Building Up. The Global Politics of Vertical Urbanism

The project financed by the Carlsberg Foundation funded a research stay with the Advanced Research Collaborative-ARC at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where I have been offered the Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award for the 2021-2022 academic year. My stay at the ARC will lays the groundwork for a future research project on the global politics of vertical urbanism. This project with study the manner in which luxury skyscrapers - that create commercial residential spaces reserved for the privileged - function as a manifestation of urban socioeconomic disparities, making the rising city a symbol of the unequal city. Accordingly, this project will make a groundbreaking contribution to the study of urban equality by explicating the politics of the physicality of a city - i.e., the vertical physical presence of luxury skyscrapers - and its role in spatially performing and perpetuating the inequalities of the contemporary city. During my stay at ARC - a global hub of cutting-edge research in urban studies - I plan to garner essential feedback on the theoretical and empirical focus and methodological approach of this project. Additionally, I plan to conduct preliminary archival research and develop the foundations for cross-border research collaborations with urban studies scholars in the wider research community in New York City. Finally, my research stay will be the basis for an article that will establish the theoretical parameters for studying the global proliferation of vertical urbanism.