An analysis oh how vertical metaphors in language intersect with the politics of upright human bodies and rapidly verticalising cities.

1. Upright:
Verticality, Language
and the Politics of
Bodies and Cities
Stephen Graham

2. Question: Where does the
term ‘top notch’ come from?

4. 1. Introduction: Horizontal research, vertical language…
Paul Carter: imagining world as “a continuous planar surface on which, at intervals, objects . . .
were located”

5. ‘Flat earth’ urbanism
and urban studies in a
world of ‘stacked societies’
Barrie Shelton and colleagues call these perspectives “’flat earth’
viewpoints of urbanism”
Geography – often defined as the study of the earth’s surface --
especially, has long been too flat!
Time geography can’t even conceptualise vertical movement!

7. Stacked societies and vertical geographies: “What
would happen if you took geographic thinking and
instead of putting it on a horizontal axis, you added a
vertical axis?” Trevor Paglen

8. Upright stance of humans “earliest distinctively
human feature to have evolved in hominids”
Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin (1992)
“Upright posture is the ‘Leitmotiv’ in the
formation of the human organism. Upright we
are, and we experience ourselves in this specific
relation to the world. Upright posture pre-
establishes a definite attitude toward the world;
it is a specific mode of being-in-the-world. ”
Erwin Strauss, 1952.
“Standing, for members of the species Homo
sapiens sapiens,” wrote medical philosopher
Stuart Spicker in 1976, “ is always an
achievement, constantly renewed.”
2. Standing struggles: Applies especially to neglected
intersections of bodies, language and urbanism

9. Vertical Language
and vertical bodies
“Whatever is superior or excellent is elevated, associated with a sense of physical height.
Indeed ‘superior’ is derived from a Latin word meaning ‘higher.’ ‘Excel’ (celsus) is another Latin
word for ‘high.’ The Sanskrit brahman is derived from a term meaning ‘height.’.. Social status is
designated "high" or "low" rather than "great" or "small." God dwells in heaven.” Yi-Fu Tuan,
1979.
“Low suggests immorality, vulgarity, poverty, and deceit. High is the direction of growth and
hope, the source of light, the heavenly above of angels and gods” Stephen Kern

10. ‘Dead’ vertical metaphors
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2008)

11. 3. Upright: Vertically Moralised Bodies
“The scheme of elevation, the upward
movement, everything that is marked by
the prefix super (or in German, ‘über’) is
here as decisive as the schema of
purification, of the turning away from
impurity, from the zones of the body that
are malodorous and must not be touched.
The turning away is an upward movement.
The high (and therefore the great) and the
pure, are what repression produces as
origin of morality, they are what is better
absolutely, they are the origin of value and
of the judgment of value.”
Jacques Derrida (1991)

12. “The vertical axis of the bourgeois body is primarily emphasized in the education of the child: as s/he grows up/is
cleaned up, the lower stratum is regulated or denied as far as possible, by the correct posture (‘stand up straight’,
‘don’t squat’, ‘don’t kneel on all fours’ – postures of servants and savages), and by the censoring of ‘lower bodily’
references along with bodily wastes” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1997)

13. Vertical bodies, dirt and the demonised
body-politic of the city’s ‘low’
Social and psychological denial of the ‘lower’ body “reach[ed] its
limits in the repression of the common abject – excrement,
putrefaction, dirt, semen, menses, and so on” Nadir Lahiji and
Daniel Friedman
Connected with the imagined vertical cartography of the body-
politic and the wider city. In this way the ‘lower’ organs of the body,
and their functions, thus became likened to:
“the city’s ‘low’ – the slum, the rag-picker, the prostitute, the sewer
– the ‘dirt’ which is ‘down there.’ In other words, the axis of the
body is transcoded through the axis of the city, and whilst the bodily
‘low’ is forgotten, the city’s low becomes a state of obsessive
preoccupation, a preoccupation which is itself intimately
conceptualized in terms of discourses of the body” Peter Stallybrass
and Allon White

14. Fascist demonization…Lower ‘races’, lower bodies
and the masculinized fetish for tallness
“Perfect posture is the antithesis
of illness and moral decay”
American eugenicist B. G. Jeffries
“Some primitive races who have
the squatting habit […] keep the
knees and back bent and have a
carriage and gait not much better
than that of the higher apes. As a
general rule, the more highly
civilised the people the better is
the carriage” The Lancet, 1922.
Both cited by Tom Jesson

15. 4. ‘I Stand Therefore I Am’:
Male-Scale and Disabling Cities
High Modernism – labelled, itself, with a vertical
moniker and oriented around the saint-like figure
of Le Corbusier -- was based absolutely on the
fetish that “the vertical is the ethical condition of
man.”
Indeed, the obsession of modernist architecture
with vertical lines and right angles – their view
that the 90 degree angle is the “only poetic
angle” – extends inevitably to the stance of
human bodies.
“No statement... better expresses Le Corbusier’s
cogito than this one, “I stand therefore I am.”
Nadir Lahiji and D.S. Friedman (1997)

16. Corbusier’s Modulor: : “progenitor of an entire
universe built to male-scale”. Barbara Hooper
Derived from Le Corbusier’s fantasy that “all men [sic]
have the same organism, the same functions... the
same needs”.
Initially, the figure was going to be the average height
of a French male – 1.75 meters. Increased the height to
1.83 meters in 1946 because "in English detective
novels, the good-looking men, such as policemen, are
always six feet tall!”
“imposes senseless geometrical norms on a supposedly
universal body in order to create what [Le Corbusier]
call[ed] ‘constructed beings, cemented biologies.’”
Like all fascists, then Le Corbusier “apprehend the
body as a block of muscles, a viriloid form, a sporting
armour ready for engagement in violent social
relations.” Mark Perelman

17. “A virile force, an entire
male. It stands in physical
fact, a monument to trade,
to the organized
commercial spirit, to the
power and progress of the
age, to the strength and
resource of individuality
and force of character.
Therefore I have called it, in
a world of barren pettiness,
a male, for it sings the song
of procreant power, as
others have squealed of
miscegenation” Louis
Sullivan: ‘Father’ of the
Skyscraper
The Gendered Politics of the Skyscraper ‘Race’

18. "The summit of the world should be associated with a great name”:
Al Maktoum on the opening of the new tower.

19. I am the power that lifts the world’s head proudly skywards, surpassing limits and expectations.
Rising gracefully from the desert and honouring the city with a new glow, I am an extraordinary
union of engineering and art, with every detail carefully considered and beautifully crafted.
I am the life force of collective aspirations and the aesthetic union of many cultures. I stimulate
dreams, stir emotions and awaken creativity.
I am the magnet that attracts the wide-eyed tourist, eagerly catching their postcard moment,
the centre for the world’s finest shopping, dining and entertainment and home for the world’s
elite.
I am the heart of the city and its people; the marker that defines [developer] Emaar’s ambition
and Dubai’s shining dream.
More than just a moment in time, I define moments for future generations. I am Burj Khalifa.
“They were the words of a God...
The tallest God in the world”
Brazilian Pastor René Breuel

20. “From the 90th floor, you feel as connected to the sky as to
the ground...
The city is laid out like a map, and the enormous windows
are less like frames for the view than wide-open portals to
it. And inside, the high ceilings and large rooms make the
place feel even less like a conventional apartment. The
layout leaves an open vista through the apartment, so you
can see north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and south to the
new 1 World Trade Center tower” Paul Golberger
5. Seductions of luxified skies

21. Photo by Andrew Harris

24. Redrow penthouse apartment ad:
“To stand with the world at my feet!”

25. Thank you!