immobilier).
4 « La tour fonctionne vraiment comme un marqueur de projet urbain et je dirais même de logiques de stratégie territoriale. La question de la desserte en TC, les grands projets de l’agglomération, la question de la vue, et puis aussi le fait que sur les projets urbains, dans les ZAC, le foncier soit moins cher (…) L’idée c’était de densifier, de ramener une population dans le quartier, pour rentabiliser un peu cette ligne de métro qui ne sert pas encore à grand-chose…Avec les ZAC on est sur du foncier minoré c’est le principe directeur (...) » (Valérie Munier, Référente habitat sur le territoire de Lyon-Villeurbanne, Grand Lyon).
The return of residential towers in France
A socially selective verticalization
London: the verticalization of a horizontal metropolis
A geography of contemporary residential towers in London
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
Recent Transformations on San Paulo Urban Structural Axis
Contribution by Geoffrey Mollé
PhD researcher in Geography, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory, Lumière University, Lyon.
#Housing, mobility, social justice, accessibility, density, strategic planning, urbanism
Download original version in French at the end of the text
"In France, the tower represents a stigmatising vocabulary (...)" and "is really opposed to the dream of the individual house and the garden that is so prevalent in France1."(Etienne Guitard, Director of Major Urban Projects and Innovation Coordinator, Kaufman & Broad).
Introduction
When they appeared in the urban landscape in the mid-20th century, high-rise buildings were reserved for social housing, according to the credo “housing for all”. They embodied the success of the modern paradigm, which nevertheless ran out of steam in the 1970s. From the Guichard circular (1973) to the creation of the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (2003), mechanisms were gradually put in place to launch a massive demolition programme, which caused what has been referred to as a “de-verticalization” phase [Veschambre, 2011]. Today, demolitions are continuing in the peripheral districts of French metropolises, as new towers emerge in their pericentral spaces (Mollé et al., 2020). Such a dialectic between two types of verticalization with opposite meanings raises questions, all the more so as the second is much more discreet in terms of built units.
While some works have demonstrated the existence of circulation processes of “vertical” architectural models in globalisation (Douay, 2016), several others carried out internationally (from Vancouver to Melbourne via Europe) insist on the emergence of the 'service residence' as an innovative form of housing building. Offering personalised services to the inhabitant, it is the figurehead of “global lifestyles” [Fincher, 2007; Graham, 2015]. More than just a building, the tower is now a package of services, public spaces and facilities, and ancillary buildings, particularly social ones, which form the contours of a vertical architectural complex whose social selectivity we question in three points.
A basket of “new” but excluding services?
The PRS (Private Rented Sector) model is only slowly emerging in France, whereas it has become considerably established in Anglo-Saxon countries:
"The PRS is a real estate complex where there will be someone to manage it, already a concierge, but afterwards it can go much further. Everyone is going to do it, it's a bit like the condo in the United States, living together, services, you don't pay for your electricity, your water, your sheets, it's short term (...) we even think that tomorrow everyone's housing will be leased, live where I want and not where I can, they're pushing towards smaller things in places that are more appropriate2."(Martin Desveaux, Innovation Manager, Linkcity UK).
In Lyon, the two projects promoted by Bouygues Immobilier embody a range of services that reflect an augmented conception of housing. Including a bicycle garage, rooftop beehives, shared spaces and spaces that can be reserved on request, the "Regards sur la Ville" project differs from "classic" housing projects in that it has resource persons, such as a special gardener who is in charge of its green spaces but who also runs workshops for young people. "Sky Avenue" is a different concept, closer to the condominium.
"Here we have chosen a rather singular programme since it is a business tourism residence on the first two nine floors, with an entrance on the street, a lobby a bit like a hotel in fact, as if we were in New York in the end, a 24/7 concierge service, and services provided to this business tourism residence, such as co-working, a lounge bar, fitness, spa and other types of services3.” (Bérengère Bouvier, Branch Manager, Bouygues Immobilier).
Each project has its own guideline. The potential clientele for "Regards sur la Ville" are young working people, potentially with young children, who work in the city but have chosen a fairly quiet neighbourhood with sufficient shops and good public transport links. Hence the development of a range of complementary services based on conviviality and nature. The guiding principle of the Sky Avenue project is based on itinerancy and professional activity. It boasts the proximity of the Part-Dieu central station and the airport, as well as the offer of a luxury hotel service. For the Ycone tower in Confluence, the guideline is different again.
"The luxury, we are on beautiful services, large bay windows, in the heart of the city. We have everything next door, Confluence is the district where there is everything now, you have the tram, the shopping centre, the cinema, you have everything4." (Camille Frérot, Marketing Manager, Vinci Immobilier).
More than the services or the "consumer experience" which are very successful in the United Kingdom, the French case shows, according to Martin Desveaux, specialist innovation at Linkcity UK, a more assertive concern for the idea of a neighbourhood to be lived in, where the question of mobility and accessibility to urban amenities is prominent, all in a calm and secure environment.
"People are asking for this (...) It is one of their first wishes, they really want to be sure of the safety and calm of their future living environment, which is something we guarantee perfectly. This is one of the first things that ensures the good functioning of the services we offer5." (Caroline Jaillet, Marketing Manager, Bouygues Immobilier).
Demanded by the residents themselves, the securing of new housing spaces places contemporary residential towers in a debate on the residentialisation of housing in the city. The contextualisation, accessibility and integration of the new generation of high-rise buildings is part of an inclusion-exclusion dynamic in relation to the ordinary road network. The naturalisation of privatised city blocks, delimited by a fence around the tower, expands the domestic sphere of its inhabitants into its private domain. Without being cut off from the world, they adapt to the intra-urban boundary drawn by the residence by easily reaching the transport infrastructures offered by the city.
Specific social targets
The work carried out on the process of "condoisation" or "condoism" [Lehrer et al., 2010; Rosen, 2015] today associates the residential tower with the emergence of a hyper-mobile "Global Elite" playing with globalisation [Graham, 2016]. The question arises as to the relationship between local public actors and this wealthy clientele who seem to be attracted by the lifestyles suggested by the new generation of vertical housing.
"They [the public] already imagine that it is financially inaccessible and therefore that it will be elitist, that is what they imagine. Yes, but the tower that is going to live there is that for the ultra-rich, they start with extremely strong preconceptions, it is a divisive object that they refute from the outset6." (Coralie Costet, Project Manager, Adéquation).
The position of public actors is ambiguous with regard to this architectural object with iconic qualities, supported by the State in certain cases, but nevertheless perceived as divisive. On the other hand, the promoters tend to be pragmatic and assume the targeting of specific social categories.
"Buying a flat in a tower block or high-rise building in the city centre is expensive, few people are able to afford a high-rise building in the city centre today7." (François Brogniard, Director of Bouygues Bâtiment Sud-Est).
The mention of an international elite that distinguishes itself by its place of living and its national roots is recurrent among the marketing managers.
"It is a programme that welcomes many people from outside. For example, at the launch of the marketing, we had people who work in Dubai, they are from Lyon, but they work in Dubai, they went back and forth, they signed and that's it, so as not to miss the opportunity. A 3-bedroom apartment, well upstairs, so we're talking about €560,000, 70-72m²8." (Camille Frérot, Marketing Manager, Vinci Immobilier).
Although the globalised elite seems to be attracted by these contemporary living spaces, they are not the core target of developers. The latter prefer to opt for resident clients, rather young and well-to-do, which resonates with the social categories highlighted in the case of Melbourne, the "empty-nesters", literally the "fallen from the nest" [Fincher, 2007].
"From T3/T4, so from the 4th to where you mainly have studios, they are families, rather young executives, young workers, which gives us a little more confidence, it's a little bit this type of profile that we aspire to (...) liberal professions...people who earn quite a good living9..." (Caroline Jaillet, marketing manager, Bouygues Immobilier).
The prioritisation of an urban, young and dynamic social target is visible in the communication documents of the developers, where the silhouettes, arranged near the building, are homogeneous, ideal. These images, which reflect the strategies of their authors, raise the question of the performativity of the discourse of real estate promotion, which uses social mimicry to induce in the target public a feeling of attraction by the place of life (figure 1).
The ideal of an entirely resident population in contemporary high-rise buildings must nevertheless be put into perspective by the fact that a large proportion of the housing is intended primarily for investment.
"The share of investors in Ycone is 58% and in Ynfluence Square 46% without Caisse des Dépôts. (...) Those that have been sold are large objects, with views, exteriors, associated services, dressing rooms, greenhouses... (...) below 600,000 everything has been sold, so there is a psychological cap... 170 m2 people buy, but 200, 300 in Confluence it's a bit harder (...). We have football players, big bosses from Lyon, who keep for themselves or who rent etc. Then we compared it with the Lyon scale and there on the T5 we find Sky Avenue with the flats which are in the cloud, 135 m2 976 000 €. Investors buy mostly small flats10..." (Davenas Perrine, Sales Advisor, Vinci Immobilier).
The logic of financialisation plays a greater role for small dwellings, the majority of which are bought by a public investor or a lessor. The top flats still pose a problem for the developers because they are outside the Lyon market, hence the solicitation of experts in urban programming. Their particularly high prices underline a mismatch between the globalised model of the high-rise flat (condominium) and the "French" style.
Rising prices and the new social order
Arousing fantasies of social domination (Graham, 2016), the price of the flats that crown Lyon's urban skyline makes one dizzy.
"We looked at these two lots, 151 and 152, which we sold for €975,000, for 134 and 137 m2, to which you add a parking lot of between €26 and €28,000, which is still a beautiful object worth more than a million euros to buy, so you have to pay for it, pay for the view11." (Coralie Costet, Project Manager, Adéquation).
However, these exceptional products are not representative of the variety of housing types offered by high-rise buildings. Thanks to tax exemption schemes or the practice of zero interest loans encouraging purchase and home ownership, developers and institutional actors today practice a policy of so-called "affordable" housing, which is far from the idea of inclusive social housing or housing accessible to all. In some cases, social or intermediate housing is even excluded from high-rise buildings. We have tried to report on this, but the lack of data is problematic. This is partly due to the lack of accessibility of the notary database, but also due to the lack of clear information on the percentage of social housing in high-rise projects, whether they are a complex of buildings or a single tower (Table 1).
|
|
Percentage of social housing Tower only |
Percentage of social housing Building complex |
|
Amount |
26 |
71 |
|
No answer |
10 |
42 |
|
Minimum |
0 % (8 towers) |
0 % (6 building complexes) |
|
Maximum |
100 % |
100 % (4 building complexes) |
|
Median |
0 % |
23 % |
|
Average |
23 % |
33 % |
Proportionally, there are far fewer building complexes than single towers without social housing, which leads to the hypothesis of a dilution of the percentage of social housing at the scale of the architectural complex.
"It's more for Autour d'un Jardin where the percentage is 30% social housing, in accordance with the city's demands, for Regards Sur la Ville it's a bit different because we have quite a few investors, notably Parisian. You have to understand that this is a very dynamic and interesting district for investors, with, for example, the proximity of the Jean Macé train station and the city centre, the metro, etc., and then its architecture is also a little more unusual12." (Caroline Jaillet, marketing manager, Bouygues Immobilier).
The combination of the iconicity of the building and its accessibility seems to legitimise the absence of social housing in the tower, which in some cases reserves it for the upper social categories. Most of the time, the social mix within the towers appeared to be a real brake in terms of programming.
"The project had to be constructible and therefore the easiest to get off the ground, but mixing buyers adds complications because you have to talk to both private buyers and landlords for the same building because you have different types of flats. In the case of a split sale, separate from the different buildings, we can sell the social housing to the landlord en bloc, organise ourselves in a different way with the co-owners for the private buyers, but also manage the commercial or office base more easily with the companies. "(Renaud Blondeau-Patissier, Director of Innovation and Research, Woodeum).
Several solutions to social mixing within the same building have emerged so far, from the question of "poor doors" (Graham, 2016), differentiated accesses according to the social category of the inhabitants so that they do not mix, to projects for common spaces such as the entrance hall for the Home tower in Paris. In Lyon, the BelvY residence is characterised by a "diffuse" assembly:
"On the Icade project there is an intermediary with the Caisse des Dépôts. The first five floors are owned by Caisse des Dépôts. But certainly, in terms of social life, I don't even know how they respect the RT with the light...and then in 15 years the rates will change, whereas the territories above benefit from optimal sunlight, and sometimes cost more...2,000,000...there really is a vertical social divide, not even on a territorial scale. There really is a vertical divide between households that are not very valued and not very valuable13." (Emmanuelle Boucheron, Habitat-Transversal Project Manager, Greater Lyon).
For this building, of which only the top half emerges significantly, a "vertical divide" divides the tower socially between the two types of housing, affordable and free. The highest strata, which probably give access to a better comfort due to the view and/or the sunshine, are the most expensive, according to an increasing gradient as one goes up the tower. If this type of social stratification mechanism is initiated by the state investing in the programme and validated by the local authorities, it is even replicated in the case of the neighbouring tower, Ycone.
While only 5 out of 97 projects over the period 2015-2020 are 100% dedicated to social housing, the new wave of residential verticalization has a socially exclusive record. Is this due to its pioneering and innovative character? The existence of socially inclusive schemes is also a form of hope: the tower has not said its last word.
References
DOUAY Nicolas, 2015, Le Vancouverism : hybridation et circulation d’un modèle urbain. Metropolitiques, URL : https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Le-Vancouverism-hybridation-et.html.
FINCHER Ruth, 2007, Is High-rise Housing Innovative? Developers’ Contradictory Narratives of High- Rise Housing in Melbourne. Urban Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, p. 631–649.
GRAHAM Stephen, 2015, Luxified Skies. City 19, (5), p. 618–645.
GRAHAM Stephen, 2016, Vertical: the city from above and below, Londres et New-York, Verso, 276 p.
LEHRER Ute, KEIL Roger, KIPFER Stephan, 2010, Reurbanisation in Toronto : Condominium boom and social housing revitalization. DisP- The planning Review, 181, p. 81-90.
Mollé et al., 2020
ROSEN Gillad, WALKS Allan, 2014, Castels in Toronto’s sky : condo-ism as urban transformation. Journal of Urban Affairs.
VESCHAMBRE Vincent, 2011, La rénovation urbaine dans les grands ensembles : de la monumentalité à la banalité ?. In : Ioana IOSA et Maria GRAVARI-BARBAS, Monumentalité(s) urbaine(s) aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Sens, formes et enjeux urbains, Paris, L’Harmattan, p. 193-206.
1 « En France la tour représente quand même un vocabulaire stigmatisant (...) » et « s’oppose vraiment au rêve de la maison individuelle et du jardin si prégnant chez nous. » (Etienne Guitard, Directeur grands projets urbains et référent innovation Kaufman & Broad).
2 « En PRS c’est énorme ce qui se passe (...), le PRS c’est un ensemble immobilier où il y aura quelqu’un pour le manager, déjà un concierge mais après ça peut aller beaucoup beaucoup plus loin. Tout le monde va en faire, c’est un peu le condo aux États-Unis, vivre ensemble, les services, tu payes pas ton électricité, ton eau, tes draps, c’est short term (...) on pense même que le logement demain tout le monde sera en leasing, live where I want et pas where I can, ils poussent vers des plus petits trucs dans des endroits disons plus appropriés. » (Martin Desveaux, Référent innovation, Linkcity UK).
3 « Là on a fait le choix d’une programmation assez singulière puisqu’il s’agit d’une résidence tourisme affaire sur les deux neufs premiers étages donc avec une entrée sur la rue, un lobby un peu comme dans un hôtel en fait, comme si on se retrouvait à New York finalement, une conciergerie 24/24, 7/7, des services apportés à cette résidence de tourisme affaire que ce soit du co-working, un bar lounge expo, fitness, spa et d’autres types de services… » (Bérengère Bouvier, Directrice d’agence, Bouygues Immobilier).
4 « Le luxe, on est sur des belles prestations, des grandes baies vitrées, en plein centre de Lyon. On a tout à côté, Confluence c’est le quartier où il y a tout maintenant, vous avez le tram le centre commercial, le cinéma, vous avez tout. » (Camille Frérot, Chargé de commercialisation, Vinci Immobilier).
5 « Les gens le demandent (…) C’est d’ailleurs un de leurs premiers souhaits, ils veulent vraiment s’assurer de la sécurité et du calme de leur futur environnement de vie, chose que nous garantissons de ce fait parfaitement. C’est une des premières choses qui assure le bon fonctionnement des services que l’on propose. » (Caroline Jaillet, Chargée de commercialisation, Bouygues Immobilier).
6 « Déjà ils [le public] s’imaginent que c’est inaccessible financièrement et donc que ce sera élitiste, voilà ce qu’ils imaginent. Oui mais la tour qui c’est qui va y habiter c’est que pour des ultras riches, ils partent d’a priori extrêmement forts, c’est un objet clivant qu’ils réfutent d’emblée. » (Coralie Costet, Chef de projet, Adéquation).
7 « Acheter un appartement dans une tour ou IGH en centre-ville ça coûte cher, peu de gens sont aujourd’hui capables de se payer une tour d’habitat en centre-ville. » (François Brogniard, Directeur Bouygues Bâtiment Sud-Est).
8 « C’est un programme qui accueille beaucoup de gens de l’extérieur. Au lancement de la commercialisation par exemple on a eu des gens qui travaillent à Dubai, voilà ils sont lyonnais mais travaillent à Dubai, ils ont fait l’aller-retour, ils ont signé et voilà, pour pas rater l’opportunité. Un T3, bien en haut en plus donc on est vers 560 000 €, 70-72m². » (Camille Frérot, Chargé de commercialisation, Vinci Immobilier).
9 « À partir des T3/T4, donc à partir du 4e jusqu’où vous avez principalement des studios, ce sont des familles, plutôt des jeunes cadres, jeunes actifs, ce qui nous donne un peu plus confiance, c’est un peu ce type de profil auquel on aspire (…) des professions libérales…des gens qui gagnent plutôt bien leur vie… » (Caroline Jaillet, chargée de commercialisation, Bouygues Immobilier).
10 « La part d’investisseurs sur Ycone est de 58 % et sur Ynfluence Square de 46 % sans la Caisse des Dépôts. (…) Ceux qui se sont vendus sont des grands objets, avec des vues, des extérieurs, des services associés, des loges, des serres… (…) en dessous de 600 000 tout s’est vendu, donc il y a un cap psychologique…170 m2 ça passe les gens achètent, mais 200, 300 dans Confluence c’est un peu plus dur (…). On a du joueur de foot, des grands patrons lyonnais, qui gardent pour eux ou qui louent etc. Ensuite on a comparé avec l’échelle lyonnaise et là sur les T5 on retrouve Sky Avenue avec les appartements qui sont dans le nuage, 135 m2 976 000 €. Les investisseurs eux, achètent majoritairement des petits logements… » (Davenas Perrine, Conseillère commerciale, Vinci Immobilier).
11 « Nous on avait regardé ces deux lots, 151 et 152, qu’on a vendu à 975 000 € quand même la bête, pour 134 et 137m2 auquel vous rajoutez un stationnement entre 26 et 28 000 €, ça fait quand même un bel objet à plus d’un million d’euros à acheter, donc il faut quand même se le payer, se payer la vue quoi. » (Coralie Costet, Chef de projet, Adéquation).
12 « C’est plus pour Autour d’un Jardin où le pourcentage est de 30 % de logement social, conformément aux demandes de la ville, pour Regards Sur la Ville c’est un peu différent parce qu’on a pas mal d’investisseurs, notamment parisiens. Il faut comprendre qu’il s’agit ici d’un quartier très dynamique et intéressant pour les investisseurs avec par exemple, la proximité de la gare de Jean Macé et du centre-ville, le métro etc., et puis son architecture est quand même aussi un peu plus singulière. » (Caroline Jaillet, chargée de commercialisation, Bouygues Immobilier).
13 « Le projet devait être constructible et donc être le plus simple à faire démarrer, mêler les acheteurs rajoute des complications puisqu’il faut s’entretenir à la fois avec les acheteurs privés, les bailleurs pour un même bâtiment puisqu’on a des types d’appartements différents. Dans le cas d’une vente à la découpe, séparée par rapport aux différents édifices, on peut vendre en bloc les logements sociaux au bailleur, s’organiser d’une autre façon avec la copro pour les acheteurs privés mais aussi gérer plus facilement le socle commercial ou de bureaux avec les entreprises. » (Renaud Blondeau-Patissier, directeur innovation et recherche, Woodeum).
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Contribution by Énora Achéritogaray
Graduate in urban and human Geography
Because of the Covid-19 crisis, the inhabitants of the Presqu’Île 2 residential high-rise in Lyon are no longer taking elevators as they used to. Regulated flows, safety distances and curfews have been the keywords of an urban crisis that has seen its breathing spaces disappear. Closed ones such as elevators in high-rise buildings have maybe become one of the only ordinary spaces capable of bringing back urban life to their inhabitants: moving around, meeting residents, going to the city, escaping from the verticality or from the city itself.
The Presqu’Île 2 is taking part of the skyline of Lyon since the 1970s. Located in the north-east of the city, the Presqu'Île 2 is of interest for the study of the experience of lifts. Although it was designed in connection with the development of the Part-Dieu district in the 1970s, the Presqu’Île 2 stands out from other housing complexes defined as residential high-rise buildings in the Lyon metropolitan area because of its density, its height and its innovative architecture promoted as a new centrality in the city.
First, the number of lifts, the density of the building and the services that it offers distinguish it from the panoramic tower of La Duchère (9th district), the Hauts de Saint-Just residence (5th district) and the towers of the Gratte-Ciel district in Villeurbanne. Necessities for living in the Presqu’Île 2, seven elevators transport the residents of three hundred flats. According to Jacques-Blanc Portard, the co-architect of the Presqu'Île 2, the morphology and originality of this high-rise building are sold as new ways of living in the city. More than the number of lifts, the morphology of this residential high-rise building divided into two distinct blocks (figure 2), increases the possibilities of questioning the practical and perceptive relationship to the vertical. In fact, as shown in figure 1, the four lifts of the block 304 are divided into pairs (blocks 304 A and 304 B), unlike the three lifts in block 302, which follow one another in a row. These initial architectural and spatial configurations aim to promote a "city within the city”, the expression of which I assume is actively involved in the issues of the perceived and lived experience of the lift. More, the integration of offices, a swimming pool on the roof of the block 304, and a tennis court on the first floor leads to the first high-rise building within the city with so many services (Gagès, 1970; Autran, 2008). Le Corbusier's legacy can be perceived inside the tower, where the first three floors are occupied by professional offices, from the medical to the financial sector, between doctors and accountants. Today, an ophthalmology centre occupies the ground floor. In 1970, René Gagès, the architect and director of the project, emphasised the originality of such a building, which he perceived as "an implementation of multiple functions, responding to the needs of the district according to what a meticulous market study has shown1". The functions are thus "integrated" rather than "superimposed" (Autran, 2008), like the petrol station that has become a bakery in front of the tower and the sports hall that is part of the high-rise building. A florist, a pharmacy and a bank have since been added. If, according to Jacques-Blanc Portard, these elements were part of the desire to rival the living conditions of the second district in Lyon, they also raise issues for the study of the experience of the vertical journey: the lift gives access to some major and privileged services and the meeting point between the inhabitants of Presqu'Île 2 and the inhabitants of Lyon who are customers of the same services offered, and therefore strangers to the high-rise living
Thus, between the street and the high-rise flats of the Presqu'Île 2, the lift makes vertical movements possible through 17 floors. However, it offers an environment that is singularly different from the other publics transports that the inhabitants of the (big) city have the experience of. Closed, with no exit, no window, restricted by the contours of a “black box" that gives nothing to see, the lift does not seem to allow the perception of vertical urban spaces or to encourage interactions between passers-by.
In 2019, the residents of this high-rise building drew me their daily journeys on paper, representations and feelings that bring together the subjective emotionality evoked by the experience of the elevator trip from the high-rise building to the city, and the ephemeral sensitive experiences of it, which are shaping their intimate relation to verticality. From the vehicle to the sensitive box, my research sits at the intersection of three main topics in urban geography: daily mobility, sociability and atmosphere in urban spaces because of their relevance to report the complexity of the residents’ daily experiences of the elevator trip.
The experience of the elevator in high-rise building and vertical cities has not become such a subject of interest in urban geography. While the history of the lift begins before Elisha Otis' demonstration of the device on the occasion of the presentation of the parachute lift at the Crystal Palace in New York (1854), Andreas Bernard (2014) shows by tracing the historiography of lift technology, that it becomes the fundamental narrative of an engineering science perceived as innovative. Defined at the Paris World Fair in March 1857 by Léon Edoux as "an apparatus which serves to mechanically lift loads or people", it is the search for improvement of its mechanism in terms of safety, materials, speed and service that is a subject under discussion in the past, present and future scientific debates.
Initially the 'streets' of 'living machines' in the 1930s (Le Corbusier, 1925), then the figures of what makes high-rise living impossible with the degradation of common areas in the Towers of the Grands Ensembles in France (Laé, 1996), lifts are becoming objects whose technical performance and aesthetic qualities are questioning by Stephen Graham and Thierry Paquot with a critical sociological approach of the production of the vertical city. Within urban and vertical geography, Stephen Graham has demonstrated the interest of the elevator as an object of investigation by defining it as “a central component of cultural modernity” (Graham, 2016, p.133). From this perspective, Stephen Graham analysed the way in which the elevator became the symbol of the “supremes lifestyles” (Graham, 2016, p.10) because it permits the access for a metropolitan elite to the view. More, the lift would be scripted for a quest for the extraordinary that relate to urban imaginaries spread by cinematic art and literature. Like J.C Ballard's novel IGH (1974) and its recent film adaptation High-Rise (B.Weatley, 2015), lifts feed urban dystopias. If for Christophe Olivier (2017) science fiction is 'a partner of choice' for the socio-anthropological and geographical analysis of the vertical city, I propose to move beyond by questioning daily and ordinary experience of the elevator in a high-rise building in Lyon in France.
If the elevator is subject to such imaginaries as an object of social segregation, I hypothesis that its daily and ordinary experiences are drawing new kind of urban experiences in the vertical city leading to modern issues in terms of mobility, sociability and appropriation of the city. Defined as an "Ambiguous zone", "intermediate space", "transitional space" or "semi-collective" or "semi-public" space, the profusion of terms and concepts to qualify it already posed a problem (albeit in another residential context) for the understanding of the habitat of Parisian apartment blocks (Moley, 2003, p.147). The definition of a time whose displacement functions seemed to be overtaken by others, poorly defined, was also posed. Some transports such as the metro have been studied using these concepts in urban geography. However, although the geography of transport questions the different modes of transport that enable urban mutations with regard to urban traffic issues, it does not make the lift a subject of daily movements in the city. Antoine Picon (1994) underlines the limits of reducing transport to its first definitions. According to the author, such a focus does not situate the problematic. Rather, he suggests an approach at the crossroads of technical, urban and architectural research, which he sees as the pillar of spatial production and understanding of the organisation of territories (Grillet-Aubert et al., 2001). However, starting from the functioning of transport allows the human and social sciences to study the car (Dupuy, 1995), the train (De Certeau, 1990) or the metro (Augé, 1996) as mediators of the urban experience shaping the sensitive experience of the (big) city. They are the transport of daily urban mobility. What about vertical movements made possible by the lift?
Thus, within vertical cities, elevators have become not only emblems of high-rise buildings but also ordinary and daily components of high-rise living, since they are the world's mostly used transport mode (Paquot, 2017). Drawing on the new geography of architecture of Jacobs (2015) and Harris (2016), I explore the way in which the experiences of elevator rides are shaping material and immaterial senses of high-rise living. In contrast to the critical Marxist perspectives of Stephen Graham, I adopt the approach of Jacobs (2006) and Harris (2015) which suggests the tower block as a relational process. This approach is quite stimulating because it defines verticality as the result of the co-construction of the relationship between the inhabitants and the tower block, in the material, immaterial and intimate dimensions. There is therefore no stable definition of what the experience of the lift would be in high-rise buildings, but a research posits the interest of which would be to question the residents’ relation to the lift through the prism of daily relations and practices, both material and immaterial, linked by the verticality.
The aim of this contribution is twofold: it seeks to portray residents’ stories of elevator experiences within their everyday life; it identifies and analyses the way in which specific floors act as stages of lift experiences and shape different levels of high-rise living. I choose to present empirical investigations to illustrate the impact of daily and ordinary experiences of the elevator trip.
We assume that the daily routine reinvents ways of perceiving and representing elevator trips and their place in the tower block, of being and taking lifts through atmospheres that suggest an intimate relationship with verticality: not all lift experiences are "remarkable" (Rousi, 2015) and the repetition of daily journeys induces sensations, emotions and constructs memories that shape the specificities of high-rise living.
I propose to identify three relevant stages of a fictional lift journey to structure the presentation and introduce the most operative concepts and different levels of lift trip experiences. Focusing on empirical investigation: mental maps and interviews, I chose to follow one resident by stage considering their specificities and stories. These three cases studies illustrate some results of my research: the way elevator experiences are significant depending on the living floor.
This study case reveals that experiences of high-rise living formed by the daily routine of ephemeral events during vertical lift journeys would no doubt be 'inexhaustible'. As George Perec suggests, "the attempt to exhaust" when it comes to study the everyday experiences is not my purpose.
Sarah lives on the 4th floor. She describes how she experiences verticality through her right to the proximity to the outside, services and others in this high-rise building. She used to visit the caretaker on the first floor by taking the only modern staircase of the building (a). Inside or outside (b), she never takes the stairs to visit the friends that she made when she was living higher. Her mental map (d) shows that from the ground floor to the 4th floor, her elevator ride is socially ritualized. Sarah places herself in the corner or against the glass when she can. She looks at others because she likes to make jokes and to observe their reactions. The elevator is at the same time open to the otherness of the tower and the city and the place to maximize or to avoid the networks of sociability. The elevator seems to be an element of a specific “sense of home” for Sarah which could be jeopardized by outage: taking the stairs because of an elevator breakdown is not only a way of escaping a dark trap (c). It is also the end of social interactions that define her position in the tower and shape her intimate perception of common spaces. At the same time, her ability to move easily outside the building when lifts break down again or when they are full, characterizes the first level of accessibility in this building.
Overcoming vertical inaccessibility
In his study of the relationships between places and flows within La condition urbaine (2005), Olivier Mongin calls upon the figure of Julien Gracq to emphasize that, "the poetic experience of the city, inseparable from a physical and mental experience, goes hand in hand with that of freedom and emancipation" (p.125). In relation to the scale of the tower, the feeling of freedom seems to go hand in hand with the possibility of taking the lift, that is to say of moving around without physical effort. This feeling is particularly emphasized by the inhabitants who never thought they could live high up. From the 4th floor, this feeling of freedom is given by the possibility to take the stairs whenever there is an ordinary breakdown. The lift makes it possible to thwart verticality as much as it undermines it: everyday, it is a question of fairly ensuring "the routine processes of urban life" (Winner, 1993) for the inhabitants of Presqu’Île 2. While accessibility only makes sense because it expresses the need to travel (Bavoux et al., 2005), looking at daily mobilities from housing leads to an understanding of the issues involved in differentiating experiences according to the criteria of accessibility and dependency.
Belonging to the high-rise building by negotiating its identity in front of and in the lift
From the ground floor to the 4th one, some types of sociability come together on the landing, in front of, in and out of the lift. They have specific characteristics according to the floor. For the inhabitants of the first floors, it is a question of managing their identity in the (big) city: being a neighbor, a known person or a foreigner whose status varies between resident of Presqu'Île 2, a passerby or a patient of the doctors working on the first floors.
The question of corporeality and spatiality makes it possible to show that explicit or implicit interactions between bodies suggest relationships to others in the building. There are tactics depending on the affluence, gender, people’s feelings and familiarity as well as strategies that suggest ways of being with others based on space and feelings of familiarity, inter-knowledge and friendship: occupying the corner of the lift, being turned to the side or with one’s back to the mirror, for instance. We can therefore see that if the movements are carefully thought out, proximity is never unrelated to intimacy. If the look is a mediator of corporality and interaction in the lift, it is one of the main tools for the manifestation of micro-geographies (Goffman, 1973) that determine the way in which the inhabitants of the first floors experience and shape their relation to the building and to verticality. Inhabitants find nooks and crannies through which they appropriate space and time, adjust the physical proximity and avoid encounters with inhabitants in order to preserve an intimate relationship with the journey, a bubble that is even negotiated inside the lift. Figures such as families, children and women have very specific experiences that determine some of the specificities of the "vertical social skills" developed through the experience of vertical travel in lifts.
Second stage on the 9th floor
Camille lives on the 9th floor. She describes the way in which she experiences the verticality through her daily travels. Every ordinary activity that she does during the week requires strategies that have become automatics to not take the stairs (c). Awareness of lack of time, irritation and rejection of waiting times are some of the issues discussed with the residents in front of the lift during peak times. As a babysitter in the tower, she used to play a game with children: she races from the 11th floor to the ground floor taking different lifts or stairs. In the lift cage, Camille hasn’t any power to save time other than pressing buttons. Because of the speed, she does not realise how many floors the lift is providing access to. When in the lift, she does not see no the difference between traveling from the 9th floor or traveling from any another floor. Her mental map (d) shows that she has preferences: some nooks and crannies that she occupies to preserve her integrity. She describes the way in which she develops strategies as a woman to face usual gender pressures in the cab. For her, the red line represents a utopian comfortable distance from other users. As in the underground or in the bus, the rules of proximity are therefore difficult to negotiate between men and women. Sometimes, she takes refuge in front of the letterbox (a) to avoid taking nine floors with her male neighbor. According to Camille, taking the lift is having the possibility to have access to this view (b) and it’s mainly a prerequisite that determines in some way her daily routines, rhythms and humors.
Connecting to the rhythms of residents’ urban journeys
From the 9th floor, the required level of fluidity and connectivity to others urban transportation modes is inseparable from the residents’ experience of the lift, especially for whose working. Just like for public transport, elevator times are evaluated and calculated to be part of the daily urban itinerary. As Hartmut Rosa (2010) analyzed, the acceleration of lifestyle affects people’s modern emotions, feelings and behaviour. Feelings of lack of time, nervousness and rejection of waiting times because of the lift are day to day shaping experiences of verticality. The need to control the travel time can also be seen with requests that are out of the ordinary, such as the need for time indicators at the landing doors in preference to numeric boards inside the cab. The extreme proximity of the tower to the underground, the bus station and the car parking is playing a role in the residents’ itinerary estimation. Anticipating, calculating and rationalizing one's journey time within the residential tower contributes to mastering the daily experience of the journey as much as to the construction of an initial sensitive relationship to the machines and the tower. In Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1989) terms the key issue is that “daily mobility” refers to the “social rhythms of everyday life”. The inhabitants include and adjust their travel time budget and their trajectories within the tower until knowing exactly the mechanism of each lift. Not necessarily because of the collective alienation of speed but to control the ability to manage scales and places.
Managing vulnerability and the lift atmosphere
The experience of daily travels depends on all the “things” (Perec, 1995) of everyday life. The lift is at the crossroads between the city and the flat, between the flat and others, as well as a space crossed by several atmospheres generated by both sensitive configurations and everyday events. The references to artificial lighting are discussed, focusing on social practices and feelings that such elements of design produce. If the atmosphere is understood as a central component of the experience, it plays a part in vertical social interactions and sense of home.
From the 9th floor, the vulnerability caused by potential machine breakdowns increases the attention to the aesthetic elements that can be subject of emotions related to memories and imaginaries. The issue of safety is fundamental to the perception and experience of the journey. All the doors of the entrance halls are only accessible with a code. It is impossible to use the lifts after 8.30 p.m. and before 7 a.m. without using a key card. Recently, surveillance cameras have been installed to make the lift lobbies, letterboxes and landings more secure. However, surveillance cameras in the cabin are considered an invasion of privacy, while their absence contributes to the feeling of insecurity. Moreover, if the atmosphere is also the result of the proximity with others, the discomfort associated with the lift cabin design adding to the gender pressure related to Camille’s experience determine unequal and heterogenous ordinary relations to vertically.
Third stage on the 16th floor
Jan and Julie live on the 16th floor. They work as engineers at Incity tower in Lyon. In Presqu’Île 2, they observed that the elevator is stationed on the 17th floor when it is not in use. The inhabitants of the highest floors would have priority to go down because the lift only picks up on its way down. By exploring this idea of priority as a differentiating mobile experience, they illustrate the tension inherent to their inability to fully master the technical object that shapes their experience. According to them, lift trips differ between their working place and the tower where their live, not only because of the building flow, design elements, sensorial stimuli such as music or artificial smells, but also because of the relation that ordinary travels in their high-rise building create. Whereas they perceive the lift as a daily indispensable service that permits to live on top of the building, to access urban experiences such as the view (a,c) or the pool (b), they highlight that the relationship to lifts can be an appropriation of space, that comes under privacy as much as completely insignificant portion of movement. Their mental map (d) does not represent when they are alone in the lift given the difficulty of assuming certain gestures that cannot happen in other spaces. Finally, the challenge of questioning is to understand to what extent residents are defining the elevator as a public, private or personal space depending on non-remarkable experiences, ordinary practices, feelings, and rhythms.
Divorcing from the verticality
Even from the 16th floor, the lift ride is perceived as the first segment of daily urban itineraries on a (large) city scale, so that the ordinary and everyday experiences of the lift ride is a moment in an urban public transport that reinvents the perception of height, the tower block and the relationship to high-rise living. People do not move from one floor to the next, but from one floor to the city. From her working place in the Incity tower block to her flat, Julie’s elevator ride is part of a total itinerary that does not seem interrupted. As Marc Augé (2013) demonstrates, public transport is a contractual space in which cohabitation of private and public space and life are practiced daily. As in the metro, smartphones or trendy tablets become not only a diversion to spend time but also a tool both for negotiating proximity and insuring some intimacy. Using it daily to get from her job to her flat on top of the high-rise building makes her forget about the lift ride, interactions, the space and the time she spends travelling in the vertical city. As in other urban transport modes, during the lift ride, the phone acts as a mobile of individualism that allows one to retreat into privacy and as an ordinary virtual space. The lift ride is still a moment when urban scales are forgotten.
Appropriating the lift as a specific intimate space and transport in the vertical city
Facing daily mobility and socialization issues, the lift ride atmosphere is co-constructed and shapes different forms of residents’ appropriation. The solitary experience is an everyday event: it occurs mostly outside peak hours. While lift rides are fast from the 16th floor, Julie has the time to put on a performance inside the lift by taking pictures or dancing. When she is alone in the lift, some ways of being, feeling, moving and perceiving space are quite special. She allows herself behaviors unthinkable in situations of co-presence. Comparisons to the bathroom highlight how symbolic privacy is created in the lift. Such behaviors and feelings often happened during the return trip at the end of the day. Thus, the lift would be the moment so special that it would be found “nowhere else”. It would be a space-time that is difficult to define: an intermediate space between home and city, inside and outside, public and private, but a more intimate space than those created by the (big) city. In that regard, the relationship of inhabitants with verticality is also the result of solitary experiences inside the lift. They are resources to consider the specificities of high-rise living through vertical mobility.
References
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1 According to the co-architect Jacques-Blanc Portard, the co-architect of this high-rise building.
2 « Dans un immeuble qui fait au minimum 14 étages l’ascenseur est indispensable par rapport à l’effort et à la hauteur. Moi, je suis au 4ème, alors non je descends par les escaliers quand je vais chez le médecin y a deux étages, faut pas pousser mémère dans les orties. Tout le monde ne fait pas ça. Ce qui m’ahurit ce sont les gens qui prennent les ascenseurs pour aller au premier étage. Oui. Moi quand je vais voir Jean Louis si je suis en bas, je prends l’escalier, non mais je suis pas handicapée, faut quand même être un peu barjo... La facilité, la flemme en fait. Pour monter au 4ème, ça serait difficile sans l’ascenseur, surtout avec les courses mais si c’est en panne, je monte ! Ça va le 4ème, je suis pas dépendante. » (Sarah, 4ème)
3 « Ah bah les petits de la dame au-dessus ils vont font toujours un regard gentil. (...) Je vais pas dire que l’on se regarde beaucoup mais quand on sort et on rentre dans l’ascenseur on se fait un signe quand même. Enfin mademoiselle c’est de la politesse, je comprends pas les gens qui ne vous adresse même pas un regard. C’est pas que dans les ascenseurs, mais c’est vrai qu’ici on fait pas totalement semblant d’être tout seul. C’est pas comme à Carrefour, quand vous prenez les ascenseurs ils sont très grands pour les courses évidemment... bah personne ne se regarde, c’est anesthésié́, bon c’est Carrefour vous me direz. » (Sarah, 4ème) « Après se regarder... quand vous connaissez oui vous vous regardez, vous vous faites des petits sourires et puis vous discutez et sinon quand vous connaissez pas... alors elles sont toujours ahuries de voir une veille raconter des conneries moi je m’en fou. Hum, elles ont l’habitude. Moi ça fait longtemps que je suis là. Mais bon bah quand vous connaissez pas vous regardez pas, ah si vous regardez celui que vous connaissez parfois quand vous cautionnez pas le comportement des gens ou que vous faites une blague de loin ! (...) mais le plus souvent, les gens manquent d’humour. Ils sont tristes dans les ascenseurs. On peut rencontrer des gens très intéressants, ça m’est arrivé dans les ascenseurs, ça peut être un lieu de rencontres, il est arrivé de me retrouver chez des gens que je ne connaissais pas parce que j’avais discuté avec quelqu’un dans un ascenseur. Vous savez j’ai une amie euh, elle me dit je me suis arrêtée deux étages en dessous, j’ai été faire la fête chez des gens parce que on discutait dans la discussion on est parti... bah venez boire un coup que je leur ai dit. » (Sarah, 4ème)
4 « Ce que j’aime pas là par exemple c’est qu’ils sont hyper lents. Ah bah le temps qu’ils mettent à descendre pour moi c’est hyper important. Les anciens étaient hyper rapides, j’étais au métro en une minute en partant de chez moi. Maintenant, il faut que je parte plus tôt. Le temps d’attendre l’ascenseur, je mets une minute trente, parce que parfois on les attend vraiment longtemps. Comme je suis tous les jours en retard, je trouve que c’est énervant. Ceux d’avant étaient très rapides, je suis pas habituée à cette lenteur. Je sais pas pourquoi mais j’ai vu la différence, ils sont vraiment beaucoup plus lents. En plus, ils s’arrêtent et ils disent « 9ème étage ». Alors que ceux d’avant, c’était « 9ème hop » et c’est bon. Là y a un temps d’arrêt. En fait, je calcule tout, je sais que pour être à l’heure à la fac, pour pas trop me dépêcher, le temps d’attendre l’ascenseur, il faut que je parte à quarante, ouais 7h40 le temps d’être à la fac à 8h. Après euh, pareil ça dépend d’où est-ce que j’ai cours à la fac, mais souvent je pars à 7h45 quelque chose comme car ça se joue à la minute près. Tu vas rires, entre 7h30 et 8h, il y a de la queue partout. Le soir, je me rends moins compte car je rentre de mon babysitting à 17h et je suis moins pressée que le matin. Même si j’ai l’impression d’être chez moi à la sortie du métro en rentrant, je calcule quand même le temps en ascenseur. » (Camille, 9ème)
5 « Après ça dépend, quand l’ascenseur fonctionne ça va, mais ceux d’avant étaient vachement mieux quand même, ça fait 3 ans et depuis ils sont super lents et ça fait que tomber en panne. Des 4, il y en a toujours 1 en panne. Tu peux pas aller au sous-sol avec, un autre qui s’arrête, celui de gauche il fait semblant de se fermer, il s’ouvre, se ré-ouvre, et puis il se ferme pour de bon. T’attends 2 secondes et puis il démarre… ok, ça se fait vraiment comme ça. Moi ça m’énerve le matin, je me dis je suis déjà en retard, mais là j’avoue que je suis toujours en retard. En gros avant ceux que l’on avait, t’appuyais au 0, tac ils se fermaient, ça prenait 10 secondes et maintenant, faut attendre et tout c’est un peu énervant. Tu sais, tu attends, tu te dis il va finir par se fermer, non toujours pas, du coup tu dois faire le tour pour aller chercher un autre ascenseur. » (Camille, 9ème)
6 « Je crois qu’ils devaient le changer ce design, je trouve que ça joue, les lumières par exemple, que ce soit éclairé, si je dois prendre l’ascenseur la nuit avec quelqu’un que je ne connais pas, ça joue énormément (...) quand je prends le trajet avec une personne jeune et de sexe féminin, c’est moins stressant. Ma mère m’a toujours dit, méfie-toi dans l’ascenseur. Par exemple, moi monsieur machin pour pas le citer j’aime pas prendre l’ascenseur avec lui forcément, il me fait des remarques, je sens son regard, aujourd’hui par exemple s’il m’avait vu avec ma robe il m’aurait dit ‘ah bah oh t’as une robe c’est pour moi non ?’. Mais ça m’ait jamais arrivé d’être vraiment collée mais j’aimerais pas franchement. Je me mets toujours au fond de l’ascenseur (je lui donne la feuille). Moi quand je rentre dans l’ascenseur j’aime bien me mettre la. C’est ma position 1 dans l’ascenseur, ma position favorite. Après bah j’aime pas trop être devant la, la y a le tableau avec les boutons tu vois ? Bah ça gêne si quelqu’un veut appuyer, qui veut se mettre la. Donc si y déjà quelqu’un la, en général je me mets la en position 2 (elle dessine) et la en position 3 (elle dessine). Après je n’apprécie pas du tout si je suis là et que quelqu’un vient se mettre la (elle dessine). Je le fais en rouge ? Comme ça tu vois bien l’interdit (rires). » (Camille,9ème)
7 « Bah ces derniers temps je regarde des séries dans les transports en commun, dans le métro et tout et du coup bah je continue dans l’ascenseur. Et en fait je déconnecte pas mes yeux de mon écran de tout le trajet et comme je commence à le connaître par coeur, bah limite quand je rentre dans l’ascenseur je me suis à peine rendue compte que je suis rentrée dans l’ascenseur et que je vais en sortir. Je m’en rends pas du tout compte du moment devant l’ascenseur en fait... En fait ça fait clairement partie de mon trajet et je déconnecte vraiment. » (Julie, 16ème)
8 « Tu sais que tu vas forcément faire quelque chose quand t’es tout seul. On est déjà déchainé dans l’ascenseur, on prend un tas de photos et on le ferait pas ailleurs, surtout pas dans les escaliers où t’es en pleine activité on va dire, là t’es statique t’attends que ça se passe donc tu te dis bah tient un petit selfie t’as le temps (...) Ah non, y en a surement (rires) mais non on le fait vraiment dans l’ascenseur. Le matin je me regarde dans le miroir mais on prend des photos quand on est toutes les deux, moi ça m’arrive d’en prendre quand je suis toute seule (rires). En fait pour moi, je peux dire que quand t’es seul, ça passe vite mais en même temps c’est un peu un espace où tu lâches ton humeur, si t’es de bonne humeur tu te lâches dans l’ascenseur, si t’es de mauvaise humeur tu te lâches dans l’ascenseur… En fait par exemple tu peux te dire que dans la douche c’est la même chose. Pour moi dans la salle de bain c’est la même chose tu vois. Bah oui parce que justement c’est un espace fermé où tu as toute ta liberté. Tu as une glace, du coup tu as une réflexion de toi-même peut-être que ça joue dans le truc, et du coup tu peux te voir en même temps et voir ce que tu es en train de faire, tes gestes, et c’est pour ça que ça te donne un sentiment d’intimité, mais pas seulement un sentiment d’intimité, mais de confort aussi parce que tu te permets de faire des trucs que tu pourrais pas faire autrement. Y a plein de gens, par exemple j’ai des potes qui ne dansent pas s’ils ne peuvent pas se voir, donc des ascenseurs où il n’y aura pas de glace ça serait différent. » (Julie et Jan, 16th)
Lyon: How to understand residential socialization
Wealthy housing estates in Lyon
Discover the heights of Lyon Metropolitan area
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
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Contribution by Geoffrey Mollé
PhD researcher in Geography, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory, Lumière University, Lyon.
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This report uses photography to render the medial sense that is held up for analysis in the thesis.
In geometry, height constitutes the dimension of objects that run perpendicularly to the horizontal plane on which they rest. As such, height is a primary dimension that projects space in three dimensions. Geographers are, by definition, interested in the actions and reactions between societies and the space on the land. For them, height takes on a less abstract meaning. It is no longer just an objective dimension, but a value, a quality of things. If something tall is recognised as such by individuals or groups, it means that it is taller on average than things that are considered at time “t”, from a certain location. In mountainous landscapes, a summit is considered as a high point from the valley. In cities, a tower block is considered a tall building because it is taller than those in the surrounding area. We understand that compared to geometry, geographic height is an experience that is contextual by necessity and integrates the intrinsic spatial aspects of the object without having it exist as it is for individuals and groups. Thus, the height of a tower block is simultaneously objective and subjective, both physical and phenomenal, both factual and sensible. In other words, it is neither objective nor subjective, neither physical nor phenomenal, neither factual nor sensible, but it is a middle ground or a “milieu” that is common to all of these opposing pairs. Defining height raises an ontological question that we struggle to answer in plain language. The discussion is centred around the dualism that makes complex, if not impossible (or vice-versa), the true high-angle shot at the heart of the subject. It is for this reason that other mediums can be extremely useful to properly express, rather than illustrate, what height is. While traditional landscape depictions of tower blocks drive the impression of height by playing on the ruptures of scale (fig. 1) or the effects of squashing caused by low-angle shots (fig. 2), they over-estimate the objective dimension of height through the object-like aspect of tower blocks.
This panoptic, taken from the stairwell of a well-known high-rise building in Lyon, Presqu’île 2, illustrates how the field of vision expands when images are taken from a height. The tower block is no longer the subject of the photograph, but that is not to say that it has lost its attributes as a subject. It is an integral part of the image that has been arranged in tiers. The use of a black filter makes it possible to intensify contrasts, which brings height into socio-ecological issues, in terms of access to light, in particular. Within urban environments that are becoming increasingly dense, opposition becomes a screen for the gaze. It would appear that the logics of socio-spatial fragmentation are projected vertically, offering new perspectives of urban justice.
By not remaining in the tower block’s common spaces, ethno-photography only illustrates a rather neutral notion of height up to that point. It continues to be dedicated to the core of the tower block, the more intimate domestic space in which the height is inhabited (fig. 4).
The horizon is not straight in these images that are taken with a wide angle because it fits closely with the geographicity of the land. While the artefact seemed to be detached from its base, here it is deeply rooted in the landscape, linked by the experience of contact between the land and the sky. The inhabitant left the vertical surroundings of the city to be able to gaze at them in depth. Off the ground, but still on Earth, its “milieu” meets that of other residents. “I had a feeling of ascending and distancing myself from those who went by at ground level, but no more now because it is something else, with the birds above all. It is a different way to connect with the city” (Laura, 12e, Barre Zumbrunnen, Part-Dieu). The photo that she sent me in the midst of the migration season gave the heights a medial sense. It invokes symbioses that reveal its value (fig. 5).
From such a height, time passes not according to hours, but by how the sun moves. The domestic space is not fixed, but rather revolutionary. Cycles and moments intertwine in a day-to-day atmosphere of discovery (fig. 6). What will the weather be like tomorrow ?
The elevator as experience of high-rise living
Urban Landscape Transformations in Poços de Caldas
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Contribution by
Loïc Bonneval
Doctor in Sociology, Assistant Professor at the University Lyon 2 Lumière
Aurélien Gentil
Doctor in Sociology, Post-doctoral fellow in High Rise project (Working Tasks 3 and 4)
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Our survey took place in two high-rise housing developments erected in Lyon in the 1970s under the aegis of architect René Gagès: L'Îlot Moderne (1971-1974) and Les Balcons de Lyon (1976-1980). These two modernist condominiums constitute socio-spatial configurations that are rarely studied.
Composed of two contiguous towers of 16 and 17 storeys with 330 dwellings (from studios to F8+terrace) and about a thousand inhabitants, L'Îlot Moderne is located in the north-east of Lyon's 7th district. Built in the early 1970s a few hundred metres from the then burgeoning Part-Dieu business district, this residence embodies for its promoters the development of a new centrality in Lyon. Located in an area that is still not very densely populated, mainly made up of factories, apartment buildings and small pavilions, L'Îlot Moderne, by its height, innovative architecture, and morphology, crystallises a form of urban renewal. It stands out clearly from the surrounding dwellings and reveals a strong singularity on the scale of the district and the city. L'Îlot Moderne is reputed to be of a high standard, but it also differs from the surrounding houses in terms of the infrastructure that it has at its disposal and that its occupants benefit from. A rooftop swimming pool offers a rare panoramic view of the city. There is also a private parking space, a playground, and a tennis court. At the foot of the building, small buildings, delivered with the residence, group together various shops (pharmacy, bank, bakery, etc). Among the oldest owners, the precursors of the gentrification of the neighbourhood, there are several private doctors and specialists working in the neighbouring hospitals.
Les Balcons de Lyon co-ownership is located in the 5th district, at the top of a hill overlooking the Vieux-Lyon district, the city's historic centre. This residential complex comprises 195 housing units (from studio to F6+Terrace) and around 500 inhabitants spread over nine contiguous buildings, including five towers rising between seven and thirteen storeys connected by four horizontal bars. It is completely fenced off and can only be entered by one lane. On the first level, accessible to visitors, wide esplanades decorated with plant pots and plant terrace troughs offer a privileged panoramic view of the city. Below, residents can access a vast private park with lawns, a tree-lined driveway, play areas (petanque pitch, children's playground), a swimming pool, a club house, and a tennis court.
L'Îlot Moderne and Les Balcons de Lyon have many similarities. These residences welcome a well-to-do population (executives from the private sector, liberal professions, etc.). They stand out from their immediate surroundings by their height, architectural style and the infrastructures that make them up (swimming pool and tennis court in particular). Each one offers a privileged panoramic view of the city. However, these two living spaces also present some notable morphological differences. L'Ilot Moderne, located in the heart of the city, is set in a very mineral and not very green environment. Due to its height and the fact that it is immediately part of a dense urban fabric, it is open to the public. The Balcons de Lyon, nestling on their hill, appear more set back, less visible from the surrounding area. Furthermore, although Les Balcons de Lyon is located in an exclusively residential space, L'ïlot Moderne is home to several professionals who have established their premises in certain flats (doctors, speech therapists, accountants, etc.). This presence leads to a significant movement of people who do not live in the building. Thus, if L'Îlot Moderne appears to be fairly exposed and known by many people, on the contrary, Les Balcons de Lyon rather gives the appearance of a haven of calm and greenery, protected by its park from the immediate urban environment.
The data that feeds our research comes from an interview survey conducted in Lyon between April 2017 and January 2018. The objective was to study the practical, subjective, and symbolic relationship that the different generations of inhabitants of L'Îlot Moderne and Les Balcons de Lyon have with their living space. During the interviews, several themes related to the ways of living and investing in the residence, neighbourhood sociability as well as the representations, forms of attachment and enhancement associated with housing and the neighbourhood were addressed. In order to be able to explain the representations through social trajectories, the respondents were also led to develop a certain number of biographical aspects, first and foremost their residential trajectory, giving meaning to the practices and representations observed in the present. During each interview, we wanted to gather as much information as possible to study the discourse and practices of the interviewees in order to articulate their sociological profile, their trajectory (social, residential, professional, marital, family, etc.) and the particular configurations engaged by their residential context of registration (verticality, morphology, and history of residence). The choice was therefore made to conduct in-depth, and therefore fairly long interviews (up to 6 hours), sometimes requiring several successive appointments with the participant. In addition, we also carried out several observations, photographed the residence and the housing of the people surveyed, and collected various archive documents (plans, promotional brochure, press cuttings, architects' collections deposited in the municipal archives, etc.). In order to objectify the representations conveyed by the different generations of inhabitants of L'Îlot Moderne and Les Balcons de Lyon about their living space and how these representations relate to their life trajectory, 29 interviews with residents or former residents (n=3) were conducted, most often in the homes of the respondents. To constitute our sample, we gave preference to people who own their own home and have lived in the residence for at least a few years, in some cases since its construction. In addition, our survey also led us to interview other people involved in the life of the residences studied (postman, building employee, developer, professionals working in the residence). These additional interviews (n=6) brought certain elements of knowledge about the residences studied (technical aspects, history of the place, etc.) of which the inhabitants interviewed were not necessarily aware. In addition, these testimonies also provided us with different "counterpoints" to the discourse and representations that the residents conveyed about their living space and its population.
The valorisation of verticality
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
The elevator as experience of high-rise living
Politics of verticality and affordances of height (Duchère, France and Braşov, Romania)
Contribution by
Loïc Bonneval
Doctor in Sociology, Assistant Professor at the University Lyon 2 Lumière, researcher at the Centre Max Weber laboratory
Aurélien Gentil
Doctor in Sociology, Post-doctoral fellow in High Rise project (Working Tasks 3 and 4) at the Centre Max Weber laboratory
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Introduction
How is verticality valued? The revival of vertical urbanism and the multiplication of high-rise projects that can be observed throughout the world (Appert 2016, Mc Neill 2005) lead us to question the values associated with height in the city. The residential high-rise projects that have emerged since the 2000s in France are the subject of intense communication and marketing efforts aimed at standing out from the large complex of impoverished social housing by reactivating the themes of modernity and distinction that have been attributed to height in the past, and by promoting lifestyles specific to high-rise housing (Mollé, 2019). Although the cultural collection of films, science fiction books, etc., from which the representations of verticality are drawn is largely marked by negative, even dystopian visions (Montès et al. 2017), there is no lack of more positive representations on which to base arguments in favour of verticality. In particular, the symbolic values of dynamism, attractiveness and innovation embodied in high-rise buildings constitute an essential justification, in the face of controversial arguments, whether urban planning (increasing density and mix) or economic (increasing the supply of housing in the centre by controlling land and costs) (Appert, 2015, Paquot 2008).
These different registers of valorisation mobilised by the actors of the urban factory only partially meet those of the inhabitants. However, if the former are relatively well documented, the latter have been less studied until now. In fact, in order to grasp the representations of the inhabitants, it is necessary to not only look at the major emblematic projects of the 2000s and 2010s but at older projects for which there is a certain historical hindsight. The large luxury housing estates of the Fordist period thus provide a useful point of comparison. Our aim is therefore to study the processes of value formation, or rather the registers of valorisation, of verticality in the urban space on the basis of two case studies in the city of Lyon. Beyond economic valorisation in the strict sense, three forms of valorisation appear: singularisation, the reconciliation of inhabitant constraints and the effects of internal and external social classifications.
A differentiated effect of height on prices?
The most visible form of valorisation is that which affects price. However, the effect of height on price is not the same according to the period of construction of the building. To study the effect of height on price, we considered the difference between the price of high-rise flats and the average price in the IRIS neighbourhood where it is located. While the flats in the residences from 1948 to 1980 are on average 9% cheaper than those in their IRIS, the difference is only -5% for those from the 7th to the 8th floor, and -1% for those from the 10th floor upwards. On the other hand, for more recent flats, built after 2000, flats above the 7th floor are on average 25% more expensive than those in the rest of the IRIS, with no great difference between those from the 7th to the 9th floor and those from the 10th floor upwards. Prices therefore seem to be influenced by height, but this influence is not the same everywhere: it is clearer for recent flats, whereas for those in the Glorious Thirties, it only seems to partially counterbalance the negative image associated with large complexes, their aesthetics, and their qualities (thermal and sound insulation, number of charges, maintenance costs or supposed deterioration).
But the study of the two residences has above all shown the importance of other valorisation processes, carried by the experiences and practices of the inhabitants, and which take several forms.
Verticality, a support for a process of singularisation
The tall buildings, relatively rare in the urban landscape of Lyon, stand out and mark the landscape. Several interviewees mentioned the fact that their building is known throughout the district, or even the city, that it can be used as a landmark or that it arouses a certain curiosity, both because of its height but also for its other characteristics (the fact that it has a swimming pool in particular). This is truer for the Îlot Moderne than for the Balcons de Lyon, part of which is less visible from the street, but the fact remains that these buildings are high-rise buildings, or at least singular places in the district and, more broadly, in the centre of Lyon. It is in the process of singularisation, carried by the inhabitants, that valorisation is built. and a privileged relationship with the city.
The singularity of this is apparent from what 44-year-old Lupin, a doctor of law, former lawyer and researcher in foreign law who became an English teacher, owner of a T5 on the 6th floor of the IM, says about her use of the rooftop swimming pool: "You can see the whole city! It's incredible. We're completely out of time, we're out of scale, we're out of everything, it's ... It's like being in an ivory tower, it's surprising1." The idea of internal consistency, expressed in terms of the village within the city, comes a little further in the interview: "In fact, it's representative of the population. How many people are in there, there are a thousand of us, it's enormous, it's a village2.”
Verticality also makes it possible to overcome constraints or nuisances inherent in city life. To a certain extent, this gives concrete expression to the project of Le Corbusier, for whom height, more than a dimension to be valued as such, was a solution to the double requirement of density and space: by building higher, one had to free up space for green spaces and provide the city with advantages that it lacked. In fact, in the buildings which we studied, this configuration also appears to be a solution, a way of resolving contradictions between the wishes for housing (tranquillity, space, even in relation to nature) and a sometimes intrusive urban character. However, it is not so much the space available at the foot of the building which attracts attention, but rather the fact that it is set back from the city, that it creates a distance from the most immediate nuisances: the absence of neighbours and the unobstructed view are seen as signs of a habitat which is preserved from the most hostile aspects of city life.)
Very often, these characteristics did not become apparent to the inhabitants until they overcame their reticence about the shape of the large building. The idea of different rhythms of life, of places which, like the swimming pool, function as spaces of secondary importance (Rémy, Voyé, 1974), or even the fact of combining the proximity of urban amenities with the possibility of retreating from congestion, all contribute greatly to this feeling.
Mr. Thibaud, an accountant in the private sector: "My husband wasn't thrilled because he thought it was just too much of a tour, too much.... While I didn't mind at all, but when he arrived, he found that these big bars weren't very pretty and everything, it bothered him a little bit and we finally bought (laughs) and it's true that the fact that there's a park, with a swimming pool, games for the children, big terraces on the ground, you don't fall directly on the cars, on a road, I think it's really great3."
An exclusive verticality? Distinction and social ranking
This protection of privacy against the intrusion of urban life that verticality favours is linked to the exclusive and distinctive character of these large luxury complexes. The singularisation is characterised both by a distinction on the outside of the building and by a social classification on the inside.
From the outside, these buildings are distinguished both by their standing, in neighbourhoods where they preceded the dynamics of gentrification by several years (even two decades), and by their morphology, which impresses just as much as it intrigues. The solicitation by estate agencies wishing to have properties for sale in the building and relaying a strong demand for these residences is experienced by the inhabitants as a signal of appreciation. Many of those surveyed report admiring reactions from their guests when they discover the view, or the rooftop swimming pool. The differentiated relationships to the viewpoint pointed out above are sometimes translated into value judgements that border on social judgment.
Mr. Ribout, a 44-year-old landscape gardener who chose to live at the BL to have a view of the Alps, tends to depreciate certain ways of tasting the spectacle from his windows: "People... And then it annoys me because they look at a view that I like less, they look at the view of the Confluenceand they're stubborn about it and I tell them : "But look at the view on the Alps rather, on Lyon". So it's funny, the interest of the views is not the same, that's it4." The attraction of the Confluence view is much greater than the attraction of the Lyon view. It is often the family history that is at stake behind the relationship between the value of the view. Mrs Davet, 74 years old, who inherited the flat her parents bought from the BL in 1976, associates height with social status in a tone that is only half ironic: "Every day I say: 'I'm lucky to be here'. But I say it but I can't bear to be told, luck has helped you, I swear! And if we're here we're worth it (laughs). That's it5." She thus shows the continuity of a project of social ascent experienced by her father who, without a diploma, rose to the status of manager in the Mérieux company.
If the relationship with the outside is marked by this separation, the internal valuation of the building is rather characterised by a form of hierarchy. The shape of the buildings itself structures this social ranking, by installing the most spacious, most attractive, and therefore most expensive flats on the highest, most highly valued floors. Flats above the 7th floor, and therefore the roofline of the neighbourhood, are particularly popular, and those on the 16th floor benefit from a terrace. The layout of the flats allows some residents to carry out all or part of their residential itinerary in the buildings, improving their housing conditions with each move. This vertical hierarchy can be seen in the ranking games played by the residents, which, although formulated at the second level, appear to be quite meaningful.
Mrs Lupin (5th floor) and Mrs Fontaine (16th floor): for the first one: "Afterwards there are jokes in the lift, we are the plebeians and upstairs ... It's the social lift (...) I like to joke about it and then there are some people on the 16th who also like it, it's funny. It's the Holy Grail (laughs)6." His point of view directly echoes the words of Mr. and Mrs. Fontaine who have lived in the building since its construction: "So it happens from time to time, when you take the lift and then you press the 16th: "Oh you live on the 16th floor! You have a beautiful view!". Mme: It's usually very kind. Except once when someone said to me, "Oh, he's showing off," or whatever. I said: "Yes, I don't even know why I'm answering you7." In the BL, the hierarchy of floors is reinforced by a distinction linked to the orientation of the flats.
The register of singularisation and its subdivisions, reconciliation of constraints and distinction, constitute the framework on which the processes of verticality enhancement by the inhabitants of large luxury housing estates are built. They are linked to the context of French cities where high-rise housing remains rare in the old centres and where verticality has been disqualified by the impoverishment of large housing estates on the outskirts. It is the rarity and the atypical character of the high-rise housing estate that gives structure to the expression of value. If these registers are not totally distinct from those employed by the actors of the urban factory, architects or promoters who are quick to praise the uniqueness of their operations, they are not reduced to the standardised designs of real estate advertisements or commercial arguments, but rather bear witness to the proliferation of appropriations and ways of investing time and inhabited space. From this point of view, reflection on forms of valorisation can also contribute to the characterisation of ways of inhabiting verticality.
References
APPERT Manuel (2016) Tours, skyline et canopée, mémoire original pour l’Habilitation à diriger les recherches en géographie, Université Lyon 2.
APPERT Manuel (2015) « Le retour des tours dans les villes européennes », Métropolitiques, URL : https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Le-retour-des-tours-dans-les.html
MC NEILL Donald, 2005, « Skyscraper Geography », Progress in Human Geography, vol. 29, n° 1, p. 41-55
MOLLÉ Geoffrey (2019) «Un changement de regard sur la verticalité urbaine, de nouvelles tours d'habitation dans le paysage de la métropole de Lyon», Géoconfluences, URL: http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/
MONTÈS Christian, Appert Manuel et Drozdz Martine, 2017, « Enjeux de l'exploration culturelle des hauteurs urbaines », Géographie et cultures, 102.
PAQUOT, Thierry (2008) La Folie des hauteurs, Paris : François Bourin Éditeur
TÉMY Jean et VOYÉ Liliane (1981) Ville ordre et violence, formes spatiales et transaction sociale, Paris, PUF
1 « On voit toute la ville ! C'est incroyable. On est complètement hors du temps, on est hors d'échelle, on est hors de tout, c'est.. On est comme dans une tour d'ivoire quoi, c'est surprenant. »
2 « En fait c'est représentatif de la population. On est combien là-dedans, on est mille c'est énorme, c'est un village. »
3 « Mon mari il était pas emballé parce que justement il trouvait que ça faisait trop tour, trop... Alors que moi ça m'a pas du tout gêné, mais lui quand il est arrivé il trouvait que ces grandes barres c'était pas très joli et tout, ça le gênait un petit peu et ben finalement on a acheté (rire) Et c'est vrai que le fait qu'il y ait un parc, avec un piscine, des jeux pour les enfants, des grandes terrasses au sol, on tombe pas directement sur les voitures, sur une route, je trouve ça vraiment génial ».
4 « Les gens… Et puis alors ça m'énerve parce qu'ils regardent une vue que j'aime moins, ils regardent la vue sur la Confluence. Et ils sont bornés là-dessus et moi je leur dis : « Mais regardez la vue sur les Alpes plutôt, sur Lyon ». Donc c'est marrant, l'intérêt des vues n'est pas le même, voilà. L'attrait de la vue Confluence est bien supérieur à l'attrait de la vue Lyon ».
5 « Tous les jours je dis : « J'ai de la chance d'être ici ». Mais moi je le dis mais je ne supporte pas qu'on me le dise, la chance on l'a aidée non d'une pipe ! Et si on est là on le vaut bien (rire). Voilà. »
6 « Après il y a des blagues dans l'ascenseur, c'est des blagues quoi, nous on est la plèbe et en haut... C'est l'ascenseur social (…) Moi j'aime bien blaguer là-dessus et puis il y a certaines personnes au 16ème qui aiment bien aussi, c'est rigolo. C'est le Graal quoi (rires) ».
7 « Alors ça arrive de temps en temps, quand vous prenez l'ascenseur et puis que vous appuyez sur le 16ème : « Oh vous habitez au 16ème ! Vous avez une belle vue hein ! ». Mme : En général c'est bienveillant. Sauf une fois où il y en a un qui m'a fait une réflexion du genre : « Oh il se la pète », ou je ne sais quoi. J'ai dit : « Oui, je ne sais même pas pourquoi je vous réponds ».
A little-known urban form, the large luxury housing estates
France: A socially selective verticalization
High-rise living in Dallas: towards vertical exclusion?
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
Vertical regeneration of Vauxhall-Nine-Elms: the mirage of affordable housing
The Production of Residential Buildings in São Paulo Metropolis
Contribution by
Loïc Bonneval
Doctor in Sociology, Assistant Professor at the University Lyon 2 Lumière
Aurélien Gentil
Doctor in Sociology, Post-doctoral fellow in High Rise project (Working Tasks 3 and 4)
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Between the two archetypal figures of the iconic tower of neoliberal urbanism and the large, degraded housing estate, the large luxury housing estates offer a counterpoint to the narratives centered on the degradation processes and the pathogenic character of large high-rise buildings. Dating from the Fordist period and intended for well-to-do clients, they share the exclusive character of the skyscrapers of the 2000s and 2010s while, like the social housing towers, they have put the label of modernity to the test of time, the aging of the buildings and the transformation of the surrounding urban fabric. The large luxury complexes have not, however, been the subject of specific works in France.
They differ from other large housing estates in their mode of production (Effosse, 2003), in the unassisted private sector and therefore aimed at wealthy clienteles, as well as in their location and their inclusion in development projects. They can, at least in part, be linked to development operations, for example following the major urban renewal operations of the 1960s (Coing 1966, Backouche 2013) or in the extension of the construction of business centers such as those of La Défense or Part-Dieu in Lyon. From this point of view, they may be reminiscent of what is happening in more recent development operations producing new neighborhoods on urban wastelands or low-value areas, such as redevelopment neighborhoods (Cousin, 2014) or certain ZACs and eco-neighborhoods (Piganiol, 2017). However, they are mainly the result of one-off operations by developers. Many of them are built in a diffuse manner, in gaps in the urban fabric with which they present a clear break. Generally established outside the traditional bourgeois districts, they nevertheless extend their influence, as in the case of sectors surrounding La Défense, where they represent one of the forms of consolidation of the spaces of the upper classes (Pinçon and Pinçon Charlot 1989). They can also anticipate gentrification processes without necessarily triggering their dynamics, because of their position as an urban block, or even as a city within the city cut off from the surrounding district.
The time of modernity
The association of the large luxury complex with modernity appears in the speeches of the inhabitants but also in that of the architects and promoters. Thus, in the text for the press conference of May 4, 1970, after having explained the different functions that the Îlot Moderne must satisfy, the architect René Gagès indicates "The overall expression is obviously contemporary, it is expressed by a play of volumes that forbids the dryness of the simple rectangular parallelepiped and contributes to the future rhythm of the street". In order to contribute to the dynamism of a new district, which was then perceived as outlying, the commercialization of the street highlights the facilities and stores. Conversely, the promotional documents of the Balcons de Lyon emphasize comfort, the site and, paradoxically, the long-term nature of the project. The relationship with modernity is not expressed in a simple and unilateral way. Moreover, it should be noted that the buildings studied here do not appear in the various publications devoted to the architect and are not among his most emblematic achievements, which are either social housing complexes or public facilities.
Degradations and re-compositions
The negative elements intervene in a second stage of the trajectory narratives. As in the case of large social housing complexes, the representations mix aspects concerning the evolution of the population and the degradation of the buildings and the services they offer. For some, it is the very idea of luxury housing that is called into question. The facades have also darkened, reinforcing the impression of poorly maintained buildings that many respondents who moved in in the 1990s and 2000s say they took for suburban social housing bars. In addition, certain elements, such as the carpets in the corridors and common areas or the design of the lobbies, appear dated and elicit multiple reactions, sometimes amused (like this respondent comparing them to a ski resort in the 1970s) and sometimes reluctant. The common areas have also been the subject of friction.
Patrimonialization and rehabilitation
It is the anchoring on the part of the inhabitants that made possible the investments that are likely to stop the outrage that time inflicts on buildings and their prestige. They are characterized first of all by what could be called forms of heritage appropriation of the residences and their history. Far from the institutional forms of memorial commemoration that preceded the urban renewal programs in social housing, we are rather witnessing an interest on the part of the inhabitants in the history of their building, the a posteriori symbolic valorization of its architecture, its technical specificities or the idea of the "village in the city". An exhibition was thus organized at the Îlot Moderne with photos of the building site, taken not by the oldest inhabitants but by households who arrived in the 2000s, who have a high level of cultural capital and who are in the process of being anchored in the building.
In the Îlot Moderne, because of the divisions between co-owners, which goes beyond the divergence on the heritage dimension and covers the fault lines between generations of inhabitants and between social categories, the important works were limited to the restoration of the facades.
On the other hand, at the Balcons de Lyon, the scope of the work was much greater. Not only have some owners preserved or found promotional documents from the time of its construction and present them as collector's items between neighbors, but the co-ownership has undertaken a very significant rehabilitation.
A dynamic of revaluation of the large complex made possible by the anchoring of the inhabitants
Despite their high-end label, the large luxury ensembles have not been spared the degradation of the towers' image. However, the inhabitants have been able to deploy resources and efforts to carry out their requalification. The very shape of the buildings has been one of the factors that have helped to turn the stigma around: the size of the buildings, their height and the number of flats open up opportunities for residential upward mobility that encourage the inhabitants, and in particular the co-owners, who are best able to carry the movement to redevelop the buildings. As the discourse on modernity fades into the inhabitant's representations, it is these forms of anchoring that underpin the dynamics of revaluation.
References
BACKOUCHE Isabelle (2013) Aménager la ville, Paris, Armand Colin.
COING Henri, Rénovation urbaine et changement social : l'ilot n°4 Paris 13e, Paris, Les éditions ouvrières, 1966.
COUSIN Bruno (2014) « Entre-soi mais chacun chez soi. L'agrégation affinitaire des cadresparisiens dans les espaces refondés », Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, n° 204, p. 88-101.
EFFOSSE Sabine (2003) L’invention du logement aidé, l’immobilier au temps des Trente glorieuses, Paris, Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France.
PINÇON Michel et PINÇON-CHARLOT Monique (1989) Dans les beaux quartiers, Paris, Seuil.
PIGANIOL Marie (2017) Quartiers de reconnexion : genèse et production d’un nouveau modèle urbain, thèse en sociologie soutenue à l’institut d’études politiques de Paris.
1 « Les primo-accédants eux ils sont plutôt dans un trip de confort, de modernisation, ils ont aucun état d'âme par rapport à tous les anciens équipements de l'immeuble (…) »
2 « Vous aviez des odeurs… Derrière la boulangerie il y a un lycée professionnel, les gamins ils venaient prendre leur truc à la boulangerie et plutôt que de le manger dehors ils venaient là [dans le couloir du 16ème étage], ils bouffaient leur sandwich, ils laissaient leurs cannettes de bière. Quand vous les preniez sur le fait, en sortant de l'ascenseur, ils disaient : « Oh ben vous avez une belle vue ! On vient voir la vue » (rire). « Ah mais qu'est-ce que vous foutez là?! » « Ah ben on a un copain au 8ème il est pas là on attend qu'il rentre » A un moment donné aussi il y a eu des dégradations. Ils ont volé tous les tubes néons (…) A un moment donné voir des capotes utilisées dans le couloir.. et à un moment donné des seringues ».
3 « Les gens ne disent plus bonjour ! Maintenant il faut que l'on soit amis pour se dire bonjour et encore. Autrefois même quelqu'un que vous ne connaissiez pas, vous rentriez dans l'ascenseur, vous disiez : « bonjour monsieur » ou « bonjour madame ». Et puis c'était tout. Non maintenant c'est fini. »
4 « Je me souviens les premières AG moi j'avais fait deux-trois interventions pour dire : Bon ben voilà c'est un patrimoine, il faut, peut-être pas qu'on restaure mais qu'on garde certains trucs. Il faut qu'on fasse gaffe de pas brader les trucs, ce côté seventies qui peut aussi être un atout à terme quoi ».
5 « Les primo-accédants eux ils sont plutôt dans un trip de confort, de modernisation, ils ont aucun état d'âme par rapport à tous les anciens équipements de l'immeuble (…) »
Lyon: How to understand residential socialization
The valorization of verticality in Lyon
France: A socially selective verticalization?
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil
High-rise Buildings, Urban Tissue and Urban Regulations: some questions in São Paulo
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil : microscales and narratives
Recent Transformations on San Paulo Urban Structural Axis
Contribution by
Bianca Botea
Anthropologist, Assistant Professor at the University Lumière - Lyon 2 and Researcher at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Issues (LADEC)
Olivia Legrip
Postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at LabEx COMOD (Université de Lyon) and affiliated to the Institut supérieur d’étude des religions et de la laïcité (ISERL)
Download original version in French at the end of the text
The research on high-rise living highlights two possible perspectives on the status of the question of verticality in this literature. On the one hand, high-rise housing and the urban environments that concern them appear as the context in which the social practices being questioned take place, which constitute the focus of the research (migration, inequalities, neighbourhood conflicts, urban renewal, etc.). Here, verticality is a 'secondary' aspect of the research, in the sense that the researcher's interest is not so much in this aspect, which is more of a 'setting' for the facts being investigated1.
On the other hand, in other research projects, verticality has been transformed from a context into a research object in its own right, the idea being to investigate the specificity of lifestyles and high-rise living in relation to other types of living. Since the topic of verticality is gaining more and more interest in social sciences, this second perspective is of greater concern to authors. Geographers propose to think of the city as three-dimensional, which puts verticality at the heart of the analysis (Montes et al., 2017). The three-dimensional city is considered in its ground plan, in verticality and in the imaginations of residents.
Richard Baxter summarised the questioning at the heart of this second approach in his research on a large social housing development in London. The main question posed by the author is whether there is a particular 'home' generated by high-rise housing, as opposed to more horizontal forms of living. Can we thus observe a relationship to place and a feeling of inhabitation that would qualify modes of existence specific to high-rise living? « This means that verticality does not just matter to residents, but can be central in their ‘being’ at home, in the phenomenological sense. Some residents are not just ordinary dwellers, but high-rise dwellers (Ingold, 2008). Vertical practices co-construct who they are in the world.” (Baxter, 2017 : 350).
This perspective of verticality as an object of research and as a relationship to living will also be ours here.
On reading the various contributions on high-rise housing in social sciences, we can make another observation. These various works reveal an equivocal aspect of this type of dwelling, since we move from a certain mentioned quality to its opposite. To illustrate this, we can observe that in the same city and at the same time, verticality can be a symbol of high-quality living (Bonneval and Gentil, see the contributions Wealthy housing estates and The valorization of verticality on this website) or a negative symbol of stigmatised residences or neighbourhoods. Even within the same neighbourhood or building, these can be positively valued by its residents and negatively represented by those who do not live there. On another level, some authors have shown that high-rise buildings can generate a certain social distance, as we will also see in this article with the city of Braşov, while other authors have highlighted, on the contrary, forms of social proximity and sociability in this type of housing (Ghosh 2014; Baxter 2017). These high-rise residences can sometimes house privileged classes and highlight phenomena of social distinction through this type of housing, or on the contrary, be places of modest housing or even impoverishment.
In view of this disparity in the aspects that characterise high-rise living, we can ask ourselves about the nature of this agency that qualifies this living in a specific way, in other words, about the actors and the actants, material and immaterial, about their relations or arrangements that produce this specific way of living and its value.
In the research carried out on this subject in social sciences, the current trend is to highlight the fact that verticality, in its material dimension, cannot in itself qualify a value or a type of use, as these are defined by their implementation in everyday experiences. “Verticality is not pre-given before action takes place, but in constructed in everyday life” (Baxter, 2017 : 335). In this sense, many authors have insisted on the importance of analysing practices 'from below', complementary to analyses of the forms of production of verticality through the discourses of designers and other intermediaries in the chain of valorisation of this type of housing.
In his research on the everyday practices of people living in high-rise buildings in Ramallah, Christopher Harker (2013) made an interesting distinction between two ways of approaching verticality. On the one hand, he evoked a topographical perspective, according to which space is viewed in a metric dimension, as volume, which leads us to consider it as a materiality already there. Here, the agency that qualifies high-rise living is placed alongside the physical qualities of the environment. On the other hand, the author evokes a topological perspective, which is also his, according to which space (and verticality) only makes sense from the links and relational processes that are engaged in this space. Harker thus quotes Anna Secor (2013: 4-5) on the meaning attributed to these two perspectives:
[T]opology focuses on the qualitative properties of space (as opposed to the geometric). Topologically speaking, a space is not defined by the distances between points that characterize it when it is in a fixed state, but rather by the characteristics that it maintains in the process of distortion and transformation (bending, stretching, squeezing, but not breaking). Topology deals with surfaces and their properties, their boundedness, orientability, decomposition, and connectivity – that is, sets of properties that retain their relationships under processes of transformation (Secor in Harker: 2013 : 4-5).
According to this topological approach, which is also of interest to us here, we understand that materiality, and in this case verticality as materiality, is not a physical quality that qualifies a space in itself, because it is not an inert surface in a fixed state. On the contrary, it is a characteristic of space that is given in movement, and therefore in the dynamics of its uses.
The work on high-rise living carried out in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology and sociology, is unsurprisingly on the side of this topological perspective. However, this sometimes has the opposite effect, with a tendency to minimise material agency and to overestimate the place of the social and symbolic construction of inhabitation, as if the latter were a significant layer that came to be superimposed on or give meaning to a passive physical reality. In the research we have previously carried out in La Duchère (Botea 2014, 2019) and in the city of Braşov (https://familiar-city.org/fr), as well as through the comparison of the different methodologies used in these two fields2, we have been able to observe that our data collection approach centred on discourses and representations tends to favour a perspective that values the social and cultural dimension of uses, often leaving aside the physical and material dimension. We therefore hypothesise that a research approach committed to an ecological and situational approach does not only give access to re-presentations, but also to perceptions engaged in direct action with these environments. This ecological and relational perspective, which is ours here based on an immersive anthropological approach, allows us to put together a story that emerges in direct actions of use of these urban spaces. This possibility of observing this direct relationship with space, for example through accompanying people on their daily reported itineraries, allows us to observe, on the one hand, the material agency of environments (by capturing the affordances of the material environments of verticality in practical life situations) and, on the other hand, the weight of the social, historical or political dimension which is often translated by speech in these actions in progress. The interviews that we conduct outside of these itineraries (with designers and residents), allow us to have access to personal or family histories and to deepen the elements that can be briefly mentioned during the walk.
Tim Ingold's3 ecological anthropology approach, which inspires us here, leads us to consider verticality not simply as a "context" in the sense of a historical, material, or political datum on which discourses are posited that give it social or symbolic meaning4, but rather as an "environment" in the sense of this author5. The contribution of an ecological perspective lies in the fact that it does not treat the different elements of the environment (physical and material, symbolic, historical, etc.) in a fragmented way but in an integrated perspective or continuum. It also invites us to look at a tower, a block, in a broader way than a reference object in itself by integrating it into the environment that gives it existence. This perspective seems to us to be well summed up by a sentence of Merleau-Ponty, taken up again in the words of Isaac Joseph himself, highlighting the interest of ecological perspectives of the city: "To see the house (...) is to access not only an object but the world in which it is observable and accessible. (...) The house is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from all sides6. "(Joseph, 2002)
According to the ecological perspective, a phenomenon or urban practices are not grasped as finite or represented objects, in other words, as decontextualised realities, on which one can speak 'from nowhere'. Rather, this perspective shows the different elements of the environment in which this reality emerges or which make it, the work in act of elaborating the phenomenon that interests us. Inherently, any perception of the environment, and in this case of verticality, is seen from a position of movement, of mobility, as emphasised by the various works on perception, following the pioneering work of James Gibson (1979).
In concrete terms, the ecological approach to high-rise living that we are proposing here leads us to situate these buildings in material and immaterial universes, in other words, in environments in movement that are constructed and defined by the practices of designers and users. In this perspective of verticality as an act of perception and action, we take into account the materiality of the spaces, the atmospheres, the life history of the people or the neighbourhood, etc.; a complexity of elements that are to be grasped in situation, by accompanying the people in their daily journeys, or through other 'more static' situations of interview with them.
The quality of high-rise living is not given primarily by the physical qualities of the environment, nor primarily by social relations (or symbolic dimensions), but by the environmental configurations generated by the verticality, which give it meaning. How then can we characterise these environmental and urban configurations of high-rise living? We try to provide some answers to this question in our contributions Politics of verticality and affordances of height and Housing or dwelling: space-times of high-rise living. Case studies in Romania (Braşov) and France (Lyon, La Duchère).
This relational and ecological perspective of high-rise living will be discussed from two case studies, in the district of La Duchère in Lyon (France) and in the district of the Civic Centre in the city of Braşov (Romania). Both have in common a major urban renewal context marked by major demolitions and restructuring. Our hypothesis is that these transformations reveal and give a particular meaning to verticality, which becomes more salient in light of the major mutations entailed in the neighbourhood.
Our fieldwork in these two districts was based on an anthropological approach, i.e. an immersive one. On the one hand, we conducted interviews and observations, and on the other hand we set up the method of reported itineraries, and carried out recordings of the sound ambiences and "on-board" videos taken by our interlocutors, with an action camera mounted on their shoulder (or on their head for people crossing the district by bike). This methodology, which allows people to film their urban environment themselves, unlike an approach in which the researcher captures and frames their reality, invites us to go beyond the postures of authority (Clifford, 1983). The use of audio-visual tools in work on verticality from a sensitive approach remains very rare. Richard Baxter (2017), for example, relies on photography, which he proposes to use less as a complement to the text than as a tool for emotionally engaging the people in his field and for producing content with them. As for our research, the video recordings with the on-board camera were made in particular on the Braşov field and only during the journeys outside the buildings. The use of this tool inside the buildings, in the space of the flats and in the common spaces, is necessary afterwards in order to extend this work and to explore the view not only from an ecological perspective "from the bottom up" but also "from the top down".
References
APPERT Manuel, 2016, Les formes de la métropole : du réseau à la canopée, de la mesure au paysage : Tours, skyline et canopée. Mémoire original pour l’Habilitation à diriger les recherches en géographie, Université Lyon 2, 293 p. View on Highrise website
BAXTER Richard, 2017, “The High-Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London”, International Journal of urban and regional research, DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12451.
BOTEA Bianca, 2014, « Expérience du changement et attachements. Réaménagement urbain dans un quartier lyonnais (la Duchère) ». Ethnologie française Vol. 44, no 33 : p. 461‑467.
BOTEA Bianca, MONGEARD Laëtitia et SERRA Lise, 2019, « Connaissances par proximité dans la recherche sur la rénovation urbaine. », EspacesTemps.net [En ligne], Traverses, URL : https://www.espacestemps.net/articles/connaissances-par-proximite-dans-la-recherche-sur-la-renovation-urbaine/; DOI : 10.26151/espacestemps.net-5ezs-v534
CLIFFORD James, 1983, « De l’autorité en ethnographie » L’Ethnographie, n°2, p. 87-108, republié dans Céfaï, Daniel (textes réunis, présentés et commentés par). 2003. L’enquête de terrain. Paris : La Découverte, M.A.U.S.S.
GIBSON James J., 2014, Approche écologique de la perception visuelle, édition Dehors.
GOSH Sumata, 2014, “Everyday Lives in Vertical Neighbourhoods: Exploring Bangladeshi Residential Spaces in Toronto’s Inner Suburbs”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38.6, DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12170
HARKER Christopher, 2014, “The only way is up? Ordinary Topologies of Ramallah”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol.38.1, doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12094
INGOLD Tim, 2000, The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, London, Routledge.
INGOLD Tim, 2011, Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description, London, Routledge.
INGOLD Tim, 2013, Marcher avec les dragons, Bruxelles, édition Zones Sensibles.
ISAAC Joseph, 2002. « Le nomade, la gare et la maison vue de toutes parts » Communications, vol. 73, n°1, p. 149-162.
ISAAC Joseph, 2006, « Résistances et sociabilités » in L’athlète moral et l’enquêteur modeste, Economica, Collection Etudes sociologiques.
MONTÈS Christian, APPERT Manuel et DROZDZ Martine, 2017, « Enjeux de l'exploration culturelle des hauteurs urbaines », Géographie et cultures [En ligne], 102, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gc/5175; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/gc.5175
MOROVICH Barbara, 2017, Miroirs anthropologiques et changement urbain, Paris, L’Harmattan, coll. « Anthropologie critique ».
OVERNEY Laetitia, 2014, « L’épreuve des démolitions à la Duchère : tactiques de résistance d’un collectif d’habitants », in Deboulet, Agnès et Lelévrier, Christine (dir.). Rénovation urbaine en Europe : quelles pratiques ? Quels effets ?, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, collection Villes et Territoires, p. 125-134.
ROJON Sarah, 2014, « La rénovation de l’habiter dans le grand ensemble de la Duchère. Pour en finir avec la figure des « nouveaux habitants » », Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques [En ligne], 45-1, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/1132; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rsa.1132
SECOR Anna, 2013, “Urban Geography Plenary Lecture: Topological City”, Urban Geography, 34 (1).
TISSOT Sylvie, 2003, “De l'emblème au « problème » : Histoire des grands ensembles dans une ville communiste”, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, N°93, Les infortunes de l’espace. pp. 122-129.
1 It is interesting to note, for example, the large number of scientific writings on urban renewal, generally deployed in working-class neighbourhoods where high-rise living is omnipresent, writings in which this dimension of verticality is rarely analysed in itself. To illustrate these two different approaches, we can cite Richard Baxter's work on low-income housing in London, where verticality becomes an object of research in itself. On the other hand, we can mention the work of Morovich (2017), Overney (2014) or Botea (2014) on Grands ensembles in France, where verticality is only a contextual element in the face of an interest in other aspects: memorial issues, practices of citizen resistance to urban renewal, representations of change in the neighbourhood.
2 In the Duchère fieldwork, the methodology essentially involved observations and interviews (individual and collective) carried out in specific places (in people's homes, in cultural places, in squares). In the city of Braşov, Romania, an additional component was added, with commented urban itineraries, sound recordings and "on-board" videos taken by the interlocutors with a shoulder-mounted camera (https://familiar-city.org/fr/a-propos-de-nous/la-methode.html)
3 See for example Ingold (2000, 2011) or a collection of his texts translated into French (Ingold, 2013).
4 We have also proposed a different conception of 'context' treated not as 'data' but as 'environment' in the sense of Tim Ingold (Botea, Mongeard, Serra, 2019).
5 For the author, the environment is not a reality external to the individual, but what is elaborated and seen from him. The individual and the environment are permeable to each other. "The environment is a relative term - that is, relative to the being for whom it is an environment. Just as there can be no organism without environment, there can be no environment without organism" (Ingold, 2013, p. 28).
6 « Voir la maison (…), c’est accéder non seulement à un objet mais au monde dans lequel il est observable et accessible. (…) La maison n’est pas la maison vue de nulle part, mais la maison vue de toutes parts. » (Joseph, 2002)
Politics of verticality and affordances of heights in Lyon and Braşov
Wealthy housing estates in Lyon
The valorization of verticality in Lyon
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil
Contribution by
Bianca Botea
Anthropologist, Assistant Professor at the University Lumière - Lyon 2 and Researcher at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Issues (LADEC)
Olivia Legrip
Postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at LabEx COMOD (Université de Lyon) and affiliated to the Institut supérieur d’étude des religions et de la laïcité (ISERL)
Download original version in French at the end of the text
We will present here our two contexts and research fields, in the Duchère district of Lyon (France) and in the Civic Centre of the city of Braşov (Romania).
The consideration of the two case studies, showing two different national and socio-historical contexts, allows us to put into perspective information obtained in the two fields and to better understand the differences or similarities that can appear in the practices of living in heights.
Furthermore, a contextual and situational, or even ecological, analysis of these practices allows us to 'naturalise' them, to use Isaac Joseph's (2006) formula, in other words not to consider them from a 'mechanistic conception' where practices are the result of prior conditioning (architectural, historical, political, etc.), but where they are the result of the arrangements of different environments, which are themselves defined in the daily experience with space.
One of the interests of these two case studies is that they both approach urban renewal differently. Furthermore, as we have already mentioned in our contribution For an ecological approach to high-rise living. An anthropological cross-section of two French-Romanian case studies (Introduction), in France urban renewal has been very little looked at from the angle of living in heights, and the same is true for work on verticality in post-communist cities in Romania. It is therefore interesting to observe what this reflection on urban renewal brings to an approach to height, and vice versa.
On another level, we can note that the case studies on high-rise buildings have so far been carried out on certain sites, for example in working-class neighbourhoods, generally stigmatised, where high-rise buildings become visible symbols of what Sylvie Tissot (2003) called, in relation to France, a 'neighbourhood problem'. Other works have, on the contrary, been able to address verticality in more central or valued neighbourhoods, by studying luxury buildings where we can observe processes of singularisation and social distinction through housing (Bonneval, forthcoming). Still other authors, such as Christopher Harker (2014), show a recurrence of the location of case studies on verticality in megacities or in sites of violent conflict.
In relation to these different works, the case studies we wish to present here broaden the category of sites analysed by focusing on places that show a dual profile. Our two case studies concern high-rise buildings that are rather valued, but located in urban environments that are thought, or felt, to be problematic. In the case of La Duchère, it is a stigmatised neighbourhood with a strong devaluation dynamic, while in the case of the Braşov Civic Centre, we are in an urban area of transit, flows and services, which is not very hospitable for housing.
The Tour Panoramique and the Barre des Érables buildings in La Duchère
The Duchère area, located in the north-west of Lyon in the 9th arrondissement, has been undergoing major upheaval for more than fifteen years. A "large complex" built at the end of the 1950s1, La Duchère was targeted from 2003 onwards by a "major city project" as part of the National Agency for Urban Renewal's programme targeting districts classified as ZUS2. It is thus undergoing a vast operation of demolition, reconstruction and rehousing of the populations living there. A major principle guides the transformation policy with a view to the social and economic upgrading of the district: the search for "social mix" in housing and "rebalancing" of social housing on the scale of the Lyon conurbation. To achieve this, a massive reduction in social housing rates was carried out: from 80% in 2003 to 54% at the end of the works. In concrete terms, the project aimed at the demolition of about 1,700 dwellings, most of which were located in high-rise buildings (of the bar type) with the replacement of an urbanism that is intended to be 'human-sized' based more on a policy of horizontal spatial densification instead of height.
Our investigation focuses on two apartment buildings, the Tour Panoramique and the Barre des Érables. The Tour Panoramique can be seen from the bottom of the hill and from several districts of Lyon (9th arrondissement on the side of the Vaise district, 4th and 6th arrondissements), which makes it an emblem of the district. Built between 1969 and 1972, it has 26 floors and 106 flats, from studio to T5. Nearly 80% of the inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique Tower own their own home.
Home ownership in La Duchère has primarily concerned the Tower and Les Érables flats. Les Érables building was built a few years before the Tour Panoramique, between 1964 and 1968. The 18-storey bar covers the alleys 250 to 259 bis of the rue des Érables, each comprising two apartment levels crossing each other. Les Érables has the particularity of having duplex flats on the 17th and 18th floors, as well as non-through flats located on the first basement with windows facing the Duchère hill. The bar is divided into two parts: a condominium and a rental.
The Tour Panoramique, Les Érables and other buildings in La Duchère (the "Water tower", etc.), were classified as "20th century heritage" in 2003. These two high-rise buildings preserve and enhance height, in contrast to the current trend of the urban planning policy of demolishing large bars in the district. Built on a hillside landscape, and therefore already high, these two buildings stand up to counter the stigma and as if to show that it is neither the verticality nor the number of dwellings in a building that is the crux of the problem in these neighbourhoods.
It is interesting to look at the dynamics of the rental/ownership regime in these buildings. For example, in the Tour Panoramique, there is only one rental flat left today that belongs to the Bullukian Foundation, which has owned many lots in the Tower over the past decades. It will soon be purchased from the landlord who wishes to relinquish it. This will make it easier for the long-time tenant to acquire it. Of the 106 flats in the Panoramic Tower, only one is social housing (there were many more in previous decades). There are also small studio flats in the Tour Panoramique, which occupy the first residential floors; the first floor is reserved for commercial premises. Above the first floors and in the larger flats, the residents have very different profiles. During the survey, I met students, teachers from the national education system (in office and retired), an airline pilot, a biologist, an architect, an agricultural engineer, a real estate agent, a single disabled adult foster family, a retired UN worker, etc. A resident on the top floor is also the representative of the trade union council and responsible for the security of the Tower. For this position, he is on duty in the lobby of the Tower, where the surveillance camera monitors are located and where he receives parcels. His presence reassures the inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique and gives them the feeling of having a barrier between the inside of the building and the Duchère district outside. The diversification of the Tower's inhabitants has taken place simultaneously with the renovation of the district. The recent construction of luxury towers or the renovation of heritage towers, such as the Tour Panoramique, are concomitant. Manuel Appert also notes this dynamic of change between the erection of high-rise towers and the effect of detachment from the neighbourhood in which they are located: 'at the same time as high-rise towers are being erected, social housing towers are being demolished, offering a striking scissor effect; order would thus be restored: the sky for the rich and the ground for the poor' (2016: 47). In La Duchère, the lessors of the rental flats, who had been present for several decades, quickly gave way to the co-owners.
The Civic Centre of Braşov
The context is very different in the city of Braşov in Romania. A large city in the country with 253,200 inhabitants, according to the last census in 2011, Braşov is among the first most important urban centres in economic terms. It is also considered the first tourist city in the country after the capital Bucharest. The Civic Centre district, still named Hidromecanica after the former factory that used to exist here, has undergone very significant changes over the past 50 years. It was the target of a massive demolition project in the 1980s, which included mostly houses, but also a large open-air market, shops and cafés, a cinema, a kindergarten, a school complex (primary and secondary) and other places. The demolitions and reconstructions have also destroyed the old street pattern, and it is impossible to reconstruct it today once in place, which says a lot about the power of these projects to change the face of an urban area. Since the 2000s, the demolition of the Hidromecanica industrial area has been added in several waves.
The demolitions carried out during the communist regime were to make way for a major project to transform this urban area by building a "civic centre" here. The reasons for the appearance of this type of project, present in many other cities in Romania, and the implementation of this programme in Braşov are rather complex and time-consuming to trace here. We can briefly note that the civic centres in Romania were an urbanistic technology that responded to a will of the communist regime from the 1970s onwards to completely redesign the society, putting forward the cult of the dictator and, among other things, a new model of organising power at the spatial level by strengthening the forms of control and centralisation. Very often the construction of these civic centres required massive demolition operations, as for example in Braşov, where the demolished spaces in the mid-1980s were to make way for a few administrative and cultural buildings, mostly high-rise buildings and a large public square that would host the large parades and public gatherings organised on the occasion of the dictator's visits to the city. With the fall of the communist regime in 1989, very few of the intentions of this urban project were realised, including the construction of a few high-rise buildings (12 to 14 storeys). The appearance of these buildings along the main boulevard produced a significant contrast with the existing urban landscape, which was rather low-rise (houses and a few four-storey buildings), and, above all, with the large, almost empty surrounding area, which had been left abandoned for a long time.
Later, from the 2000s onwards, various building sites followed one another in this area, in an urban landscape that became very eclectic. Thus, these high-rise buildings are now in the vicinity of the old houses that escaped demolition, but now also in the vicinity of banks, a church, a Mall, car parks, a park, other administrative buildings, playgrounds for young children or teenagers. In place of the industrial area Hidromecanica, a new construction site was recently completed with the construction of a Mall and high-rise office buildings.
Concerning access to the flats in the high-rise buildings, it has been rather restricted since their construction (at the end of the communist regime and at the beginning of the 1990s) and until today.
In our interviews, many interlocutors stated that the high-rise buildings in the civic centre were built to house nomenclatura ('blocuri pentru nomenclaturisti'), which seems to have added value to these flats. Moreover, rents and charges are very expensive in these buildings, which benefit from large surfaces and stronger resistance systems against earthquakes, in addition to the added value given by the rumour that these buildings were originally intended for Securitate people: "These buildings were not made for us, the ordinary people!" An important criterion for choosing to live in these high-rise buildings in the central district along the boulevard was the rumour that they were built for the privileged members of the regime. Some go so far as to say, for example, that Building K was delivered to the residents with some of the windows closed (those facing the boulevard) to prevent the inhabitants from sticking their heads out of their windows when Ceausescu visited. There had to be complete trust in the occupants of these flats.
It is also in relation to this quality attributed to these buildings that people who participated in the 1989 revolution against the communist regime were rewarded with the possibility of buying in this area, as the new housing stock was public and controlled by the institutions of local power.
It should also be noted that these new high-rise buildings in the civic centre, especially those not completed in 1989, have been subject to real estate speculation. Although they were originally intended for housing, they were bought by some actors and later resold for office space. A certain business and enrichment from the initially public properties, as well as a significant phenomenon of corruption around land in this area, in which public authority actors have been the main beneficiaries, are dimensions denounced in several interviews.
The prestige and value of the high-rise apartment buildings are maintained and symbolically reiterated today by the public who live there: 'In our building live discreet people, people with important jobs: doctors, prosecutors, lawyers. The prefect even lived in our building" (P. P., 69, building C).
In conclusion, in the last years of the communist regime, access to housing in these high-rise buildings was conditioned by a system of relationships or loyalty to the government in power, or by working at the city's urban planning institute. Today, access to these buildings remains restricted, conditioned by a certain amount of economic capital, since these buildings are still very expensive in the city's housing stock.
1 At the end of the 1960s, La Duchère had 20,000 inhabitants, 80% of whom lived in social housing. This percentage was halved in 2006 (Rojon, 2014).
2 Zone Urbaine Sensible for Sensitive Urban Area (Editor’s note).
Politics of verticality and affordances of height
The valorization of verticality
Contribution by
Bianca Botea
Anthropologist, Assistant Professor at the University Lumière - Lyon 2 and Researcher at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Issues (LADEC)
Olivia Legrip
Postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at LabEx COMOD (Université de Lyon) and affiliated to the Institut supérieur d’étude des religions et de la laïcité (ISERL)
Download original version in French at the end of the text
For an introduction to this article, with the presentation of the two case studies, see For an ecological approach to high-rise living. An anthropological cross-section of two French-Romanian case studies.
Putting the two case studies (La Duchère in Lyon - France and the Civic Centre in Braşov - Romania) into perspective allowed us first of all to understand the importance of the historical configuration and the political intention in which high-rise housing construction projects are inscribed in order to approach the 'here and now' perspective of the ordinary practices of verticality. Although this imprint of politics and history gives a certain meaning to an urbanistic gesture and invites certain uses, it is interesting to observe the dynamics of these uses over time and to see the affordances1 This is the reason for the high-rise in various other contexts today.
In the city of Braşov in Romania, the policy of building high-rise housing must be seen in a general way, as elsewhere in Europe, in the context of the industrialisation of the cities, and the shortage of housing to accommodate the workforce that was arriving in the city. Here, high-rise buildings become a symbol of modernity, but this modernity does not have the same face in a very rural country in the midst of a dictatorship, compared to the urbanistic projections and programmes in Western Europe. We can therefore note some additional issues implied by this policy of verticality in Eastern European regimes. In Romania, the planning and urbanistic policy was a tool to create a new society by means of very aggressive urbanisation strategies up to the destruction of old districts in the city and the countryside. As for high-rise urbanism, it must also be seen in this new political and ideological framework. As some authors show, "collective housing was an instrument for maintaining and controlling the New Man. (...) The central idea behind the process of rebuilding cities, of increasing population density through vertical expansion, was the regime's desire to leave its mark for an indefinite period. The second reason, never declared, was the idea of ensuring the strictest control of the population, by concentrating it into the smallest possible areas2." In Romania under the Ceausescu regime, high-rise housing not only has a social reason related to housing policy and is not only a symbol of modernity, but it is also a spatial instrument of control.
In the Civic Quarter in particular, the new high-rise buildings built at the end of the 1980s and put into use after the fall of communism, break from the rather low-rise regime in place and participate in this desire to radically change the image of the cities and society.
This policy is also a reflection of the dreams of grandeur and the cult of the dictator. Some of our interviewees who were urban engineers in the former city planning institute (from the communist era) mentioned in the interviews that the height of the buildings on the boulevard was perfect for displaying large portraits of the dictator when his visits were organised in the city, at the time of large public gatherings.
It is interesting to observe that this quality of building height becomes an affordance for other purposes after the fall of communism, in a market society that gains the field of vision everywhere in urban space. The height thus serves as a good support for large advertising billboards transforming the urban landscape and its ambiences which have become more loaded with visual stimuli, in a sound environment already overloaded by the explosion of the number of private cars and road traffic. We can look at another interesting dimension concerning the use of height in advertising displays, namely its economic function, including in a production and circulation of resources at the level of the co-ownership of these buildings. Some of the people we spoke to mentioned the direct benefits of these displays for the families who agreed to have their flats included in the project, as well as the benefits for the co-ownership, which were reinvested in work on the building's common areas.
"You could see the difference as soon as you walked into some of the alleys and entrances [of the building]. Some of them were better maintained, the hall and staircase had been painted, the advertising on the walls brought in a bit of money and it was easier to finance the work. Because people find it difficult to finance these works. But there are people who refused these posters." (L.M., Block K resident)
It is also interesting to note that the changes in the road infrastructure in this area of the civic centre, with the switch to one-way traffic, has stopped this advertising use of these buildings’ walls. In this new configuration, they no longer had the right orientation and exposure to be in the optimal visual field of all passers-by. The question of urban environments or configurations of high-rise living, which we mentioned in the article For an ecological approach to high-rise living. An anthropological approach crossed with two case studies from France and Romania, makes sense here. This example shows that verticality is not a value in itself, nor simply a social construction, but that it is made up of material environments and social projections adjusted through practice. Thus, several dimensions come together and give a use value to the height which explains its variations or affordances: a political or ideological context which is itself adapted and readjusted in place, decisions on the development and organisation of traffic in the city, the physical and architectural qualities of buildings, economic interests or individual or collective relationships to advertising practice, and neighbourhood dynamics.
We would also like to focus here on the dynamics of living in the Civic Centre area from the construction of these first high-rise buildings. We can thus note the role played by this first urbanistic gesture of verticality in the transformation over time of the ways of living in the neighbourhood and of the relationship of individuals to height. Thus, these buildings, built in the context of the communist regime for the reasons mentioned, create an 'antecedent' after the fall of communism and this environment constitutes an affordance for the appearance of other vertical constructions such as banks, and more recently a mall and office spaces.
While for the residents of the buildings located in the direct vicinity of the mall the height provided the possibility of contemplating the city and its undulating landscape, the advent of this project has removed this possibility, by bringing into the field of vision cranes and a disturbing noisy environment, as well as a lot of pollution generated by the construction site.
In this context, the high-rise living in general is becoming a strongly devalued element underlined by some interlocutors, who are unhappy with the arrival of an inappropriate "gigantic" construction, which is also a mall. This height is now thought of in connection with these new constructions, and it is described by some as a "disease" that is taking hold in this urban area, which is destroying its balance in terms of living, as an area historically occupied by houses or a lower height regime.
Other elements are added to this. While before the construction site, height is evoked by these residents as a possibility that gives access to nature in the city (to contemplate the landscape and get closer to nature), a classic discourse present in the various research works on high-rise living, the restructuring of the neighbourhood and the new constructions refer to a height that now, looked at from below, hide nature, block the landscape of the city’s hills, the emblem of Braşov. "It's a horror what happened" some residents of the area go so far as to say, unlike other city residents who are happy with the arrival of a second mall in the city, where they can shop or socialise.
This example shows the role of certain high-rise buildings (designed for housing) in the dynamics of a neighbourhood, or even the city. At the same time, we can note these environmental configurations generated or recomposed by the verticality which, in return, requalifies it, gives it a certain meaning and value.
One last element will hold our attention here. It relates to the dynamics of living in this urban area. We have noticed that it is also changing with the increasing installation of office space (especially notaries' and lawyers' offices) in these high-rise buildings intended for housing, or by strategies for buying flats in order to rent them out.
In some high-rise buildings in the civic centre, offices are increasingly taking up space. This cohabitation is generally deplored, especially by the presence of notary offices in these buildings:
"In our building the offices occupy up to 40% of the total flats. They attract numerous clients, especially when they are Tziganes who come in large families to solve a problem, smoke in the corridors, stick gum on the carpets with cigarette holes, and clutter up the residents' passageways when the lift is not working and we are obliged to pass through them." (D.L. 68 years old, building K)
Certain offices and professions are preferred to others according to the amount of foot traffic they generate (for example, a lawyers' office is preferable to a notary's office). The residents of some stairwells resist the installation of these office spaces in their buildings, but others also mention the advantages of this cohabitation, such as the participation of these units in the costs required by rehabilitation work in the building, knowing that some property owners refuse to pay and block the progress of the work. Sometimes these works are carried out with the contribution of only a few residents and all the office flats, generating a saving of resources in the neighbourhood.
Finally, another recent cohabitation, which generates tensions in the living spaces, is the conversion of some flats into hotels or Airbnbs. In one of the buildings where we conducted our survey, two floors were occupied by flats for this purpose, inspiring ill will among neighbours. It is generally the noise and the feeling of insecurity created by the presence of these "strangers" in the building that are regularly mentioned by the inhabitants.
To sum up, from a financial and symbolic point of view, the value of these high-rise flats is still relevant today, but a new trend is emerging. These buildings seem to be gradually losing their value as living space and gaining in investment and service value, while the value of living space is increasingly projected in the return of living at ground level, in a house, in the metropolitan area.
We have said to ourselves many times: 'One day the offices [the flats rented for offices] will kick us out'. We have three entrances to this building. The owners of ours are more conservative, we didn't want to sell to the offices, but the others did. (...) Before, all the flats in the alley had to give permission [for office space], now it's only the immediate neighbourhood. The article of law has been changed (...) Maybe it's normal that businesses grow like mushrooms. Maybe in the long run people will rent out their flats to offices and live in a house elsewhere. Today, after years of building houses, I would like to build one for myself. A low house, with a chimney, very simple.
Living in these high-rise buildings in the direct vicinity of the centre, where not everyone can afford to live, loses interest compared to the desire to leave these collective dwellings to live in single-family houses and to live at ground level and closer to nature. Residential mobilities to the outskirts of the Braşov metropolitan area have intensified in the context of the last two decades, and the pandemic context has shown an increase in the number of house purchases in the vicinity of the city. This trend of valuing ground level living over height is highlighted in other work. In his research on luxury apartment blocks in Lyon built in the 1960s, Loïc Bonneval and Aurélien gentil showed that higher floors are more expensive to buy for the light and landscape they offer, yet ground floor flats in these skyscrapers are just as sought after, giving their residents the feeling of being closer to a home lifestyle while living in the city. The author also noted that some of his interviewees put certain qualities of height, such as the view, into perspective against other disadvantages, such as the heat in summer and the wind in the cold seasons (See the contribution The valorization of verticality on this website).
In the high-rise buildings discussed in Braşov, this preference to return to a low-rise living regime must also be seen as a desire to leave the concrete, especially a way of life in a building that borders the main boulevard. Some residents complain that their children have grown up and socialised in flats because of the long construction period after the demolitions and because of the congestion of the communal spaces at the bottom of the buildings by cars, as the building's car parks are located here. In front of these buildings there is no transition space between the public pavement of the main boulevard and the entrances, and the back part is congested with cars.
This devaluation of the high-rise living takes place in an environmental configuration, resulting among other things from an urban planning of the 1980s based on the principle of spatial densification of buildings, an explosion of the number of private cars after the fall of communism in a city lacking infrastructure for this purpose, the inconvenience of building sites prolonged by a lack of requalification of the urban spaces concerned.
In a very different context, Anne Raulin's work on Manhattan showed a similar idea, highlighting the importance of the treatment of verticality in an environmental configuration. Verticality in itself cannot qualify and give particularity to the city, nor even the Manhattan skyline for New York City, but rather the inscription of this verticality in a particular environment: 'This insular exception manifests itself with unprecedented force in the architectural dimension: it is commonplace to speak of the Manhattan skyline, but it owes much of its magnificence to its intensity created by the insular delineation that densifies the construction and intensifies the competition' (Raulin, 2006: 473).
To return to one of the ideas formulated earlier, on the need to situate historically and politically the birth of vertical urbanism and to follow the evolution of representations of high-rise living over time, we can now look at the case of La Duchère. High-rise construction in this district began in a context of housing needs with the factories of Vaise and the repatriations from Algeria in the 1960s: high buildings such as bars and towers were also seen as a symbol of modernity when compared to dilapidated flats, for example in the centre of Lyon. But the representations of these dwellings, and we can also say of verticality, have changed with a gradual devaluation of the district in the 1980s until a strong stigmatisation leading to an urban renewal policy nowadays. However, it is interesting to observe that a reversal of the stigma is taking place in order to value the verticality as a quality habitat, notably because of the view it offers. The first inhabitants of these buildings were confronted with an imposed verticality (notably due to the need to house large populations quickly) whereas the new purchasers of the high floor dwellings compose their dwelling around the idea of a desired height, which involves emphasising the view.
Today the inhabitants of the Panoramic Tower are fuelling the spirit of competition between the towers of Lyon. They insist on being the first inhabitants of Lyon to occupy such a high residential tower, and persist in pointing out to me in opposition to the new high rise towers in the Confluence district1 : "we are still the highest in Lyon despite the Confluence!" a resident of the 8th floor of the Panoramic Tower and former tenant of the 16th floor of the Érables bar proudly remarks to me. The exchange continues with the topographical particularity of the Duchère, in short, even if an apartment building has more floors than the Panoramic Tower, given the hill, their flats will remain the highest in Lyon. This height is nowadays an affordance for visits to the district, especially on local heritage days when the roof of the Panoramic Tower is open to visitors. This roof, which is usually inaccessible to the inhabitants, apart from access for the technical maintenance of the Tower, is very popular with the people of Lyon who want to take panoramic photographs of the city. Occasional requests for access to the roof are made to the co-ownership manager by young people from Lyon or the Duchy who wish to take photographs to feed their social networks by showcasing themselves in an unobstructed and unknown landscape.
In this contribution we have tried to highlight the importance of grasping verticality in a diachronic dimension by showing the evolution over time of its representations and affordances, specific to situations and times.
References
CULICIU Cristian, 2015, “Urbanizare și sistematizare urbană în România Comunistă”, in A. Macavei & D. M. Dăian (dit.), Fragmente din trecut. Tinerii cercetători și istoria, pp. 317-331, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană.
GIBSON James J., 2014, 1ère édition 1979, Approche écologique de la perception visuelle, édition Dehors.
MOLLÉ Geoffrey, APPERT Manuel et MATHIAN Hélène, 2019, « Le retour de l’habitat vertical et les politiques TOD (Transit Oriented Development) dans les villes françaises : vers une intensification urbaine socialement sélective ? », Espace populations sociétés [En ligne], n°3, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eps/9256 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eps.9256. View on HighRise website
RAULIN Anne, 2006, « Manhattan comme une île », Ethnologie française, n°3 Vol. 36, p. 467-474. DOI : 10.3917/ethn.063.0467. URL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-ethnologie-francaise-2006-3-page-467.htm
1 The term affordance, borrowed from the perceptual psychologist James Gibson (2014, 1st edition 1979) James Gibson, is used in many ecological approaches to the city, and refers to a practical availability of certain elements of the environment in a given context and for a specific activity.
2 Culiciu, C. (2015). Urbanizare și sistematizare urbană în România Comunistă. În A. Macavei & D. M. Dăian (co.), Fragmente din trecut. Tinerii cercetători și istoria (pp. 317-331). Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană. We thank Cătălina Rezeanu, researcher at the Transilvania University in Braşov, for her participation in this research and for this reference.
Wealthy housing estates in Lyon
The valorization of verticality in Lyon
Contribution by
Bianca Botea
Anthropologist, Assistant Professor at the University Lumière - Lyon 2 and Researcher at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Issues (LADEC)
Olivia Legrip
Postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at LabEx COMOD (Université de Lyon) and affiliated to the Institut supérieur d’étude des religions et de la laïcité (ISERL)
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Spatial scales of high rise-living: the flat, the building, the neighbourhood and beyond
We all live in places, but we only inhabit some of them. Dwelling refers to the construction of a relationship of proximity and intimacy with an environment and in this sense, it is different from the simple fact of residing or housing (Paquot, 2007). Dwelling is based on the production of 'a familiar use of the world in which a sense of inhabiting (one's own doorstep, building, neighbourhood) is maintained, which crosses the threshold of the household and may concern, for example, certain public places in the city' (Breviglieri and Trom, 2013: 401).
In our survey on living in high places in the city of Braşov in Romania and in La Duchère in Lyon, we wondered whether our interlocutors were building a relationship of living with their building or neighbourhood, or whether they were simply residents of these places. More specifically, it is the question of the spatio-temporal scales of inhabitation that concerned us, since it is possible to live in a building, a neighbourhood, a city... and not to live in them. In the first part of this article, we will examine the scales of this spatial anchoring of inhabiting and then show that this dimension of spatial experience necessarily involves a relationship to time.
One way of approaching living is therefore to deal with the question of familiarity and the links (social, emotional, etc.) that individuals establish with their living environment.
In the various works carried out on verticality, some authors highlight a social distance observed in these buildings, while other authors show, on the contrary, that forms of proximity and sociability are not lacking in the life of these buildings (Ghosh 2014, Baxter, 2017, Bonneval and Gentil on this website). This proximity can even be very strong in some cases, as S. Ghosh's research in housing located in the outskirts of Toronto shows that there is a phenomenon of 'neighbourhood in height' at the scale of the building. The building becomes a microcosm, a city within a city, which provides the various functions of commerce, work, sociability, education, etc. for the Bangladeshi residents living there (Ibid.).
Christopher Harker (2013) highlights another interesting case, in the city of Ramallah, where social ties are not built on the vertical scale of the building since the residents of these buildings spend little time here. Nevertheless, important links are established through horizontal mobility, which takes place through the circulation networks of these residents between the city and the countryside (for supplies, for family reasons, etc.) through the use of shared taxis.
We explored this question of sociability in the high-rise buildings of our two case studies, in the cities of Braşov in Romania and Lyon (La Duchère) in France.
In the Civic Centre of Braşov, the profile of the residents of the high-rise buildings located on the main boulevard1 tends to concern highly educated professional categories and/or with an above-average standard of living, which, according to our interlocutors seems to have had an impact on sociability and neighbourhood practices. According to them, this has led to fewer people getting to know each other within the building and to little participation in the neighbourhood (e.g. participation in co-ownership meetings).
I feel nostalgic about the neighbourhood where I used to live (Triaj). But it was more peripheral, a different social milieu. Here we have as neighbours doctors, university professors, office colleagues, former university colleagues... The relationship with the neighbours is very different, respectful relationships, we are not quarrelsome, but we are not socialised, we have not made friendships. That doesn't mean that we didn't ring each other's doorbells if we needed to. But before we had friends, simple, unpretentious people. In Triaj, if I needed an onion for the kitchen I would go to the neighbour's, here I wouldn't dare. So, with the neighbours, we only see each other if we meet by chance, otherwise not. (...) There are only less than 20% left of the original neighbours today the majority of people who live here are tenants (...)" (S.P2. 62 years old, building K).
The residents of these buildings therefore live in their flats but not really in the building as they do not invest in the neighbourhood scale. However, a form of recognition and a feeling of collective belonging to a community of neighbours are experienced outside the neighbourhood, in places where people meet accidentally, for example at the church, at the bus stop opposite their building, at the market, etc.. In these public places, the neighbour becomes that 'familiar stranger' to quote Goffman, and we could say that the same is true of the neighbourhood.
However, there are exceptions to these forms of social distance in the building, especially within the sociability of the elderly or in connection with mutual aid practices with them. When mobility outside the building becomes problematic for them, two neighbours meet weekly and spend time in the closed balcony from where they can look out over the city and tell each other their stories.
Our two interlocutors also receive visits from some of their neighbours on the landing for a one-off errand or to drink coffee and discuss the latest information on the progress of the Mall construction site and its effects (destruction of trees, changes to pavements and bus stops, etc.) or on current events at national level.
Unlike the high-rise buildings of the Braşov Civic Centre, where living is mainly on the scale of flats and the neighbourhood and less on the scale of neighbourhoods, in La Duchère the neighbourhood is not the scale of living for all the residents. The rather central position of the civic centre in the city, located in a space that is a hub for travel and a concentration of services (market, Mall, station, administrations, schools, etc.) explains why this neighbourhood scale is strongly invested in Braşov. This does not mean, however, that a peripheral position alone generates a relationship of residence rather than of living. To illustrate this, we will return to the example of the Duchère district.
The ethnography carried out in the Tour Panoramique and the Érables building shows precisely two types of relationship between the residents and their living space. On the one hand, a certain number of people from Duchère live in the district and rarely leave it. The vast majority of them have been living in La Duchère for several decades (some of them since it was built) or were born there. Historically, this was the dominant dimension. On the other hand, for others, La Duchère has the aspect of a "dormitory district", in which the residents do not live, do not consume, do not walk or work there. These residents do not consider themselves to be "Duchérois"; they have recently been living in a flat that they bought here for the view and the high floor, but not for the neighbourhood. They live in La Duchère, but actually live in the neighbouring communes: they have jobs in Lyon, and their children go to school in Champagne au Mont d'or or Ecully. This trend, which changes - or annihilates - the relationship with the district, emerges above all with a part of the new arrivals who often did not know the district before the urban renovation plan. However, this picture is not so homogeneous either, since some newcomers to the neighbourhood are involved in collective projects such as the shared gardens, in search of building links and putting down roots here.
Memory and the experience of time in high-rise living
The transition from the act of residing to the fact of living implies a relationship of familiarity and intimacy with space, in other words an experience that is expressed through a particular relationship to time and continuity. While height has been looked at in particular from the perspective of the spatial question - and especially by geographers before other social scientists - the temporal dimension has been less explored in the work on verticality.
Although the importance of the temporal dimension is mentioned in some of the work on this topic, it is not addressed explicitly and in a 'thick description' (Geertz, 1998).
Anne Raulin's work on the city of Manhattan (1997), among others, is an exception here, although it does not address the dimension of inhabitation that interests us here. This work provides an original reflection on the role played by the Manhattan skyline, by the abstract toponymies of the streets or by the topography, in the construction of a singularity of the city of New York, more precisely a paradoxical role of "anti-memory": "An anti-memory that has made it possible to contain the upwelling of the collective and historical past and has allowed the advent of the imagination, without any constraint towards the future. But an imagination that takes its liberties with the past, but without leaving it, breaks it down, decontextualises it, reinvents it as it pleases (e.g. the styles of houses, architecture, neighbourhoods, etc., all of which refer in a new way to this multicultural heritage, to a diversity of groups and influences). A collective imagination that subordinates memory and history, whereas in France it is annexed to them. (...)” and which 'allows not an eternal return to the same but an eternal return of the new' (Raulin, 1997: 221).
Closer to questions of inhabitation, other anthropological studies have addressed the memorial narratives of the inhabitants of social housing in the context of the demolition of the "Grands ensembles" (Morovich, 2014; Botea, 2014). These works highlight a discrepancy between the memorial issues envisaged in the context of urban renewal by the actors carrying out the urban project and the logics of habitation and attachment of the people (Botea, 2014)3. If the experience of time is a central dimension in the analysis of these works, as well as the question of urban change, less emphasis is placed here on an approach to verticality.
Other works that explicitly focus on living in heights, such as those by Richard Baxter (2017) and Loïc Bonneval and Aurélien Gentil, approach the historical dimension in the relationship to verticality from a different angle. Loïc Bonneval proposes an analysis of the evolution of the representations of height in luxury buildings in Lyon from the point of view of people's residential trajectories and their accounts of the experience of living in these buildings. As for Richard Baxter (2017), his research on living in high-rises also proposes to integrate a sensitive approach to understand this phenomenon, a more phenomenological approach centred on emotion and perception, but the question of memory and the experience of time are ultimately too little addressed in his work.
We wish to extend these various contributions in two ways. On the one hand, we will rely on an anthropological, sensitive and ecological approach to understand the experience of height, as well as on one of the representations of the residents of these buildings. A varied methodology has enabled us to carry out this type of exercise: observations and interviews in people's homes, the creation of commented itineraries by accompanying people on their daily journeys, sound recordings and 'on-board' videos (made by the people). This methodology allowed us to explore in greater depth elements that had been little explored in previous work, such as body memory in the relationship to height and the pragmatic dimension of sight. These tools have also made it possible to re-examine the question of the spatio-temporal anchoring of dwelling and to broaden these scales to better understand the experience of dwelling and its narratives. We will show that the practices of living in heights and its representations must be analysed in a spatial and historical perspective that goes beyond the experience of living in these buildings or in the city. The spatio-temporal anchorage is diffuse and extended in time and space, through the long memory of the inhabitants or their families.
Living in the place before you even live there
A first dimension that we wish to address here is linked to the importance of attachments and the feeling of familiarity with places, which determine the choice of places of residence. We will show that this feeling of 'presence' in places and this feeling of inhabiting are built even before actually living in these places. The relationship to height is also directly influenced by this past experience.
Marcel was a fireman at the Duchère fire station (since 1966), and in this context, he began to walk around the Tour Panoramique when it was only a building site. Indeed, when the workers were not occupying the façades, the firemen organised access exercises through the outer walls and abseiling, or, when the stairwells were available, sports training sessions were organised there. When Marcel and his wife retired in 1988, they had to leave their accommodation in the barracks and quickly decided to buy a large flat on the 24th floor of the Tower, with which they felt very familiar. Given his background, this inhabitant born in the 1920s becomes for the residents of the Tour Panoramique the memory of the neighbourhood and the building. The links with his neighbours in the Tower are all the stronger because he lives in a flat on a very high floor and for several years now, he and his wife, both in their nineties, have not been able to leave their home. The height amplifies the impression that the couple is locked up at the top of the Tower, but the solidarity of the neighbours compensates for this loss of autonomy and the feeling of isolation. We have already highlighted this aspect of peer support in high-rise buildings with the elderly in the case study of the Braşov Civic Centre.
The trajectory of Marcel and his wife is interesting in that it shows that these inhabitants already felt familiar with the Tower even before they lived there, through their experiences during interventions related to the fire station. Marcel was already experiencing the Tower before he lived there. In her study on La Duchère, Sarah Rojon (2014) noted a similar idea, when she highlighted the familiarity that 'new' arrivals in the neighbourhood already had with these places. The author shows that many of the 'new' arrivals in the neighbourhood (for home ownership and settlement in the new housing following urban renewal) are in part former inhabitants of the neighbourhood. They re-establish themselves in this neighbourhood which they know and have experienced, in an official dwelling in the fire station, or as a child in the family flat, as we will also see in the following example.
When height awakens the senses and the body's memory
Danielle arrived in La Duchère from Algeria with her parents and, as a teenager at the time, discovered France from a high floor of one of the Mille bars in the large La Duchère complex, a bar that has since been destroyed. Since her arrival, she has always lived in La Duchère. Through the interviews with her, we were able to understand how her relationship to the view and to height is conditioned by her Algerian and French residential trajectory. From the first family flat of her adolescence, she keeps the frustrated memory of a view obstructed by the Barre des Érables, which faced her and masked Lyon. As an adult, Danielle married Pierre and they bought a flat in Les Érables, in the same bar that had been so reviled by her family for years because it obstructed their view. The purchase of this flat gave Danielle the security of home ownership and the view. She tells me with a smile that decades later she is still amazed that she lives in this bar, which seemed as awkward as it was inaccessible when she was a teenager. This social upgrading is important to Danielle, especially since it was done without leaving the neighbourhood where she has always lived. Many residents of Les Érables mention as a major disadvantage of the living room balconies (facing Lyon) their exposure to the wind and the resulting problems of isolation due to the heat in summer. However, Danielle's story leads her to take the opposite position to her neighbours. She refuses to install double glazing and likes to feel the warm wind blowing into her living room day and night, whether the shutters are open or closed. In fact, she says that she feels sensations from her childhood and perceives again the warm wind that used to blow in the courtyard of the house where she lived in Algeria. The experience of height is part of a historical depth that takes Danielle back to before her arrival in La Duchère, when she did not live on a high floor. This feeling of height goes back to the starting point of her residential trajectory and awakens her bodily memory through the sensation of the warm wind.
When height recalls painful experiences of communism
In the case study in the city of Braşov, we were able to observe that the temporal scale is an important horizon to take into account when analysing the relationship to verticality. Here the height of the buildings is not necessarily valued because it often echoes bad memories of the communist period: memories of lifts that often broke down because of electricity failures, a common currency during the last decades, or of water that did not go up to the upper floors. In general, the so-called "communist" blocks, which were built during this regime and which represent the majority of housing construction, have a bad reputation. The current tendency of the population to move to new buildings in order to escape the 'communist blocks' is exploited by property developers who develop new districts, largely with high-rise residences. A good illustration here is the peripheral district "Avangarden". It should be noted, however, that even in these new districts, height is now less in demand by those who buy flats here, and developers are returning to the four-storey buildings they started with. Many problems of malfunctioning are reported by residents and are attributed to the large number of flats in the formula "many flats, many problems".
The view from above: a spatio-temporal approach
The importance of a spatio-temporal approach to living at height leads us to look at the question of view from this angle, which is an essential part of the work on verticality. Analyses concerning the relationship to the view have not dealt much with the temporal dimension. A few works underline the importance of this aspect. For example, according to Baxter (2017: 345), sight is an "embodied and multi-sensory experience" that calls upon the degree of knowledge and background of the residents. As Loïc Bonneval also shows (see his article on the website), knowledge and social and professional trajectories influence residents' ways of looking. According to the author, the view is informed by a "familiar, not to say educated, look at the landscape, and a spontaneous, immediate, and therefore less valued, reaction to the view".
Through our analyses in La Duchère and Braşov, we propose to extend this work by addressing other aspects of this temporal anchoring of the view, in particular the question of bodily memory. In another step, we will pay attention to another ubiquitous aspect in approaches to sight, the perspective of escapism and singularity often associated with discourses on elevated sight. If we have encountered this type of discourse in our interviews, we will show that the view from above does not only generate a feeling of escape, but it also has another, more pragmatic function, of connection to the rhythms (and temporalities) of the city and the neighbourhood.
Remembering a distant height
The practices of high-rise living are based on sensory and everyday dimensions, as we have just seen, but they are also part of residential trajectories and previous experiences of living in other cities and in contact with other verticalities.
For example, Monique arrived in Lyon in 2010 after spending several years in New York. She opted for a rental on the 7th floor of the Tour Panoramique. She had lived in Villeurbanne for 5 years in the 1980s but did not know La Duchère. She wanted to move to Paris, but her retirement did not allow her to do so, so she chose to return to Lyon. Chance led her to La Duchère. While still in New York, and in anticipation of her return to France, Monique joined a mailing list for expatriates and got in touch with the owner of the Tour Panoramique flat. On receiving the photographs, she decided to visit the flat quickly as she "fell in love with the angled openings", she says. At the foot of the Tower for the first time, she looked at it like the New York towers: "but it's tiny! 26 floors is not high... well... it's all relative"; she perceived it to be quite high but very narrow, not very posh. This image of the high city was transposed to La Duchère, because Monique lived on the first floor (in Queens and then in Brooklyn), as high floor rentals were too expensive in New York.
She said that she discovered burnt cars in the neighbourhood shortly after she moved in, which prompted her to contact the landlord to consider leaving because these events reminded her of the trauma of 11 September 2001, when she was living in New York and saw the World Trade Center towers collapse from the UN building where she worked. She associates the demolition of the Barre des Mille with the return of calm to the neighbourhood. Still referring to the New York skyline, Monique lists the illuminated vertical features that she observes at night: the Fourvière basilica, the Eiffel Tower, the Part-Dieu Tower and the Oxygen Tower, like "ersatz New York". During the day, she also looks through binoculars at the Alps and Mont Blanc, that "enormous iceberg". Monique's New York experience has structured her relationship with the Duchère district and with heights, through the lights of the city and the noise of urban works.
Double perspective of the elevated view: 'above ground' practices and anchoring in the city
It is first of all a feeling of escape, of being "out of the ordinary" and "out of the everyday", offered by the view from above that is described by our interlocutors from La Duchère. This feeling is amplified in the context of urban renewal with the arrival of low-rise buildings.
The new inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique and the Barre des Érables have diversified the Duchère, but only in terms of height, which is a specificity of these two buildings, which are also heritage buildings4. Otherwise, the new inhabitants of this district often settle in the new blocks, which have a maximum of 6 floors. It is interesting to note that this variation in the height regime of the buildings reinforced with the urban renewal increases the feeling of difference between these ways of living - in high buildings and in the new blocks of lower construction - and amplifies the feeling of height by this comparison.
These feelings of isolation from the ground (and therefore from the neighbourhood) are put forward by the inhabitants through a staging of the view and the landscape. With the height, they no longer "touch the ground" (and here again stand out from the Duchère district, which is firmly rooted on the ground floor), they feel "on a cloud", have "the feeling of flying", of being "suspended". One autumn day, when Monique, a resident of the 7th floor of the Tour Panoramique, opened her shutters, she was confronted with a wall of fog that completely blocked her view: "I was alone in the world, it was an extraordinary impression and I said to myself: this is it, the Tower has taken off! On another occasion the fog started to roll in after the park, it looked like the sea was just behind it!” It should also be noted that this feeling of isolation allows some people to feel (or to be) sheltered from a stigmatised neighbourhood and the delinquency associated with it.
"Perception plays the role of a catalyst: the higher you are, the easier it will be to ignore the ground", notes Alexandre Chabardès, based on the discourses of the inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique (2018: 91). In our interviews too, many inhabitants of this building remarked that they felt protected, removed from the acts of incivility in the neighbourhood. They mention urban rodeos for some and burnt-out cars for others. One couple pointed out that they hardly hear the sirens of the police cars and fire engines and only find out what has happened the next day when they talk to the neighbours and go shopping nearby.
While height provides a feeling of escape and security from the various nuisances of the city and if it projects us into a space outside of time, we noticed that it could be just the opposite, a good connector to the spaces and rhythms of the city and to its daily life. It could thus play the role of a 'spatial switch' (Lussault, 2007) and temporal switch, connecting people to the different places and temporalities of the city.
In Braşov, our interlocutors from building K affirm that on Sundays they open the windows and thus participate in the Orthodox Christian mass in the neighbourhood, without the need to move, a mass now transmitted over the loudspeakers. On the one hand, the height accentuates the feeling of being cut off from the neighbourhood "downstairs" and the noise of traffic and the construction site. On the other hand, it also makes it easier to listen to desired sounds, such as those of the church, and connects these residents to a community of believers who may or may not be physically present at the church.
In the case of La Duchère, we were able to observe a similar phenomenon of connection from the top of the building to the rhythms of the city. A resident of Les Erables told us that over the years he has learnt to look from the balcony of the building towards the tunnel under the Fourvière hill every morning. He tries to see if the tunnel is blocked, which will allow him to adjust his preparation time before leaving for work (leaving earlier or later; enjoying or swallowing his coffee quickly). The view thus allows a better anchoring in the city through height and a better adaptation of the organisation of daily life.
In the high-rise buildings of the Civic Centre, the balconies also become a window to the city and a means of connection and participation in its daily rhythms for older people with mobility difficulties.
Selling the view and reinterpreting height
As we have shown elsewhere5, verticality is not a value in itself, it depends on the environmental configurations of the height. In the same way, the quality of the view which depends on the height is not an a priori value, given by the number of floors, it also raises the question of the angles of view and their amplitude. The Tour Panoramique presents various view angles due to its angular and cylindrical shape; the view is oriented in an angle of 54° for the T2 flats, and up to 108° for the T4. The spiked windows spread over the flat allow for more light than flats with a more classical architectural structure (including through-view) (see the recent ethnography by Chabardès, 2018: 87 and following). In the same way that the question of viewing angles arises for La Duchère, in the Braşov Civic Centre the exposure and orientation of the flats is essential not only for light and calmness for the residents, but also in relation to the attractiveness that these high-rise flats may have for advertising displays.
In the case of La Duchère, verticality appears through a housing policy driven by the housing shortage. The construction of the bars and then of the Tour Panoramique led to a high type of housing, which nevertheless favoured a link with the ground and nature through the generous spaces left free by the high urbanism. On the other hand, verticality is nowadays 'sold' in luxury buildings to offer a view (cf. Bonneval). Following this idea, the inhabitants of the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables are upgrading their flats by detaching them from the neighbourhood and attaching them to the view. A resident of the 8th floor of the Tour Panoramique opens up the view from the front door to the bay window of her living room so that her guests "dive into the view as they enter".
The question of the view, and more particularly the enhancement of the view, in the case of La Duchère, deserves to be considered in relation to the question of property value. Indeed, the real estate value of La Duchère presents two very distinct spaces, the Tour Panoramique and the Érables on one side, the rest of the district on the other. The particularity of these two buildings lies in the fact that they are heritage buildings, but above all in their great height, which offers an unobstructed view of Lyon (on the highest floors, of course, but also on the intermediate floors, given the position of the two buildings on the hillside). A real estate agent lives on the 17th floor, he bought his flat during the renovation of the Tower (concomitant with the renovation of the district). This flat was used as a warehouse for workers and had, among other things, gaping windows without glass. He bought it back for a pittance and turned it into a showcase for luxury high-rise living. Photographs of the panorama, a green wall in the living room or a jacuzzi under the angled windows (the particularity of the Tower's architecture) can be seen on the website of the family's real estate agency, which specialises in quality properties in the Monts d'Or region. A flat in the Tower, for sale at the time of writing, is described as follows:
"LYON 9 TOUR PANORAMIQUE DUCHÈRE AT THE GATES OF CHAMPAGNE AU MONT D'OR. [...] Located on the 19th floor of a high-rise building. The highest residence in France, labelled Patrimoine de France and designed by the architect F.R. Cottin in 1970. Come and enjoy a breathtaking view at an altitude of over 360 metres. [...] A fire safety service is present 24/7 in a first aid station located at the entrance of the building. 106 lots in the co-ownership [...]6".
The height, the view and the heritage value of the property for sale without taking the neighbourhood into consideration, although the advertisement insists on the security of the building. In the real estate offer, as in the accounts of Loïc Bonneval's interlocutors, it is possible to go to La Duchère for a building of modern architecture, classified as heritage (the Tour Panoramique for the ad, the Barre des Érables for buyers aiming for standing and an architect's building). Indeed, "if the view is often the most obvious theme through which the value of height is expressed, it is neither the only one, nor is it unequivocal: it can refer to ways of living, to the choice of housing, or even to a logic of positioning in relation to the neighbours" (Bonneval and Gentil, on this website). These two buildings in La Duchère (the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables) have retained an important value, despite the downward dynamic of the stigmatisation attributed to the Duchère district.
The towers (and bars) are thought of by the high floors for the inhabitants, in other words: being high up in La Duchère is no longer really being in La Duchère, according to some of our Duchère interlocutors, as the real estate advertisement also shows. The differentiation between dwellings (and inhabitants) is not made by location but by height (high floors vs. low floors), especially in the sub-neighbourhoods affected by the urban renewal. Social housing is associated with the lower floors and "luxury" flats are on the higher floors. Indeed, the renovation of the "Plateau" district in La Duchère has forced the removal of inhabitants who were living in social housing in the high floors of the destroyed bars. Thus, couples with several children who were living in T5 apartments on the 15th floor, for example, were then able to move into new flats in the new buildings with few floors, but as they were now retired, these couples were housed in T2 apartments on the 1st floor. They suffered a downward residential dynamic while the newcomers (from the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables) were able to "show off" by buying the so-called "view flats" and/or the duplexes.
Manuel Appert makes a similar observation and shows a dynamic of change between the appearance of high-rise buildings and the effect of separation from the neighbourhood in which they are built: 'at the same time as high-rise buildings are being erected, social housing towers are being demolished, offering a striking scissor effect; order would thus be restored: the sky for the rich and the ground for the poor7" (2016: 47).
If the association between a regime in height and economic and social capital is an element observed also in our investigation on the Tour Panoramique and Les Érables building, it is nevertheless to be relativised in other parts of the district, and on the Romanian field, in Braşov. This topographical dimension of height can generate topological effects(otherwise living spaces, particular links, separations etc.)8, however these effects are to be understood from a diachronic and ecological perspective, thus at the same time historical, situational and relational. Hence the importance of situating high-rise housing in the environmental configurations that ultimately give it meaning and confer a certain topology on height9.In the context of urban transformations where nature is giving way to concrete or the arrival of the shopping centres, we have noted a certain devaluation of high-rise housing, to the benefit of a revaluation in the city of ways of living in connection with nature and a return to the ground. Furthermore, the aspects we have developed here linked to body memories and to the daily and sensory experience of living highlight the fact that relationships to height are rather dynamic in a movement from top to bottom and vice versa, which once again invites us to a pragmatic and relational approach to height.
References
APPERT Manuel, 2016, Les formes de la métropole : du réseau à la canopée, de la mesure au paysage : Tours, skyline et canopée, Géographie. Mémoire final d’habilitation à diriger les recherches, Université Lyon 2, 293 p.
BAXTER Richard, 2017, «The High-Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London», International Journal of urban and regional research, DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12451.
BOTEA Bianca, 2014, « Expérience du changement et attachements. Réaménagement urbain dans un quartier lyonnais (la Duchère) ». Ethnologie française Vol. 44, no 33 : p. 461‑467.
BREGVIGLIERI Marc and TROM Danny, 2003, « Troubles et tensions en milieu urbain. Les épreuves citadines et habitantes de la ville », in Les sens du public : publics politiques et médiatiques, D. Céfaï et D. Pasquier (dir.), PUF, pp.399-416.
CHABARDÈS Alexandre, 2018, «Ressentir la verticalité : étude de cas de la Tour Panoramique de la Duchère», Master 2 thesis in anthropology, Université Lyon 2.
GEERTZ Clifford, 1998, «The Dense Description», Inquiry [Online], No. 6, URL: http://journals.openedition.org/enquete/1443; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/enquete.1443
GOSH Sumata, 2014, «Everyday Lives in Vertical Neighbourhoods: Exploring Bangladeshi Residential Spaces in Toronto’s Inner Suburbs», International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38.6, DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12170.
HARKER Christopher, 2014, «The only way is up? Ordinary Topologies of Ramallah», International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol.38.1, DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12094
LUSSAULT Michel, 2007, L’Homme spatial. La construction sociale de l’espace humain, édition du Seuil.
MOROVICH Barbara, 2014. « Entre stigmates et mémoires : dynamiques paradoxales de la rénovation urbaine », Articulo - Journal of Urban Research [Online], Special issue, n°5.
PAQUOT Thierry (ed.), 2007, Habiter, le propre de l’humain. Villes, territoire et philosophie. La Découverte.
RAULIN Anne, 1997, Manhattan ou la mémoire insulaire, Paris, Institute of Ethnology.
ROJON Sarah, «La rénovation de l’habiter dans le grand ensemble de la Duchère. Pour en finir avec la figure des ‘nouveaux habitants’», Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques [Online], 45-1 | 2014, online 31 July 2014, accessed 23 March 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/1132 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rsa.1132
1 We are referring to the three C blocks on Boulevard 15 Noiembrie and the K block on Boulevard Iuliu Maniu (where the Chamber of Commerce is currently located).
2 The first names used in this article have been changed.
3 For the actors behind the urban project, the memorial action is part of a heritage and archiving logic, or is used to mourn and move on to a new stage in the neighbourhood. For the inhabitants of the district, memory is rather an expression of the multiple attachments and links built over time within the neighbourhood, the district and indirectly to the original territories (Botea, 2014).
4 These buildings have been designated as 20th century architectural heritage.
5 See our two texts "For an ecological approach to height..." and "Politics of verticality and affordances of height" published on this site.
6 « LYON 9 TOUR PANORAMIQUE DUCHÈRE AUX PORTES DE CHAMPAGNE AU MONT D'OR. […] Situé au 19ème étage d'un immeuble IGH (Immeuble de Grande Hauteur). La résidence la plus haute de France, Labellisée Patrimoine de France et réalisée par l'architecte F.R. Cottin en 1970. Venez profiter d'une vue époustouflante à plus de 360 mètres d'altitude. […] Un service de sécurité incendie est présent 24/24 et 7 jours sur 7 dans un poste de secours implanté à l'entrée de l'immeuble. 106 lots dans la copropriété [...] ».
7 "At the same time as high-rise buildings are being erected, social housing towers are being demolished, offering a striking scissor effect; order would thus be restored: the sky for the rich and the ground for the poor' (2016: 47).
8 For this distinction between a 'topographic' and 'topological' approach to height see Christopher Harker (2014).
9 See our contribution For an ecological approach to high-rise living on this website.
Politics of verticality and affordances of height
Wealthy housing estates in Lyon
The valorization of verticality in Lyon
Sao Paulo: Verticalization timeline
São Paulo provides an historical perspective to our project, because it has been a laboratory of high-rise living in the global South with established high-rise developments. São Paulo underwent an early residential verticalization process when other metropolises verticalized the economic power through the erection of office skyscrapers. For over half a century residential verticalization, although uneven through time, never ceased. The city is home to more than 14,000 (mostly residential) high-rises (more than 10 levels or 30 meters high) in 2019 for a city of 11.25 million inhabitants (c. 23 million in the metropolitan area). This process created one of the most vertical landscapes in the world. The way residential verticalization has been created and is enhanced reinforces the social and spatial inequalities of the Brazilian society, the governance of verticality being based on a regulatory framework that sustains inequality in housing.
São Paulo, a city of heterogeneous territories, also allows “de-westernization” of the study of contemporary large cities, by taking into account the local political, economic, and cultural contexts (Robinson, 2006) and their consequences - therefore taking a “step aside” the usual Western way of analyzing cities, to work towards a decolonizing of urban theory and urban studies (Yiftachel 2009). Such a perspective allows to go go beyond the analysis of the process of construction of new (residential) high-rises as a sole agent of privatization, social segregation, and fragmentation/splintering urbanism in the sole light of developmentalist concepts such as globalization. Indeed, even if they are produced under converging globalization processes and modes of governance, residential high-rise processes reveal different types of local-global negotiations in the making of the neo-liberal city (Alves and Daitx, 2021).
Observations on Inclusiveness, Equality and Equity in the Urban Space in the city of São Paulo
Highrise Buildings Urban Tissue and Urban Regulation: some questions in São Paulo
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil : Highrise Project, microscales and narratives
Real Estate and Stakeholders’ Role in the Creation of Lifestyles: The Co-Production of Urban Spaces of Public and Private Life
COVID-19 Urban Form Digressions
Case Studies Cartographies
Verticalization Timeline
Urban Phenomena and Verticalities
Interview Highrise Project
Contribution by
Manoel Rodrigues Alves
Professor of architecture at the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade de São Paulo and researcher in LEAUC - Laboratório de Estudos do Ambiente Urbano Contemporâneo.
Maíra Daitx
PhD student at the São Carlos Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo (IAU / USP-São Carlos). She is a member of the Contemporary Urban Environment Studies Laboratory (LEAUC) and is part of the HighRise Living and the Inclusive City project (in partnership with the University of Lyon 2-France).
Territorial Heterogeneity. Narratives of Urban Segregation and Socio-spatial Practices: Pairaisópolis - Red Series. Source: Luciano Costa and Ricardo Pinto. Highrise Project Collection.
Resume
The mundialization process has led to significant transformations in the urban space, where new relations between public power and financial sectors have expanded the social base necessary for capital accumulation, thus contrasting with the reproduction of human life needs. In such a neoliberal context, where the State has opened up the command of the urban space production to flows and interests of the private market, decreasing its participation as the provider of the common good and, in many cases, reinforcing its role as the insurance of capital profit, questions on inclusiveness, equality and equity1, common to the fields of sociology and politics, have started to gain headway in talks on architecture and urbanism. One of the reasons for this discussion is most areas under urban transformation have been facing an uncertain future due to the lack of basic public services. Supported by urban laws, developers are occasionally exempt from responding to such needs, which are left in the hands of market competition and the offer-and-demand logic.
What demand and who does this market respond to? Whole neighborhoods have been created according to the enclave model, in which conveniences are drawn for indulging the tastes of their consumers. As such, those services are designed and located towards fulfilling the needs of homogenous groups not necessarily open to contact with others. Such urban samples, however, show no difference and heterogeneity, which are basic conditions of an equal urban space. Education, health and leisure are not offered to all classes of citizens, but to specific target groups. The right to the city regarding both human rights (e.g., housing, education, health, accessibility, mobility, etc.), which should (and could) be provided by the State, and political rights of being included in the production processes of the city (HARVEY, 2008) are far from being equal in the decision-making structures of the current politics. At best, some groups are included in discussions on transformations of their own neighborhoods – their own homogeneous and limited spaces –, but not on the ideals and means of production of their territories, cities, and urban space.
If urban inclusiveness, equality and equity (considering their differences) are a major concern from our time, we should set our eyes into their opposites, i.e., the forms of urban segregation and exclusiveness. By unveiling their aspects of capital reproduction2, relationships of power and social responses (good or bad), we can evaluate if we are creating (or even trying to create) more inclusive, equal or fair cities, questioning: To what extent are (or are not) speeches, urban policies and interventions related to the (re)production of a city characterized by intensifying social and spatial segregation for increasing urban inequality? What type of urban equity is eventually possible in a city where “[…] the characteristic resort of the globalised city involves an elementary principle of urban space: segregation”? (CASTRO ORELLANA, 2011:56). Can this movement be reversed in an era in which reinforced individual liberties, high competitiveness, lack of security, trust and hope (in institutions, in the future and in ourselves) are increasingly rising? In the next paragraphs, we intend to enlighten the reality of our particular context, i.e., the city of São Paulo, regarding the recent alterations in its urban laws and their consequences for the transformation of the urban landscape.
Keywords: Inclusiviness, equality, equity, urban space.
Contribution by
Manoel Rodrigues Alves
Professor of architecture at the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade de São Paulo and researcher in LEAUC - Laboratório de Estudos do Ambiente Urbano Contemporâneo.
Area 2, identification of new highrise residential buildings, 2000-2015. Source Centro de Estudos da Metrópole – Database and Google Earth. Produced by Luiana Cardozo.
RESUME
In the contemporary city, a cultural phenomenon that responds to parameters that point toward an era of transition, the urban space is a product and reproducer of the dynamics that guide its time; a living cultural space produced by social relations that are neither neutral, uniform nor exact, where the experience of belonging persists amid a group of transformations where the flow of local and global conditions seems to have an impact upon collective experience in the urban territory. In this context, where regulatory capitalism and entrepreneurial municipalities are participating in the promotion of singular urbanization processes to control the urban space, we analyse issues related to vertical urbanism in São Paulo.
In the contemporary scenario, residential high-rises are more than an architectural solution. Once a place for living, are now commodities of a global market where capital flows, fixed by developers (and municipalities), of a particular strategy of reproduction of the urban space: space as a business, a productive element and a condition of capital reproduction. In this process, urban space requires a new relation between the public power and the financial sectors, aiming not at the reproduction needs of the urban life but at expanding the social base necessary for the accumulation process.
This communication debates this theoretical framework in the context and hypothesis of the ongoing french-brazilian research "High-rise Living and the Inclusive City", presenting some preliminary results in São Paulo, Brazil, related to building typology, urban tissue, urban legislation and "false public spaces". São Paulo is a laboratory of high-rise living in the global South; its governance is facing intense pressures from the globalization of its real estate market that promotes ‘innovative’ spatialities and urban governance/management, privatization and transformations of the urban space. New dimensions and institutional networks that reconfigure territories tend to reveal the substitution of class/social divisions by lifestyles divisions.
KEY WORDS:
Highrise, urban transformation, urban regulation, innovative spatialities.
Contribution by
Camila Moreno
Architect and Urbanist, Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (IAU USP), Professor at the Universidade Paulista (UNIP), Brazil.
Luiana Carolina Cardozo
Architect and Urban Planner, Master's Student of the Postgraduate Program
in Architecture and Urbanism from the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (IAU-USP), Brazil.
Manoel Rodrigues Alves
Professor of architecture at the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade de São Paulo and researcher in LEAUC - Laboratório de Estudos do Ambiente Urbano Contemporâneo.
Heat maps (kernel) of the production of highrise buildings in São Paulo by period. Source: Highrise Project Collection
RESUME
Urban space is understood as a product and producer of the dynamics that govern its time, reflecting the contradictions of its production processes. These processes, promoting oppositions and tensions between domains, legalities, uses and urban practices, are usually conditioned by an articulation between the State and private agents, therefore demanding new interpretations of the established relationships. The ‘Highrise Living and the Inclusive City’ project investigates, focusing on São Paulo and Lyon, aspects of verticalization processes based on specific axes and scales of analysis, crossing methodological procedures that encompasses territorial and spatial analyzes, as well as. This communication mainly presents the results of the research in its smallest scales, observing also the construction of critical postrepresentational cartographies and spatio-temporal narratives.
KEYWORDS
Contemporary city, verticalization, production of the urban space, highrises.
France: A socially selective verticalization?
The return of residential towers in France
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
Contribution by
Maíra Daitx
PhD student at the São Carlos Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo (IAU / USP-São Carlos). She is a member of the Contemporary Urban Environment Studies Laboratory (LEAUC) and is part of the HighRise Living and the Inclusive City project (in partnership with the University of Lyon 2-France).
Manoel Rodrigues Alves
Professor of architecture at the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade de São Paulo and researcher in LEAUC - Laboratório de Estudos do Ambiente Urbano Contemporâneo.
Photo, people learn how to use scooters (recently released in Sao Paulo) of the brand Scoo. Both rides took place at Paulista’s Avenue. (Source: www.facebook.com/vitacon)
RESUME
Investment of private capital for the maintenance of public spaces has become a usual practice in cities, from large metropolises to smaller ones, with the counterpart of temporary or permanent branding. In some cases, private events are organized in these spaces, stimulating uses and practices conditioned by consumption, with the partnership of municipalities. How does this process become significant to the production of urban space, once investments in spaces of public life come from the same source as the spaces of private life? Are we witnessing a new form of build-in gentrification, of all-enclosed buildings signs of a growing exclusion in the so called ‘neoliberal’ entrepreneurial city?. Real estate and property developers have recently earned a great participation in the dissemination, reproduction and maintenance of certain urban practices in a territory previously not dominated by them: the public space. Thus, one wonders: Is this process representative of an attempt to create and reinforce certain urban lifestyles? In what ways do certain residential high-rise housing typologies dialogue with the spaces of public life, conditioning certain activities to or withdrawing them from it? Taking the city of São Paulo as a sample of this process, this article aims to explore aspects of the process of territorialization of these companies in urban public spaces, consequences to public life and to discuss the regulations that make this practice possible, as well as the relationship (and counter-relationships) of this type of “street marketing" with the high-rise residential buildings produced by them.
KEY WORDS:
Highrise, public spaces, street marketing and urban branding, real state market, process of absortion
Contribution by
Manoel Rodrigues Alves
Professor of architecture at the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Universidade de São Paulo and researcher in LEAUC - Laboratório de Estudos do Ambiente Urbano Contemporâneo.
Camila Moreno de Camargo
Architect and Urbanist, Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (IAU USP), Professor at the Universidade Paulista (UNIP), Brazil.
Urban network and percentage of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the municipalities of the state of São Paulo, Brazil (from May 25, 2020), with emphasis on the dispersion routes read from the main and secondary road systems. Source: Radar COVID-19, Faculty of Science and Technology, São Paulo State University (FCT/Unesp). Available at https://covid19.fct.unesp.br/mapeamento cartografico/
Resume
Urban life representations, citizen participation and sociospatial disaggregation patterns COVID-19, in urban areas, is associated with processes that indicate socio-spatial dynamics and practices in an urban morphology that, resulting from uneven urban development patterns, promotes serious health commitments to groups exposed to the risk of viral transmission. Through critical cartographies, based on public research databases, we question urban space transformation trends, urban morphology and living spaces - their nexuses with socioeconomic data, social vulnerability and support capacity. As a new layer, collaborative mappings promoted by diffuse entities and organizations are associated to significant aspects of urban reality. In view of the social isolation due to the pandemic COVID-19 we argue that critical cartographies and initiatives of citizen participation, can, on the one hand, be a counterargument to certain representations and contribute to a more effective reading of the transformations underway and, on the other hand, become an effective instrument for registering people’s perceptions and interpretations, as well as a tool for empowering people.
Keywords: Urban Morphology, urban transformation, Covid 19, citizen participation, critical cartography
Black Series
Red Series
BlaBlaBlaBla
White Series
Collages
Street View
We propose a timeline that graphically expresses not only quantitative and normative data but also social and cultural facts (maybe even more important to contextualize vertical urbanism). This image represents the Timeline of São Paulo city, throughout the research period (1985-2020), but the idea is that it can be replicated to other cities.
We aim at the identification of connections between the different categories of data. The elements analyzed were:
Click here to acces the timeline in the Miro platform.
Organized mostly in a chronological way, the Urban Verticalities in São Paulo StoryMap aims to present different urban aspects of the city of São Paulo in an intuitive and didactic form. It allows the viewer to have a quick and easy to understand overview of the most important processes that took place in the city and how they impacted its future. In addition, it relates the process of verticalization on a quantitative road with the main political and historical events during the constitution of the vertical city as it is known today. Some of the items are interactive in order to give the user closer contact with the different sides of this story.
It’s developed over the ArcGIS's StoryMap tool which is a platform full of utilities and ways of disposing content. While navigating through the site one gets to discover all that functionalities, making the experience a lot dynamic and interesting.
Interview given by Professor Manoel Rodrigues Alves, professor at the IAU to Jornal USP in 2019. To see it in full, go to here (in Portuguese).
"A group of researchers wants to know whether the verticalization of cities is really an important factor in providing social inclusion, and to what extent verticalization processes imply transformations in the urban fabric and its socio-spatial practices. The research, with the participation of USP's Institute of Architecture and Urbanism (IAU), in São Carlos, investigates aspects of different metropolitan verticalization processes in São Paulo and Lyon, focusing on high-rises buildings – buildings with more than 10 floors or more 50 meters high. This is a bilateral and transdisciplinary research project, developed with the University of Lyon (UDL), in France, and with the participation of researchers from Argentina, the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and other USP units."
To complement the three major case studies (Sao Paulo, Lyon, London) and to broaden the scope of the research, the reader will find in this section studies on a lesser scale but of no less importance. Brasov in Romania exemplifies the fate of communist high-rises and the advent of post-communist ones, Melbourne offers an in-depth study of the tactics and strategies of residents in suburban recent residential high-rises, Dallas allows to see how high-rise living is accepted in American cities, and Hanoi helps us understand the making of high-rise living in a Asian city less studied than Singapore or Hong-Kong.
To broaden the scope of the research, other case studies, on a lesser scale but of no less importance, complement the three major case studies (Sao Paulo, Lyon, London). Brasov in Romania exemplifies the fate of communist high-rises and the advent of post-communist ones, Buenos Aires presents another view of a global process, Dallas allows to see how high-rise living is accepted in American cities, Hanoi helps us understand the making of high-rise living in a Asian city less studied than Singapore or Hong-Kong, Melbourne offers an in-depth study of the tactics and strategies of residents in suburban recent residential high-rises and Santa Fe depicts a singular process of vertical urbanism in a southern middle city.
Brasov
Buenos Aires
High-rise living in the United States: towards vertical exclusion? The case of Dallas-Fort Worth
Europe
Residential verticalization in Hanoi, towards a generic city?
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
The Verticalization of the City of Oran (Algeria): A Geohistory of Towers
Santa Fé
For an ecological approach to highrise living. An anthropological cross-section of two French-Romanian case studies (introduction)
Urban renewal in La Duchère, Lyon, France and the transformation of post-communist urban spaces in Braşov, Romania
Politics of verticality and affordances of height (Duchère, France and Braşov, Romania)
Housing or dwelling : space-times of high-rise living. Case studies in Romania (Braşov) and France (Lyon, La Duchère)
The ebb and flow of towers in Europe. Part 1/3: The post-war verticalization of Europe
The ebb and flow of towers in Europe. Part 2/3: The ebb and flow of towers in Europe. Part 2/3: The demise of high-rises In Europe 1980-2000
The ebb and flow of towers in Europe. Part 3/3: Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
Contribution by Louise Dorignon
Research fellow at the Centre for Urban Research (RMIT University, Australia)
As many cities globally are engaged in the process of vertical expansion, challenging discourses on renewed forms of high-rise living has become an increasingly urgent agenda for urban research. There is a burgeoning field seeking to understand the diversity of experiences and practices within apartment buildings (Baxter 2017), including in emotional terms (Dorignon and Nethercote 2020; Kerr, Gibson, and Klocker 2018). Yet the social and spatial conditions of living inside these new homes remain insufficiently explored.
Between 2015 and 2019, my doctoral project contributed to this agenda by developing a micro-scale analysis of social relations within and around two apartment developments of Melbourne, Australia. It focused on the everyday actions of middle-class apartment dwellers in negotiating tenure, governance and social status, and investigated how this reshaped social and spatial relations in the high-rise developments. To illuminate these relations, framed as micro-politics, I developed a methodology combining walking tours and semi-directed interviews.
The photographic portfolio renders some of the steps and findings developed for my thesis (Dorignon 2019). During a recent and self-directed visit to the suburb of Collingwood, one of my case study sites, I followed the same itinerary as the one used during the walking tours for my project. I stopped along the way in key sites and places that were mentioned during my interviews with apartment dwellers, taking photographs to illuminate the urban materialities and social relations participating in Melbourne’s residential verticalisation.
The photographs reproduced below were taken using a Nikon D320 reflex camera with a fixed lens as well as an iPhone 12. They were all taken in the suburb of Collingwood in January 2021, unless otherwise stated. Following the walk, I selected the photographs based on several criteria: their aesthetic quality (framing, sharpness etc.), their ability to render the atmosphere of urban locations (such as streets or squares) and their capacity to elicit the practices and interactions described by the participants to my research. I also ensured to guarantee people’s privacy and anonymity when I took and selected the photographs. The text was adapted from my doctoral dissertation (Dorignon 2019).
I conducted my doctoral research as a temporary guest of Country, on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. I respectfully acknowledge that their Elders, past and present, have shaped and continue to shape these places. Then and now, I aspire to frame my work within a continuing relationship with Indigenous sovereignty.
The first slideshow walks the reader through the rise of vertical living in Melbourne, conjuring the ways in which narratives and practices surrounding high-rise living are being renewed. The second slideshow explores the benefits and limitations of exploring verticality and high-rise living through mobile methods. The third slideshow articulates what walking tours can reveal about the micropolitics of high-rise living.
Walk 1 – The rise of vertical living in Melbourne, Australia
Until recently, high-rise living was predominantly associated with public housing and the working class in Australian urbanism. Apartment living in low and mid-rise block of units was also already fairly established for middle-class young professionals in Sydney and Melbourne’s inner-suburbs. Rather than an ‘acceptable’ compromise in which a house and garden are traded for an urban location, apartment living is more and more marketed as an aspirational lifestyle and looked-for opportunity within dynamics of suburban change dynamics.
Walk 2 – High-rise living through mobile methodologies
Residential high-rises have long constituted a laboratory for urban research methodologies. In the last ten years, there has been a surge of innovative approaches and novel methodologies to emphasise and explore the multiple and changing qualities of high-rise buildings as homes, inaugurated by McNeill’s call to develop a skyscrapers geography (2005). Other researchers have also emphasising the agencies involved in architectural work and established the relational effects of building materiality (Jacobs, Cairns, and Strebel 2012). More recently, the links between high-rise housing and home have been investigated through objects and practices(Blunt 2008), as well as underlined for their everyday or ‘ordinary’ dimensions. By exploring the events, practices, and relations that make or unmake these homes (Baxter and Brickell 2014), these methodologies outline home as a process that shapes belonging, meaning, identity and memory.
Walk 3 – The walking tours: revealing micropolitics
Dwellers’ and housing professionals’ perspectives, initially thought of as divergent and binary, revealed a much more nuanced set of complementary, intertwined and interdependent relations between actors. This was particularly the case regarding perceptions of safety and what were considered acceptable behaviours in the building. Walking tours were an opportunity to visit otherwise inaccessible places in the high-rise, and to observe, for instance, the ways dwellers were cooperating with security systems or eluding them. The experience of resolving various issues reinforced ties between dwellers regardless of their tenure status, despite a tendency to live distantly and maintain strict boundaries.
Mixed, innovative and visual methods are increasingly encouraged in the geographical study of materialities and particularly in the exploration of high-rise spaces for they help create a compelling picture of physical and affective spaces. Methods including different forms of diaries have also been scrutinised by qualitative research as being well-suited to studies on everyday life. Yet the inconveniences associated with getting this time-consuming activity into respondents’ diaries, perhaps discouraging potential participants, appeared significant in my project. Having multiple methods also turned out to have uncertain outcomes, causing me to scatter my initial recruitment efforts in multiple and disjointed ways while losing some of the participants’ energy and ease in the process. The potential richness of the interview methodology was prioritised, and the lack of photo-diary compensated by the detailed comments, stories and reminiscences brought up at the walking tour.
The walking tours helped reveal the power relations between actors, as well as the establishing eminently political or moral views on how to regulate high-rise living. They also showed how dwellers produced particular arrangements towards the achievement of their social status. This came not only from the spatial and physical relations that derived from buildings’ particular location and design, but also from a set of various representations associated with high-rise living. For many dwellers, moving into a high-rise but staying in the suburbs held great significance. Living in a high-rise assumed a position of difference as well as spatial distinction: knowing how to embrace apartment life and building on previous international housing experience to shape one’s expectations, social interactions and behaviours in the neighbourhood.
The elevator as experience of high-rise living
Residential verticalization in Hanoi
High-rise living in Dallas: towards vertical exclusion?
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
The valorization of verticality in Lyon
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil: microscales and narratives
High-rise Buildings, Urban Tissue and Urban Regulations: some questions in São Paulo
Contribution by Pierre-Eloi Coste
Graduate in Architecture, Space Design Strategist freelance in Lyon, France
Summary
Following my work experience in Vietnam post Bachelors in an architectural firm specialized in high-rise housing, I have chosen to focus on this specific subject and its challenges at each scale. During my masters I concentrated on the specific context of Hanoi. In 2020, while developing my research thesis and architectural graduation project successively, I intended to blend theory, aesthetic and the contemporary uses of verticalization in this young globalized metropolis. Through this study I specifically analyze its residential verticalization and try to highlight the significance of a "glocal" approach. According to an international circulation of references, the vertical model seems more than ever deeply rooted in a generic logic. However, once defined as the combination of the designed, built and appropriated forms, the notion of “model” breaks down the idea of a global homogeneity into an overlap of multiple disparate interests and ambitions from all the stakeholders. Thus, by comparing the discourse of decision-makers with what is being built and the attested usage of spaces, a complexity transforms these residential towers from a simple spatial scheme to a laboratory of globalization.
Introduction
For more than thirty years, the constant increase of towers is extensively shaping the skyline of Hanoi. Like in other Asian countries, instead of operating as office towers, these towers predominantly provide housing units for a fast-growing population (Scoccimaro, 2017). They mostly rose in clusters within wide new urban areas, also called KDTM, spread across the entire city. Initially, in the late 90’s, this verticalization of the Vietnamese capital has raised some concerns among some urbanists and architects especially regarding the relations between towers and the existing city. Nowadays, on the contrary, those issues don’t seem to be a political problem anymore. Indeed, the recent researches based on Hanoi, only seldom mention the vertical growth of the city and fail to discuss it or to take it as a main research topic. Nevertheless, the desire of a modernist vertical urbanization for the city from the authorities is significant. In multiple visual mediums used by the local authorities to illustrate their vision for Hanoi (figure 1), the imaginary of a vertical city is omnipresent. The tower’s spatial scheme, that have been extensively duplicated, finally appeared as Rem Koolhaas defined it already in the late 90’s in his essay on the Generic City as “the unique and definitive typology”.
In 2018, I personally took part in the design of a high-rise residential complex in Hanoi in the local office of an international architecture firm. l then had the chance to better understand the spatial and design logics which underpin the residential verticalization. From the very beginning of each projects, some contradictions appeared between the stakeholders. As the architects wished to develop new original concepts, the real estate developers insisted on imitating existing projects. By asking the architects to draw from local as well as foreign built iconic references, they aim to easily reassure and tempt politicians who want to modernize the city and even civilize its population. Furthermore, due to a commodification of real estate and a constant rise of land prices (Boudreau, Labbé, 2011; Waibel, 2006), the developers are mainly driven by the financial aspects of their projects. From the massing to the layout of the housing units the efficiency ratios of the towers are constantly closely monitored to maximize the profit. Consequently, the promoting and the design process of the residential towers follows a nearly unique logic which is tightly streamlined.
Even though the residential towers are mostly built above a podium welcoming public spaces, I never got the time to experience these during my initial stay. Actually, most of the locals I met described those new urban spaces as too occidental and far from the inner city. Indeed, most of the residential towers are predominantly built in the fringes of the city on expropriated agricultural lands. They aim to host a rising numbers of middle-class households (Appert, 2016) offering them a globalized western way of life. I personally only had a regular but distant view on the vertical city and its skyline from the center in which I was living (figure 2). This helped me get acquainted with the local lifestyle culture within the traditional city. At first sight, the relationship between the inhabitants and their unconventional use of urban spaces seemed disparate from this exclusive vertical contemporary city (figure 3).
According to many researches (Cerise, 2009), housing programs have already been used in the past by the Vietnamese authority as a way to modernize and acculturate the urban dwellers. These studies highlight how the inhabitants rapidly managed to spatially transform these modern housing buildings essentially to maintain their traditional lifestyle culture (figure 4). Supposing this kind of appropriation still exists today, I decided to go beyond my first impressions. I choose to look at the residential towers, not only as built objects, but also as the sum of multiple negotiations between all the stakeholders. Instead of observing the towers as a simple duplicated spatial scheme, I followed the definition of an architectural model given by Anne Coste (1997), and structured my research in three stages. I successively studied the design, the construction and appropriation processes of the Hanoian residential towers. The aim of this study was to highlight the importance of the “glocal” challenges (Appert, Montès, 2015) underpinned by the verticalization of this city. Thereafter, this process leads to multiple models shaped by a varied acculturation of the local interests of each stakeholder with a global logic.
First of all, at the design stage, I made the hypothesis that the verticalization was contributing to shape a uniform politico-cultural frame through the promotion of a homogeneous modern western way of living.
Then, I intended to show that beyond an apparent esthetic diversity, the construction of residential towers revealed iterative and contradictory strategic challenges.
In the last stage, I demonstrate that the appropriation of the residential towers would vary according to multiple expectations from the dwellers and their attested usages of spaces.
This research relies on an inventory of nearly two hundred complexes including at least one tower in the Hanoi metropolitan area completed as at February 2019. Using mainly the Emporis Database, it gathers, if found, the information on the location, date of construction and height of each high-rise residential complex. In addition, the websites of the architects and developers gave the specifications about the built surfaces and the identity of each developer, architect and contractor. According to one unifying and three differentiating criteria, four complexes have been extracted from the inventory and chosen as detailed case in order to fully appreciate a hypothetical heterogeneous vertical residential way of living (figure 5). First of all, the rented flats had to be located in the upper floors of each tower - at least 14th level. Then, geographically speaking, the chosen complexes had to be located in different part of the city, in order to cover different spots of the verticalization. Then, thanks to their description and the offered amenities, from affordable housing to luxurious apartment, the selected towers were supposed to match each a different residential standing. Finally, the four groups of stakeholders, which handled the development of each project, had to reflect as much as possible a diversity due to various profile or countries of origin. This reduced corpus aided my close investigation of four towers from the urban scale to the residential unit. Indeed, thanks to an online booking platform I managed to rent successively four flats in these different towers during the field research.
Through this study, I intend to observe the big picture of the residential verticalization of Hanoi as well as to highlight some of its details. From cartography, to acoustic records, the combination of various tools aims to build bridges between the different scientific disciplines – architecture, urbanism, geography and sociology - I go through. In order to demonstrate the hypothesis’ tryptic, I adopt an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines simultaneously quantitative and qualitative approaches. Thus, the analysis is articulated in three comparative stages.
In the first place, I analyze the politico-cultural discourse conveyed by the residential verticalization. I put into perspective the words and visual representation -rendering, maps, schemes- produced by the public and private decision makers and displayed on their own website or on the one of the local press. This analysis is based on the conversations I have had with these stakeholders during my time there. Then, I compare the envisioned city to the spatial and temporal diffusion of the residential towers through a set of analytical metropolitan maps.
Secondly, I compare the envelop of the towers, through photographs of the whole exterior façade taken during the field study, against their floorplan, which I had redrawn prior to this construction analysis. In addition, my observation of various construction sites complements this analysis, while relying on my professional architectural experience.
Finally, the third analysis not only concentrates on the detailed investigation of the four case studies but also on significant observations made in other tower complexes or on websites of the local press. Inspired by the study ‘Usages’ led by Périphériques architecture in different public places around the world, I mean to factually analyze the public, common and private spaces around and within the residential towers (figure 6). I then highlight the attested use of spaces in these towers, with accompanying visual, drawn and acoustic data.
Promoting a unique vertical living ideal
In the first part, focused on the design stage, the analysis consisted of putting into perspective the political and commercial discourse with the different visual representation produced around the promotion of a vertical ideal. The representation of the vertical urbanization is employed to show how Hanoi could be transformed into a modern metropolis. Thus, the authorities’ propaganda posters that are regularly found in the streets of the city, now emphasize components of the vertical city next to the traditional communist figures (figure 7). Hence, the verticalization as a symbol of wealth became a powerful tool for politicians to instill a new metropolitan order.
The images from the real estate developers tend to be very homogeneous. They adopt a similar external point of view to magnify the whole high-rise structures and their direct surroundings. Instead of representing the existing backgrounds, most of them are imagining a fictive one with a collage of idealized skyline. The visual vocabulary used to depict the residential towers is generic enough to be easily imagined anywhere in the world (figure 8). Nevertheless, the name given to each real estate development is an evidence of a trial to compromise with the local context. Even though they mostly adopt English and words echoing with success as well as environmental awareness, they also include terms that may evoke the culture or landscape of the local context “silk”, “lake” or “lotus”.
Mainly taking their inspiration from the luxury hotel sector (Dorignon, 2019), these renderings also cultivate an intense fascination for the high-rise living by showcasing all the amenities, advantages and views offered by the unique experience of this new kind of living environment (figure 9,10). However, the housing units, which should be on the forefront, are hardly depicted as if it had a little significance. On the contrary, the location of each complex became a key argument. In addition to the ever-present “strategically located” formula, schematic maps (figure 11) reveal how the geographical accessibility of each complex is definitely determinant (Appert, 2016). This strategy is generally supported by an urban narrative. Citing influent planned and organized city such as New-York, Hong-Kong, Singapore or Osaka, the developers aim to illustrate, by analogy, their respective vision for Hanoi. As a matter of fact, they want to attract and reassure the future investors or buyers by propelling them in well-known references.
The residential verticalization of Hanoi takes root in a perpetual dialogue between local and global interest. According to a deep desire from politicians and developers to be part of a globalized culture, the residential towers became the object of a strategic urban marketing. This led to a profound commodification of real estate. Hence, they aim to promote a unique ideal kind of western lifestyle to local potential buyers as well as to foreign investors.
From concept to reality: a matter of standing
Since the very beginning of the verticalization process of Hanoi, several experts and urbanists (Decoster, Klouche, 1997) identified the deficiencies of some projects as the main consequence of the financial risks taken by the investors and developers. Originally, only few semi-states companies such as HANDICO1 or HUD2 partook in the construction of residential towers. Then, the successive arrival of renowned foreign real estate developers such as Ciputra3, Gamuda Land4 or CapitaLand5 irreversibly shook the local market as they brought their own longstanding expertise, know-how and standards. In their wake, a myriad of local companies with diverse profiles have emerged. Therefore, the current construction of residential towers clearly mirrors the diversity of these actors. When comparing the built towers with their original rendering the discrepancies are evident between this different property developers (figure 12).
Most of the time, for affordable housing and mid-end residential complexes promoted by Vietnamese developers, there is a lot of change in the development of the planned projects. Their better understanding of the local system allows them to directly negotiate with politicians or to subvert an already minimal technical control. In this way, they aim to increase the density, the height or the number of units they are allowed to build, all that in order to speed up their return on investment. As a result, the volumetry of the towers regularly gets wider and consequently the space in between the building is reduced. Also, the analysis of their typical floor (figure 13, table 1) plan layout showed an increase of the number of units per floor and an extreme spatial reduction of their sizes which frequently lead to windowless living rooms (figure 14). Finally, the external appearance and all the finishing components are drastically reduced or replaced by cheaper solutions. For instance, instead of the window ledge and ornamental elements showcased in the rendering, the contractors only use plaster and paint patterns to embellish the façade.
| HH LINH DAM | GREEN STARS | TOKYO TOWER | HAPULICO COMPLEX | DIAMOND FLOWER TOWER | BOOYOUNG VINA | TIMES CITY | DISCOVERY COMPLEX | SKYVIEW PLAZA | GOLDEN PALACE | SEASONS AVENUE | D' PALAIS DE LOUIS | |
| Residential Standing | Affordable | Mid-end | High-end | Luxurious | ||||||||
| Developer's origin | Vietnam | Vietnam | Vietnam | Vietnam | Vietnam | South Korea | Vietnam | Vietnam | Vietnam | Vietnam | Singapore | Vietnam |
| Designer's origin | N/A | Singapore / Vietnam | Vietnam | South Korea / Vietnam | Singapore / Vietnam | South Korea / Vietnam | - | Singapore | UK / Italy | South Korea | Singapore | Japan |
| Total housing surface per floor | 1098 | 940 | 1503 | 737 | 1495 | 1174 | 1540 | 1651 | 2340 | 1431 | 912 | 1774 |
| Number of units per floor | 20 | 13 | 16 | 7 | 12 | 13 | 24 | 14 | 28 | 14 | 11 | 10 |
| Number of units' typology | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 |
| Unit's average surface | 55 | 72 | 94 | 105 | 125 | 90 | 64 | 118 | 84 | 102 | 83 | 177 |
| Common circulation surface | 247 | 220 | 285 | 117 | 231 | 309 | 212 | 368 | 336 | 316 | 153 | 277 |
| Natural cross-ventilated core | YES | YES | YES | NO | YES | YES | NO | YES | NO | NO | YES | NO |
| Naturally enlightened core | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES | NO | YES | NO | YES | YES | YES |
| Floor total surface | 1579 | 1305 | 2043 | 949 | 1944 | 1637 | 1978 | 2360 | 3044 | 1983 | 1218 | 2424 |
| Total length of the facade | 205 | 196 | 264 | 129 | 223 | 287 | 221 | 289 | 366 | 320 | 291 | 236 |
| Average length of facade per unit | 10,3 | 15,1 | 16,5 | 18,5 | 18,6 | 22,1 | 9,2 | 20,6 | 13,1 | 22,9 | 26,5 | 23,6 |
| Housing surface efficiency ratio | 70 % | 72 % | 74 % | 78 % | 77 % | 72 % | 78 % | 70 % | 77 % | 72 % | 75 % | 73 % |
| Common surface efficiency ratio | 16 % | 17 % | 14 % | 12 % | 12 % | 19 % | 11 % | 16 % | 11 % | 16 % | 13 % | 11 % |
| Unit with a windowless living room | YES | YES | NO | NO | YES | NO | YES | NO | NO | NO | NO | NO |
| Unit with an indirect enlightened living room | YES | YES | YES | YES | NO | NO | YES | YES | YES | YES | NO | YES |
On the contrary, in luxury and high-end residential towers, foreign developers tend to stick more closely to the initial design. They seem to value spatial qualities as sources of financial profitability while importing their own construction standard and products. The layout of the units offers typically wider opening surfaces and favors a natural cross-ventilation. Nevertheless, some projects also contrast with this dual position. In fact, the most influent Vietnamese developers already practice these diverging approaches. They constantly balance their positioning on a residential standing segment with profit-driven decisions.
Even though the verticalization is initially based on a shared generic and ideal vision, it crystallizes contradictory decisions when it comes to the building stage. Due to their various ability to invest and the chosen residential standing, the developers adopt ambiguous strategies resulting in a relatively unclear heterogeneous architectural production.
Dwelling vertically, living horizontally
”If there is a skyscraper’s poetic, this is the one of the onlooker and the wanderer but not of the dweller” (Godo, 2010). On these words the author indirectly expresses that one can dwell in a vertical stacking of units, but finally the occupant always entrenches his daily life horizontally. Once inside of a tower, its external appearance would vanish for the benefit of a strict functional efficiency. Due to the clear separation of housing units, the isolation of the occupants would reach its climax. As a result, the human relationships would be less consistent whereas they are a fundamental pillar to any urban fabric.
In Vietnamese “chung cù” is the appellation given to the residential high-rise complexes. It covers as demonstrated a wide range of different towers which host an increasingly diverse population. Initially they were built to support housing demand in the metropolitan area for a growing middle-class. Following a premiumization trend, the towers then offered exclusive high-end apartments and services in order to host expatriates and the upper class in a gated community’s logic. Simultaneously, mass housing towers were also constructed as a means of compensation for modest rural families evicted to settle major infrastructures and urban expansion.
The upper class tends to easily adopt the globalized cultural norms conveyed by the residential towers. As Pierre Bourdieu (1993) said, “the architectural spaces implicitly address intangible physical orders and are undoubtedly, due to their invisibility, the most important components of the effects of the symbolic power”. The built towers definitely support the vision of the decision-makers which intend to initiate a new metropolitan way of living. In most of the high-end, luxurious and some mid-end complexes, developers use the towers and their direct surroundings as a showcase dedicated to magnify their brand image. By implanting iconic architectural symbol and elements such as triumphal arches, antic statues or pyramids they aim to highlight their success while offering an opulent scenery for the users’ daily life (figure 15). Also, in the podium of these towers can be found shops of the most well-known international chains (figure 16), which contribute to transforming the local lifestyle into a more western one.
The middle and lower classes encounter some issues as they learn to accommodate the modern vertical dwelling’s functioning. Indeed, due to various shortcomings from the developers in the towers, the different spaces are appropriated according to every tenant’s aspirations. From the ground floor to the residential flats, the occupants perpetuate the Vietnamese traditional way of living to varying degrees. Downstairs, next to formal shops settled in dedicated spaces, the public spaces feature various informal activities as the day moves along (figure 17). At each floor, the common corridor resembles the streets of the traditional city, where the flow of motorbikes and cars has been replaced by the endless ballet of lifts. To compensate for the lack of space in their units, the occupants largely use common spaces to support group activities that can’t fit in their flat (figure 18). In addition, to allow a natural ventilation most of the entrance doors remains open - resulting in a constant intertwining of smells and noises. Also, even though government officials try to supervise the use of residential spaces with regulations, many inhabitants still manage to run businesses in their flats.
Unfortunately, I was unable conduct proper interviews with the tenants I met due to our language barrier. Nevertheless, informal conversations with some occupants support my visual and acoustic analysis. On one hand, they concur that the residential towers have a safer environment to raise a family. As a matter of fact, they all agree the heavy and noisy Hanoian traffic outside is a very dangerous component of everyday life. On another note, most of them invoke the development of a more individualistic lifestyle. Finally, as the doors close, it completely isolates each occupant both visually and acoustically.
Far from the initial cultural homogenization promoted during the design stage, the vertical way of life in Hanoi is definitely appropriated in different ways (figure 19, 20,21,22). The modern urban verticalization finally proffers different faces, which implicitly leads to an unprecedented increasing socio-spatial segregation of the metropolitan population.
Conclusion
This study shows that between the designing, building and reception stages, all the stakeholders are going through a constant acculturation process, from local to global cultures, which lead them to adopt diverging perhaps contradictory positions. Politicians, developers, designers and especially dwellers are actually all learning from each other leading them to constantly adjust their way of acting. The failure to take into account the existing context and the adoption of an international architectural style during the design process of the residential tower complexes definitely suggest a global homogenization of the urban fabric as foreshadowed by Rem Koolhaas. However, this observation alone forgets about the ability of each pre-occupied territories to adapt an imported urban form. In this way, through this research, the initial notion of “generic” is significantly tempered. Indeed, the contemporary residential tower could be defined beyond its physical and technical aspect as multiple combinations of a designed, built and appropriated forms deeply rooted in a constant negotiation between local and global concerns. Thus, by comparing the discourse of developers with what is being built and attested usages of spaces, there appears a complexity which transforms these residential towers from a simply duplicated spatial scheme to a laboratory of globalization.
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1 Hanoi Housing Development and Investment Corporation (HANDICO) is the first "90 corporation" of Hanoi City. It was established in 1999 in order to meet the requirements of innovation in the field of construction, housing development residential and urban areas of the city. http://www.handico.com.vn/en
2 Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUD) is under the Ministry of Construction. Established in 1989, it was tasked to develop quality housing solutions for a sustainable urbanization. http://en.hud.vn/
3 Ciputra is an Indonesian property developer established in 1981, which develops in Hanoi the Nam Thang Long Urban Area since 2003 http://ciputrahanoi.com.vn/en/introduce/ciputra-hanoi/
4 Gamuda Land is a Malaysian real estate developer founded in 1995. It is in charge of the Gamuda City township development in Hanoi since 2010. https://gamudacity.com.vn/
5 CapitaLand is a Singaporean multinational asset management company mainly focused on real estate development and founded in 2000. As one of Asia's largest real estate companies, it developed the Mulberry Lane (2015) and Seasons Avenue (2017) complexes in Hanoi. https://www.capitaland.com/vn/en.html
High-rise Buildings, Urban Tissue and Urban Regulations: some questions in São Paulo
The elevator as experience of high-rise living
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
High-rise living in Dallas: towards vertical exclusion?
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
Contribution by Asma Rezk-Kallah
Architect, PhD student in Architecture at Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University (Mostaganem, Algeria)
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Introduction
Until the 2000s, the city of Oran was a relatively low-rise city. It is marked by these old districts shaped by the different Spanish, Ottoman and French occupations. After independence, its landscape is marked by large collective complexes of 4 to 5 floors called ZHUN (new urban housing zones) and individual housing developments. Only a few high-rise buildings, mainly from the 1940s-1950s, stood above the urban canopy. At the end of the 1990s, the urban landscape of the city of Oran experienced an acceleration of its verticalization following a favourable financial situation. This new verticality is located in the old, as well as in the new, districts of the city, mainly regrouping projects with a residential vocation, carried by private and public actors. These towers are inserted in different contexts, with the European city on the one hand, which was closely linked to the site of its construction, and on the other hand, the new urban extensions characterised by a development of the city, which has broken with this tradition of valuing the site in order to be concerned with a purely quantitative and functionalist aspect.
This contribution comes at the beginning of a thesis. The aim is to identify the logics of spatialization of the different phases of verticalization in Oran. This spatialization would allow us to understand the location of the towers, but also the representations and the conflicts that they can generate.
The advent of the towers in Oran
Algeria has been the scene of many theorisations of modern architecture which have inspired and nourished debates on a national and international scale. The 1930s were marked by numerous theoretical projects for high-rise buildings, particularly in Algiers (Cohen et al., 2003). It should be noted that Algeria was a testing ground for many modern urban planners and architects, as shown by the projects proposed by Auguste Perret (1939) and Maurice Rotival (1930)1. But the most emblematic projects are those of Le Corbusier (1931-1942) which marked generations of architects and subsequently the Algerian urban landscape (ibid.). Despite numerous proposals, Le Corbusier did not carry out any project. One of the reasons given is that the doctrine embodied by Le Corbusier is in contradiction with the plans for the development of embellishment and extension (PAEE)2 carried out by the municipalities of the large cities and with the regional plan of Algiers entrusted to Henri Prost (Almi, 2002). These plans were based on meticulous surveys and gave particular importance to the local context, the site and its topography (ibid.).
The arrival of a team within the urban planning departments that was more sensitive to the progressive approach would allow the principles of the modern movement to be applied (ibid.). Le Corbusier's theories were thus carried forward by his disciples and collaborators (Stambouli, 2014). The most emblematic achievement of this movement is the Aero habitat (1950-1959) in Algiers, designed by the architect Louis Miquel. This building 'held the world record for height for a residential building' (ibid.).
The doctrine advocated by the modern movement after the Second World War contributed to the verticalization of the urban landscape of Algerian cities. This new way of making the city, impregnated by modern thinking, is also visible in the landscape of the city of Oran.
In Oran, the beginning of the 1950s was marked by major urban transformations due to a financial boom. These different operations (including the construction of the seafront) aimed at modernising and embellishing the city, led by Mayor Fouques-Duparc. The latter clearly displayed a desire to attract wealthy residents and more tourists. This was followed by strong land speculation in the Miramar and the new prefecture districts, with buildings exceeding 20 storeys and changing the landscape of the city (Coquerey, 1965). The irruption of these buildings coincided with the completion of the Boulevard du Front de Mer (1953) and the first ring road (1950).
Following the strong speculation in the city centre, the large housing estates built by the municipality to solve the problem of substandard housing were built on the outskirts of the city (in these former suburbs).
In a more global context, the Constantine Plan (1959-1963)3 was adopted throughout Algeria. As a result, the municipality started vast building sites composed of bars and towers impregnated with the ideology of functionalism. However, the programmes were only partially completed due to the outbreak of the war of liberation (1962) (Mouaziz-Bouchentouf, 2014, 2017). After independence, the city did not undergo any major urban expansion. The public programmes were limited to the completion of the actions carried out within the framework of the Constantine Plan. It was not until the end of the 1970s that real estate activity resumed through new urban housing zones (ZHUN), individual housing estates and real estate cooperatives (ibid.).
The contemporary verticalization of the city of Oran
At the beginning of the 2000s, a vast construction site for large high-density urban complexes was created on the outskirts of the city, through various public social and promotional housing programmes. On the other hand, the arrival of private real estate development has marked the urban landscape of Oran through the construction of medium- and high-residential towers (Mouaziz-Bouchentouf, 2017).
This return to verticality is organised either in the form of clusters: a concentration of towers in the central districts, the eastern districts and the maritime fringe or according to a more punctual distribution around major axes and in the fabrics of the former ZHUN. The lack of orientation in terms of landscape in the urban planning instruments means that there is no planned logic as to their location. However, the concentration of high-rise buildings seems to be determined by certain factors. Firstly, by the type of actor. Projects carried out by private players are located in highly attractive areas where the price of land per square metre is higher than the average. The location near the city centre, the presence of numerous services, the views of the sea and the profitability of the land are factors that have encouraged the production of high-rise housing by private developers in certain districts. While public projects, whether social or promotional, are located outside the city in the neighbouring agglomerations and municipalities.
The districts of the city centre and those bordering it dating from the 19th century, limited by the second ring road, are experiencing strong pressure for verticalization. The presence of recyclable land suitable for projects of this scale has encouraged their verticalization. Densification in these neighbourhoods is mainly carried out in favour of low-rise buildings (sheds or villas with gardens) creating sudden changes in volumetric scale. It should be noted that these towers are not evenly distributed in the city centre. The western part is relatively untouched, as its urban fabric is made up of apartment buildings, unlike the Miramar district to the east of the city centre, where there are disused sheds and low-rise housing.
In addition to the land opportunity, the development of road infrastructures impacted the spatial distribution of the towers, such as the Boulevard Millenium, Boulevard des Lions and Boulevard du 19 mars. It is in this logic that the verticalization of the eastern districts of the city has developed between the third and fourth ring roads.
The towers exceeding 100 metres in height are located on the maritime fringe. The latter is the ambition of the public authorities through the development of public spaces, the construction of hotels and convention centres (2010), and the projection of a residential complex composed of towers, "the city of the sea" (project not carried out). This part of the city catalyses many issues for the construction of a metropolitan image that the authorities wish to promote. However, private action has taken precedence over urban planning with punctual actions without an overall vision.
Conclusion
The spatialization of high-rise buildings in Oran today reflects the absence of a planned logic. It is particularly visible in the central districts which are undergoing landscape and social transformations. In the absence of spatial orientation, the towers are inserted according to land and financial opportunities without taking into account the social and morphological contexts of the districts. This is not without causing tensions and conflicts (Mouaziz-Bouchentouf, 2017). Because of their scale, high-rise buildings contribute to the privatisation of the city's volume (shadowing, recomposition of views) (Appert, 2016). Consequently, the landscape produced can be the object of exclusion and deprivation or, on the contrary, a source of pride and appreciation for the residents. This is why the continuation of the work will now consist in questioning the perception of the inhabitants at different scales of the territory. Taking the latter into account allows for a more detailed understanding of the impact of verticalization on the experience of the population in Oran.
References
ALMI, S., Urbanisme et colonisation: présence française en Algérie, Mardaga, Paris, 2002.
APPERT, M., 2016 Tours, skyline et canopée, mémoire original pour l’Habilitation à diriger les recherches en géographie, Université Lyon 2.
COHEN, J.-L., N. Oulebsir, and Y. Kanoun, Alger: Paysage urbain et architectures, 1800-2000, Editions de l'Imprimeur, Paris, 2003.
COQUERY, M., "Quartiers périphériques et mutations urbaines", Méditerranée, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 285-298, published online in 1965. URL: https://www.persee.fr/doc/medit_0025-8296_1965_num_6_4_1175, DOI: 10.3406/medit.1965.1175.
MOUAZIZ-BOUCHENTOUF, N., "FONCIER ET IMMOBILIER A ORAN. LEGISLATIONS ET STRATEGIES D'ACTEURS", Université des Sciences et de la Technologie d'Oran - Mohamed Boudiaf, 2014.
MOUAZIZ-BOUCHENTOUF, N., "Les Tours à Oran (Algérie). La Quête de La Hauteur et Ses Conséquences Sur La Ville'" Geocarrefour, Vol. 91, No. 2, Gouverner La Ville Verticale : Entre Ville d'exception et Ville Ordinaire, published online in 2017. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/geocarrefour/10254
STAMBOULI, N., "L'Aéro-habitat, avatar d'un monument classé?", Livraisons de l'histoire de l'architecture, No. 27, pp. 117-127, published online in June 2014. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lha/382, DOI: 10.4000/lha.382
1 Maurice Rotival had proposed a skyscraper project for the business district of the navy in Algiers. A mega structure composed of buildings with a traffic platform detailed in the magazine "Les Chantiers nord-africains n° of January 1931". This project takes as a model the city of New York whose functioning, zoning and Wall Street business district he will detail to justify his project. Le Corbusier also proposed a very similar project on the same site.
2 The plans were drawn up in accordance with the French law on urban planning known as the 'Cornudet law' - 14 March 1919, made applicable in Algeria by the decree of 25 October 1925. This law is at the origin of what is known today as "urban planning".
3 The Constantine Plan (1959-1963): is an economic and social recovery plan. Housing construction was an important part of it. It provided for the construction of 200,000 housing units nationwide. These large housing estates were built in a hurry and were intended to combine construction savings and speed of execution to the detriment of architectural quality (Mouaziz, 2014).
Sao Paulo: Verticalization timeline
London: the verticalization of a horizontal metropolis
A geography of contemporary residential towers in London
The return of residential towers in France
Re-verticalization Europe, 2000s
Contribution by Christian Montès
Director of the High Rise project. Professor of Geography, Environnement Ville et Société laboratory (UMR 5600), Director of the Doctoral School of Université Lyon 2 Lumière
Download original version in French at the end of the text
Introduction
The United States is known to be the country of the single-family home. However, if high-rise living is not widespread there (apart from the centers of rare metropolises), the country has seen a recent shift from the construction of high-rise offices to residential high-rise buildings, because the profits are higher; they now represent 80% of the market. Residential high-rise buildings are also markers of the attractiveness of places in the globalized inter-metropolitan competition, symbols of a valued lifestyle; we can compare them to gated-communities for urban elites. The American case has been less studied than that of Europe in the 1960s and 1970s or Asia, even if the needle towers of NYC are widely talked about. Dallas-Fort Worth case study will test the following hypotheses:
- New residential high-rise buildings as goods / assets in an increasingly financialized market model, a vector of growing inequalities
- The new residential high-rise buildings - as a lever for the municipalities to create the compact city and revitalize their centers - create vertical gentrified spaces (which could be called the high-build gentrification, based on Lees and Davidson’s (2010) new-build gentrification concept.
NB: all the photographs in this text were taken by the author in April 2018.
Conclusion. Is a build-high gentrification in progress?
This gentrification takes place in an already segregated city. Dallas would be, according to a 2013 study, the least inclusive city in the USA (its population is made up of 42% Latinos, 29% Whites, 25% Blacks and 3% Asians), well separated as shown on the map: Whites reside in the north, Blacks in the south and Latinos especially in the east and west. This segregation is voluntary: however, the zoning plan of the 1940s forcefully pushed the black population behind the levees of the river and the industrial zones.
• According to Lees and Davidson (2010), new-build developments participate in the gentrification of (peri) centers, in connection with the financialization of “place-based products” (Zukin). They create indirect displacements (even if the inhabitants stay where they are, they have lost their “place” (as home and identity)
• In Dallas, this did not happen, because nobody lived there anymore, due to the quasi-apartheid policies of the 1940s. This high level of segregation led to the construction of residential high-rise buildings in the white part of the city (simply put:almost everywhere)
If there is gentrification, it is still an incipient trend:
• It would be part of Scott's “third wave of contemporary urbanization” (2011) which creates new privatized urban landscapes where housing is an investment for households (in condos), but in Dallas, they are mainly developers and real estate management companies (apartment buildings). The inhabitants are mainly tenants
• But it is very far from having yet become the “normal” way of life in the USA: in 2017, out of 121,600,000 occupied dwellings, only 10,500,000 were occupied in structures with more than 20 units (8, 6%), and only 10,000,000 were condominiums or co-operatives (census.gov) So it is not a "mature" market. New-build gentrification is a comprehensive urban strategy for sophisticated entrepreneurs, with the help of state intervention, and a more recent official discourse on mixed communities which leads to indirect population displacements (Davidson and Lees). Dallas shows that this stage has not yet been reached (unlike Vancouver for example).
1. A very recent phenomenon in the center, where the Municipality remains powerful. It has encouraged the revitalization of the CBD since 2005 (classic tools: conversion of historic buildings thanks to aid: historic tax credits, TIF ...)
2. Local or national developers with local alliances. Non-locals make mistakes because they do not know the real estate market, which remains hyper local; this differs from capital markets, which are more fluid.
3. This is a partial market. Lenders (institutional funds) do not want to finance condos because there is no market. They finance apartment buildings (rental).
4. Individuals play an important role in this movement (oil and gas billionaires in Dallas) to the “sentimental” relationship with the city; they think very long term, even if it is not profitable. In Dallas, Tim Heddington; the Bass family in Fort Worth (Foundations elsewhere).
Is there really no model? In fact, other processes are possible, as shown by Minneapolis for instance: 5,000 social housing units (people, elderly, disabled, refugees) in 42 high-rise buildings; policies demand "inclusion" in the new residential high-rise buildings in the center (and reject high-rise buildings built solely to serve as AirBnBs), and residents of a historic district have succeeded in defeating a 32-year residential IGH project. However, this does not prevent the center from counting high-rise buildings from the 1980s and 90s intended for affluent populations and a recent revival in the construction of luxury high-rise buildings, linked to the desire to breathe new life into the heart of the city.
References
DAVIDSON Mark and LEES Loretta (2010), New-Build Gentrification: Its Histories, Trajectories, and Critical Geographies, Population Space and Place 16(5): 395 – 411.
American census : www.census.gov
ALLEN Scott J. (2011), Emerging Cities of the Third Wave, City 15(2-3): 289-321.
ZUKIN Sharon (1998), Urban Lifestyles : Diversity and Standardisation in Spaces of Consumption, Urban Studies 35 (5-6): 825-839.
The micropolitics of high-rise living in Melbourne, Australia
The fabric of contemporary vertical London
Residential verticalization in Hanoi
High-rise Buildings, Urban Tissue and Urban Regulations: some questions in São Paulo
France: A socially selective verticalization?
Urban Verticalization Issues in France and Brazil
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