Workshop Report: Vertical Urbanism in London and Paris / Urbanités verticales in Paris et Londres
The vertical urbanism of London and Paris was the subject of an online workshop organised by Urban Lab Co-Director Dr Andrew Harris (UCL Geography) and Dr Martine Drozdz (LATTS, Paris) on 30th June 2021 and funded by an award from UCL’s Global Engagement Office. This report written by Sidra Ahmed and Isobel Pagendam, PhD students based in UCL Geography researching vertical themes in contemporary London, documents the day and explores key themes that emerged.
Having previously collaborated on a special issue of Built Environment entitled High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe, this workshop intended to bridge a gap between Andrew and Martine’s home cities and respond to the lack of explicit comparative research conducted on vertical urbanism in London and Paris. The two cities bear important connections and differences through the way verticality has manifested in both locations. Their vertical built environments have been shaped by planning histories, representations, cartographic imaginaries, and management practices.
Panel 1: Verticality and cartographic imagination and instrumentation
The first panel of the day unpacked interesting relationships between the horizontal and the vertical through its focus on 19th Century mapping and surveying in Paris and 21st Century 3D digital representations of London. Architectural historian Min Kyung Lee discussed the creation of Hausmann’s maps, and how the development of these established a particular view of the city, which became central to Paris’ modernisation. The erection of triangulated pillars which served to collect information, were used to translate the Parisian terrain into a 2-dimensional representation. In essence, the surveyors involved in this process of map-making built upwards to then flatten the city. These interrelations were further expanded as we came to see how the resulting maps became the basis for urban intervention, which ironically projected a flatness that at the time didn’t exist given that much of Paris’ modernisation had already begun.
The session’s comparative counterpart, which was delivered by Oliver Dawkins from UCL CASA, focused on three-dimensional visualisations of London, thinking not only about buildings above, but also infrastructure below. The presentation introduced the techniques of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and photogrammetry as ways of creating volumetric representations of the city. When discussing photogrammetry, an interesting parallel was made with the first presentation, with these triangulation methods being undertaken from the air as opposed to the ground; planes are flown over the city, taking photos and overlapping them to create an image with depth. These methods and representations are not just for developers and planners, but also the wider public through the use of open source images and photographs on phones. Oliver explored this idea through his own work in London and Dublin, where the public were asked to take photos, which were then used to create 3D environments, thereby inviting them to explore and view the city in new and different ways.
Architect-engineer Nathalie Roseau (LATTS) was this panel’s discussant and she provided a diachronic perspective on the vertical view with a rich array of material from urban scholarship and imagery. Her concluding thoughts in particular resonated in terms of the relationship between the situated city and the model city. The situated city is always evolving which in some ways means that the model city is always a constricted representation. It was interesting to hear Min Kyung Lee discuss how aerial representations of the city have an ‘atemporal’ quality whereby the space being depicted in a map or imagery is at once presenting the past, present and future. Further questions were asked of such models: who is running the model? And which are the models that circulate? The discussion concluded with considerations around matters of accessibility, authority, expertise, and the democratisation of these digital volumetric views and representations.
Panel 2: Densification and the production of verticality
The workshop’s second panel looked at the production of urban verticality through high-density urban spaces. London is overall a low density city with approximately 6,000 people per square metre whereas Paris has a relatively higher density of 22,000 people per square metre.
This panel opened with LSE’s Fanny Blanc and Tim White’s discussion of their 2016 ‘lived densities’ study, which looked at residents’ experiences of living in high-density housing in London. Their study was embedded in the context of the new drive for high-density and high-rise housing since the turn of the century. This drive has been led by the private sector and also supported by local authorities ‘pushing for higher densities as a way of extracting value’. High-density housing schemes are often accompanied by a small number of social and affordable housing. Many schemes come with mixed communities policies too that this study sought to explore.
Fanny and Tim’s study looked at 14 typologically diverse high-density schemes in London that ranged from historic social housing schemes and estates to modern high-density housing and towers. Through conversations with residents, the study explored and contrasted various aspects of high-density urban life across the case studies such as the social fabric, community cohesion and issues with the materiality of the buildings themselves. Storage, overheating and noise were common physical issues reported by residents. The study raised important questions around maintenance and the lack of it in new housing schemes. Fanny also highlighted the crucial management role of the concierge, ‘often the only human that residents see’ for help in high-density buildings. The presentation concluded by stressing that for housing to be part of the lasting urban fabric, it needs to be well managed, of good quality and promote social life.
Following this, Martine Drozdz and André Lortie (LATTS) presented on the production of urban verticality in Paris between 1902 and 2016 from a post-occupancy perspective. They considered the perspective of urban experts and planners on verticalization. High-density schemes in Paris have been enabled by a ‘Parisian Paradox’ where the city is facing austerity alongside huge amounts of international investment in the built environment. The austerity has created a condition for the intensification of the marketisation of building rights which international investment has been able to cater for. And this has translated practically into the emergence of high-density schemes in Paris.
Using London’s case as a jumping off point to set the scene for what has been going on in Paris, we were shown how Central London’s built environment has significantly changed since the 1960s with new tall buildings whilst Central Paris remains unchanged with any new vertical developments appearing on the city’s outskirts. Paris has remained protected and preserved by heritage policy but there have been some hotspots of high-density development activity emerging. Citing the cases of Paris’s Rive Gauche regeneration, one of the city’s largest regeneration projects, and the densification of the Cité Glacière housing estate — Martine and André reflected on how achieving ‘good urban form’ is at the forefront of how urban policy is shaped and practised. And verticality has become a contested area through which to do so. They outlined the struggles within the Parisian administration between different kinds of value and how experts allow or restrict densification. In Paris, there are moral and aesthetic limitations on the increase in land value. Within the Parisian administration of urban experts, architects and the letter of the Local Plan, there are important play offs to make between three factors: aesthetics, environment and land rent.
The issue of maintenance in high-density housing was also reflected on by Martine and André in the case of the Cité Glaciére estate. A private developer was authorised by the municipality to build private flats on top of social housing in order to fund the refurbishment of the building. This is an important example of paying attention to the outcome of densification in Paris and that knowledge, urban and architecture expertise is involved in the city’s densification. Maintenance has to be included as a fundamental aspect of the architectural design of high-density developments so as to mitigate the need for increased maintenance and refurbishment post-occupancy.
Claire Colomb (UCL Bartlett School of Planning) responded to these two presentations. One key point she raised was about distinguishing between ‘high-density’ and ‘high-rise’. The concept of ‘high-rise’ comes with certain cultural associations. Claire gave the example of Paris’ low-rise nature creating the perception that it is not of high density ‘until you see the numbers’. She also picked up on the potential to explore the prevalence of management issues in dense vertical housing across London and Paris. One suggestion that was interesting was to look at the ‘microethnography of the concierge in London and Paris’ to explore the lives of those who are essentially gatekeepers for high-density vertical spaces. The planning systems of our two subject cities, which are conventionally very different, were also pinpointed as ‘converging rather than diverging’ in recent years.
Panel 3: More-than-human volumetric enclosures
The final panel of the workshop was delivered by Simon Marvin (Urban Institute, University of Sheffield) and Jonathan Rutherford (LATTS) and focused on contemporary climate controlled forms of vertical enclosure, with a comparative focus on London’s Kew Gardens and the Paris Zoo. The artificial milieus found at these sites transcend seasonality through the external control of temperature, humidity, and light. The speakers outlined the specific histories of these two controlled environments, foregrounding the ways that they have respectively evolved in their aims over time. While the presentation wasn’t necessarily explicit in its focus on verticality, the ensuing discussion offered interesting opportunities for developing these themes further: what is the need for climate control as we build upwards? What does climate control enable, and what does it exclude?
Discussant Clare Melhuish (UCL Urban Lab) connected Simon and Jonathan’s work to the role of climate control as a key technology in the emergence and maintenance of vertical developments; as construction technologies have made it possible to build higher and higher, climate control has been vital in optimising internal temperature due to the inability to open windows in these high-rise developments.
In response, Jonathan Rutherford touched on the production of food in vertical spaces occurring across the vertical spectrum from rooftops to subterranean spaces. Paris is home to the world’s largest urban rooftop farm along with an underground farm under its streets in an old abandoned car park. The incorporation, or artificial creation, of nature within vertical developments in London was also mentioned by attendee David Craggs. The City of London is home to an increasing number of sky gardens often due to Section 106 Planning Agreements; the Heron Tower has an aquarium installed in its lobby; and swimming pools are a must-have amenity on rooftops like that of Centre Point, and to bridge buildings as seen in Nine Elms. These volumetric and biological resources can consequently be seen as central to the development of new forms of premium urban experience.
Throughout the day, we also showcased images workshop attendees had sent in advance that represented an aspect of verticality in London or Paris. This included glimpses of the spectacular, mundane and hidden in both cities. From the Eiffel Tower, Parisian rooftops, high-density housing, building columns, to underground farming spaces in Paris. And in London, different encounters with The Shard, Canary Wharf, views from the inside of One Canada Square and Sky Garden, the City of London’s new tall buildings towering over Whitechapel Road, and a scale model of the City of London.
The workshop brought together a range of individuals specifically concerned with researching and writing on the verticality of London and Paris. Attendees included academics, photographers, journalists, early career researchers and doctoral students all involved in past and current vertical urban research.
As Martine put it on the day, this workshop was organised as a ‘launching point to explore other geographies and patterns that manifest themselves in London and Paris’. This workshop brought together two cities, twelve presenters and various ways of thinking about verticality through visualisation, high-density and volumetric enclosure in order to start the conversation for future work and events between London and Paris. To create a tale of two [vertical] cities.
Sidra Ahmed and Isobel Pagendam, PhD students based in UCL Geography researching vertical themes in contemporary London. Sidra’s PhD is on ‘The Lived Skyscraper: Branding, Viewing and Experiencing Contemporary Vertical London’, and Isobel’s is titled ‘Everyday ups and downs: exploring experiences of the lift in London’.
