Histories of the Future in Contemporary Megastructures An exploration of the development of multi-level cities around the world, and their links to historic futurism

1. Histories of the Future in
Contemporary Megastructures
Stephen Graham

3. 1. “Let us raise
the level of the city!”
“The houses of concrete, glass and iron must
rise on the edge of a tumultuous abyss”.
Instead of ground-level streets stretching
“like a foot-mat level with the porter’s
lodge,” future ciEes would instead “be linked
by metal walkways and immensely fast
escalators.”
“Let us throw away sidewalks, arcades,
steps!” he extolled. “Let us raise the level of
the city!”
Antonio Sant Elia

5. Newcastle:
The ‘Layer-cake City’
“prepare a fresh layout in
three dimensions, and then
to redevelop the areas as a
whole in one conEnuous
operaEon”

6. “no project for urban renewal,
be it extensive or quite local,
will match up to modern
necessiEes unless it provides
for proper segregaEon of
operaEons. This is essenEal
for safety, for maximum
concentraEon of use, and for
amenity and comfort […] The
transport design should,
therefore, aim at the
segregaEon of pedestrians,
city roads, service roads, and
car park roads, leading to
mulE-level circulaEon of
funcEons such as two-storey
shopping”
InsEtuEon of Municipal Engineers, 1962

7. “Some of the most hated
and unmanageable
[planned landscapes] in
urban Britain. Dismantling
or dis- guising the legacy
of deck access and
walkway design now
absorbs a good share of
the BriEsh government’s
“problem estates” budget.
Several recently built
mega- structures are
being demolished and the
original paXern of streets
and sidewalks reinstated”
Michael Hebbert

8. 2. Internalising
Downtown
“The development of discrete, grade-separated pedestrian
networks in the downtown core areas is surely one of the most
remarkable, [] The idea of an interior city from which one might
never need to step outdoors, is on the point of realizaEon in a
score of locaEons across the conEnent”.
Barry Maitland, 1992

11. Li[ing the Ladder Up?
In 1980s urban crisis, Minneapolis’ eight-mile
skyway system “became something it was
never intended to be: a fortress, a filter, a
refuge” Trevor Boddy.
“The success and proliferaEon of interiorized
acEvity and the fact that its nodes can be
placed anywhere as islands whose
connecEve Essue is a sea of formlessness
and nothingness, has le[ the outside
amputated, mostly inhabitable, and quite
o[en a space of threat”
Sze Tsung Leong
“The beginnings of a dual level downtown
society in which people are physically
separated by class”
Kent Robertson

12. “The enEre Hill is [...] separated
from the adjacent city by an
obstacle course of open freeway
trenches, a palisade of concrete
parking garages and and a tangle
of concrete bridges linking
citadel to citadel high above the
streets. […] We could aXain the
summit from the south, but only
by climbing a narrow, heavily
patrolled stair ‘plaza’, studded
with video cameras and clearly
marked as private property”
Steven Flusty

13. 3. Bangkok’s Skytrain:
An “Exclusive, Elevated
Urban Realm”:
• A “supreme symbol and icon of Bangkok’s
entrance into the realm of the super-
modern” ; Raised travellers experience the
city “within an elevated urban realm of cool
spaces, whilst being voyeur of the relaEvely
chaoEc ‘other’ realm below” Richardson and
Jensen
• Tickets cost over 10% of average monthly
wages in Thailand
• Elites and wealthy groups are starEng to live,
work and entertain themselves within a
raised archipelago city of enclaves, which
develop new concentraEons of elite services
and spaces geared to their needs, laced
together along the raised urban plane by the
Skytrain and its system of skybridges
providing ‘plug-in’ connecEons to its staEon

14. “The upper middle classes and the rich people transport themselves and live,
generally speaking, from 3rd floor and up. They work in buildings with air
condiEoning; they shop in air condiEoned shopping malls; go to cinemas and
train in cool fitness centres. They even transport themselves in air condiEoned
cars on elevated high ways or in sky trains.” Marling

15. 4. Bypass in Bombay
Geographer Andrew Harris found
that at least some, such as that
which allows commuters to
completely bypass the very poor
neighbourhood of Bandra East,
have “been created to enable
parEcular groups to move through
the city without having to
acknowledge and negoEate the
widespread dispossession and
poverty that remains the dominant
and abiding experience for most
people below”.

16. 5. Hong Kong:
City Without Ground
• Over 500
mulElevel
walkways that it is
the first city on
earth to have a
three-dimensional
urban guidebook
devoted to it

17. “Hong Kong enhances three-dimensional connecEvity to such a
degree,” the guide’s authors write, “that it eliminates reference
to the ground altogether. Hong Kong is a city without ground”
Solomon, Wong and Frampton,

18. 5. SpaJal Dead-Ends: Beyond ‘VerJcal Sprawl’?
• As ciEes across the world rise up, many
architects and planners are arguing that a
fully-three dimensional sense of the urban
public realm is now necessary. QuesEons
of physical accessibility and social
inequality are now constructed within the
complex volumes of urban built space and
can no longer adequately be represented
on tradiEonal two-dimensional maps used
by urban geographers and transport
planners.
• Horizontal imaginaEons of urban space
are clearly inadequate to the emerging
urban labyrinths which seamlessly blend
over-ground, ground-level and
subterranean complexes and
megastructures and link them together
unevenly through elevators, escalators,
tunnels, skywalks, subways, walkways,
bridges, people-movers and skytrains

19. • With many verEcal enclaves internalising a wide range of services and
ameniEes for their elite owners, such projects are becoming more and more
securiEsed and solipsisEc; their relaEonship to the urban street ever-more
distant and remote
• ‘VerEcal gated communiEes’
• “skyscraping suburb”, Iris Hwang
• “the 3-D city depends on sky passages that connect buildings together at
certain levels. In the early twenEeth century, each building had its own
underground level; now these are connected and became part of the city.
The same thing could happen in the air” Hirosi Hara

20. • “Could some of the retail, arts and leisure
faciliEes that normally occur at ground level
within the city be li[ed up into the sky to
occupy a new ‘public zone’ at height?”
Anthony Wood
• MVRDV’s 2005 Mirador; The Cloud’ in
Yongsan; Pinnacle at Duxton, Singapore