Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers

What does it mean to be above or below in today’s rapidly urbanising world? As humans excavate deep into the earth, build ever-higher into the skies, and saturate airspaces and inner orbits with all sorts of machines, how might we understand the remarkable verticalities of our world? From satellites to bunkers, from drones to mines, and from towering skyscrapers to the increasingly manufactured ground beneath our feet, this lecture  will explore today’s geographies from a new vertical perspective as a way of gaining fresh insights of how power and inequality work in our world.

Biography
Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at  Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.  He has an interdisciplinary background linking geography, urbanism and sociology. Since the early 1990s Prof. Graham has explored how cities are being transformed through remarkable changes in infrastructure, mobility, digital media, surveillance, security, militarism and verticality. Prof. Graham’s work has been extremely influential across a wide range of urban, technological, social and political debates across the world. It has been translated into twenty languages. In this lecture, Prof. Graham will talk about his latest book, “Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers” (Verso, October, 2016).