Building Up. The Global Politics of Vertical Urbanism

This grant will fund my research stay at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where I have been offered the Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award for the 2021-2022 academic year. My stay will lay the groundwork for a project on the global politics of vertical urbanism. I will study the way 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. The project will make a ground-breaking contribution to the study of urban inequality by explicating the politics of a city’s physicality (i.e., the vertical physical presence of luxury skyscrapers) and its role in spatially performing and perpetuating the inequalities of the urban milieu.