Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers

Today’s cities don’t have skyscrapers to save space, at least not the way they do in New York and Hong Kong. Today’s megatowers are symbols of prosperity, like the ridiculous Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or the huge fountain in that city, ironic since there are now lakes or rivers anywhere in Arabia. Each city comes with her own unique challenges, like sanitation, sewage, policing, and transport. According to author Stephen Graham, they also bring about the development of new technologies.

     Helicopters are increasingly used to police major cities. While rarely used in Britain or Israel (despite their problems with terrorism) it was common for the police in Los Angeles to use them as far back as the 1980’s. Today, heat racking systems come in handy, as in the case of the Boston Marathon Bomber, caught hiding in a disused boat. While a helicopter with a heat detector may have helped scope out a hidden fugitive, it has also become a symbol of military-style policing in poor areas. Los Angeles was notorious for this in the 1980’s (see Blue: The LAPD and the Struggle to Redeem American Policing) during the War on Drugs. While the LAPD has made curbs to the use of SWAT, it has always been commonplace in Brazil, Jamaica, and South Africa.

    The Favelas of Latin America are used in this book as an example of an urban policy that is both a success and a failure at the same time. The city of Medellin, Colombia, has a typical urban center at the bottom of a valley while the poorer areas are clustered in the hills. Cable cars were introduced in the last decade to cut travel time, so there would be no more two-hour bus rides down the winding mountain roads. Protests sprang up, however, because there were some who saw this as an effort to keep the poor out of the wealthy areas. Similarly, the city of Rio De Jeniero had stairways and bridges built across the ravines in order to cut travel time by the residents of the Favelas, but some saw this as an excuse to avoid improving sanitation and sewage. It’s cheaper to build a steel and concrete bridge than to make regular garbage collection, and certainly cheaper than to build housing for the poor in what is considered a wealthy area.

    Every city has its own unique history regarding urban improvement. No matter what country you’re in, whether it’s New York City, London, Paris, Rio, or Medellin, efforts are made to improve things and some people get left out in the cold. But if children in a wealthy area are simply walking to school, while the children in a poor area do so with submachine guns pointed at them, then who’s to say either side benefits?