Skyscraper geography

Abstract

This paper argues that geographers have tended to neglect the substantial impact of skyscrapers on urban life. Yet the significance of these buildings - in terms of height, levels of human occupancy, aesthetic impact and popular representation and use - is in need of careful geographical interpretation. Synthesizing work from a number of disciplines - geography, social history, architecture, planning, and cultural studies - it argues that the skyscraper is an extremely complex spatial phenomenon. First, the development and diffusion of skyscrapers as a global form is considered in terms of its geographical contingency, and the relational nature of its production. Secondly, the representational nature of the form in relation to cities is discussed, including attention to cinematic, biographical and everyday practices of representation. Thirdly, the volumetric nature of the skyscraper in urban form is briefly reviewed, focusing on its differing impacts on urban space and at various physical strata of the city. Taken together, there are important urban, political, social, cultural and economic debates that underpin this apparently regularized, rationalized built form.