Altitudes

of Urbanization

Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology

Elsevier Journal
Published Online (4 January 2016)

Pierre Blanger
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture
Harvard Graduate School of Design
belanger@harvard.edu

Description, Note, Bibliography (1,132 words)

+35,000 km ASL

+2,000 km ASL

+10,000 m ASL

0.00 Sea Level

-10,000 m

Key
Diagram
F
rom 10,000 metres below the sea, to
35,000 kilometers in orbit above the
surface of the earth, the infrastructure
that supports urban life has reached
unimaginable extents below ground, in
the water, and across outer space. Re-tracing the
conventional contours of the cities we live in and
the spaces we travel through, this diagram illus-
trates the range of depths and dimensions that
we have reached and explored over the course of
the past 3,000 to 5,000 years of human history.
Organized through different depths and eleva-
tions, the elements mapped out here pro-pose a
different projection of the infrastructures that not
only support everyday life, but also the environ-
ments generate it. While attention is traditionally
given to the plans of urban civilization and top
views of human history, this schematic cross-sec-
tion view of the world opens a lens on the planet
as an urban projection, pattern and process of
overlapping change across different layers and
level of space, in time.

Referencing John McHales canonical chart of

Vertical Mobility in his 1969 The Future of the
Future and Patrick Geddes 1909 Valley Section
of Civilization, this visualization shifts our pre-
dominantly static and technological view of the
world from above to open a longitudinal lens
on the processes and patterns of contemporary
urbanization across three horizons: the orbital,
the subterranean, the submarine. An aircraft lost
in mid-flight in the middle of the ocean, a sinking
ship washed ashore, a receding coastal shore-
line, a deep-water free dive, or a high-altitude sky
dive, are planetary events that may seem isolated
but are all interconnected as processes. Not only
can heights, depths and levels of planetary pro-
cesses be numerically coupled with other metrics
such as changes in temperatures or air pressures
at different altitudes, they can also be spatially
combined with other less conventional flows. For
example, the cloudy tracks from flight paths left by
daily commercial aircrafts and passenger planes
at cruising altitudes of 10,000 meters can overlap
the seasonal and cyclical migration of different
bird species like geese or ducks along intercon-
tinental flyways at 4,000 meters above sea level.
The banal survey of a 150-millimeter curb eleva-
tion on a street or of an interstate highway ramp
can be plotted by satellite-enabled global position-
ing systems in high earth orbit. The land laws that
enable ultra-deep subsurface mining of copper in
Chile and open pit diamond mining in the Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo by transnational cor-
porations are best understood through subsurface
mining leases granted by States, on the surface,
who control rights to the underground.
Seeing and seen in section, processes that are
often isolated, in plans, or divided in conventional
categories, from above, can be better understood
and revealed, from this alternative vantage point,
from the side, as being associative and integra-
tiveoften overlapping, intertwined and entan-
gled.
Opening a lens on the complex urbanization of
the underground and of the atmosphere, this
association of the quantitative with the qualitative
made possible by seeing sideways offers three
important observations on the once and future
hinterlands of the underground, the ocean and
the atmosphere:
- Surface as Deeply Political Projection of
Spatial Power: the separation of surface
and subsurface rights reveals hidden
powers of the State; if consumption re-
quires extraction then the remote spaces
of resource extractionof so-called re-
source hinter-lands, are as urban as the
city-centric spaces of consumers.
- Air as Thick, Fuzzy, Complex Space: the
conflicts between flows across different
air-spaceabove ground, below water,
or underground (aircraft flight path and
bird migration, industrial fishing and fish
migration, deep mining and land resourc-
es) are no longer linear or direct, but they
may be better designed, planned, and
synchronized;
- Spatial Risks as Relative, Temporal, In-
terconnected: the vulnerability and risks
of coastal populations is less dependent
on the distance from shorelines or set-
backs from coasts than by the quality
and concentration of coastal ecologies
including the different latitudes of littoral
flora and altitudes of biota that lie above
and below the surface.
Across time, and into the future, this deep sec-
tional set of projections brings to light the in-
separability of environmental forces and flows,
climates and temperatures, pressures and at-
mospheres that regulate the range of senses,
sites, systems and infrastructures of contempo-
rary economies. Here, in this field of motion and
this stratified landscape of information, multiple
grounds can be read and revealed as both index
and interface: a registration of existing tempo-ral-
ities, shifting territories and emerging agencies.
Change both occurs from below (e.g. an earth-
quake or a tsunami), as it does from above (e.g.
an airquake such as the attacks on the Twin Tow-
ers during 9/11).
Altitudinally, change is as much environmental
and spatial, as it is political and ecological. This
longitudinal landscape provides an augmented
understanding of where we live in relationship to
thermodynamic exchanges, latitudinal variations
and hydrological ranges that are associated with
vectors of movementfrom logistics to commu-
nications, policies to legislations, planetary pro-
cesses to intertidal cycles, climatic differences to
barometric pressures, to better understand the
live, dynamic ecologies under the influence of,
and exerting pressure on, the altitudes of contem-
porary urban life.
Note
This project was first exhibited and developed at the
Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2013 for the
conference and exhibition Airport Landscape: Urban
Ecologies in the Aerial Age chaired by Sonja Dm-
pelmann and Charles Waldheim, between October
30, 2013December 19. The Altitudes diagram was
produced by OPSYS with research and graphic assis-
tance by Chris Bennett, Einat Rosenkrantz, Laurent
Corroyer, Oscar Malaspina, and Xiaowei Wang. Addi-
tional information is available at opsys.net
A Brief Bibliographic Primer
on Altitudes, Infrastructures, and Ecologies
of Urbanization

Neil Brenner, Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study

of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin, DE: Jovis Verlag
GmBH, 2013)

Rachel Carson, Undersea, Atlantic Monthly 78 (Sep-

tember 1937): 5567.

Joel E. Cohen and Christopher Small, Hypsographic

Demography: The Distribution of Human Population by
Altitude, PNAS-Proceedings of the National Academy
of Arts & Sciences Vol.95 No.24 (1998): 14009-14014.

Federal Aviation Administration, Airspace in Pilots

Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge FAA-H-8083-
25A (Washington, DC: US DOT, 2008): 14-1.
http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_
manuals/aviation/pilot_handbook/media/PHAK%20
-%20Chapter%2014.pdf

R. Buckminster Fuller, Planetary Planning, The Ameri-

can Scholar Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 1970-71): 29-63.

Patrick Geddes, Valley Plan of Civilization, The Survey

(June 1, 1925): 288-290.

Todd McHale, The Future of the Future (New York:

George Braziller Inc., 1969)

Abbott Lawrence Rotch, Comparative Altitudes in

Studies of the Upper Air (Boston, AM: Bos-ton, Com-
monwealth, 1895): 1.

Peter Sloterdijk, Airquakes Environment and Planning

D: Society and Space Vol.27 No.1 (2009): 41 57.

Jules Verne, Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Paris,

France: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1864)

J.D. Voss, P. Masuoka, B.J. Webber, A.I. Scher, R.L.

Atkinson, Association of Elevation, Urbanization and
Ambient Temperature with Obesity prevalence in the
United States, International Journal of Obesity No.37
(2013): 14071412

Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Es-

say on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990/2008)

Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life, The American

Journal of Sociology Vol.44 No.1 (July 1938): 1-24.
 Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology xxx (2016) xxxxxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tust
Editorial
Altitudes of urbanization
From 10,000 m below the sea, to 35,000 kms in orbit above the
surface of the earth, the infrastructure that supports urban life has
reached unimaginable extents below ground, in the water, and
across outer space. Re-tracing the conventional contours of the
cities we live in and the spaces we travel through, this diagram
illustrates the range of depths and dimensions that we have
explored, exploited, occupied, and instrumentalized over the
course of the past 30005000 years of human history. Organized
through different depths and elevations, the elements and equip-
ment mapped out here propose a different projection of the infras-
tructures and territories that not only support everyday life, but
also the environmental forces that generate it. While attention is
traditionally given to the plans of urban civilization and top views
of human history, this schematic cross-section view of the world
opens a lens on the planet as an urban projection, pattern and pro-
cess of overlapping, cyclic change across different layers and levels
of space, in time.
Referencing John McHales canonical chart of Vertical Mobility in
his 1969 The Future of the Future and Patrick Geddes 1909 Valley
Section of Civilization, this visualization shifts our predominantly
legal, static and technological view of the world from above to
open a longitudinal lens on the processes and patterns of contem-
porary urbanization across three horizons: the orbital, the subter-
ranean, the submarine. An aircraft lost in mid-flight in the middle
of the ocean, a sinking ship washed ashore, a receding coastal
shoreline, a deep-water free dive, or a high-altitude sky dive, are
planetary events that may seem isolated but are all interconnected
as territorial processes in time. Not only can heights, depths and
levels of planetary processes be numerically coupled with other
metrics such as changes in temperatures or air pressures at differ-
ent altitudes, they can also be spatially combined with other less
conventional flows. For example, the cloudy tracks from flight
paths left by daily commercial aircrafts and passenger planes at
cruising altitudes of 10,000 m can overlap the seasonal and cyclical
migration of different bird species like geese or ducks along inter-
continental flyways at 4000 m above sea level. The banal survey of
a 150-mm curb elevation on a street or of an interstate highway
ramp can be plotted by satellite-enabled global positioning sys-
tems in high earth orbit to a boundary marker, benchmark, or mon-
ument on the ground. The land laws that enable ultra-deep
subsurface mining of copper in Chile and open pit diamond mining
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by transnational corpora-
tions are best understood through subsurface mining leases
granted by States, on the surface, which control rights to the
underground.
Seeing and seen in section, processes that are often isolated, in
plans, or divided in conventional categories, from above, can be
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tust.2015.09.011
0886-7798/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
better understood and revealed, from this alternative vantage
point, from the side, as being associative and integrativeoften
overlapping, intertwined and entangled.
Opening a lens on the complex urbanization of the underground
and of the atmosphere, this association of the quantitative with the
qualitative made possible by seeing sideways offers three impor-
tant observations on the once and future hinterlands of the under-
ground, the ocean and the atmosphere:
Surface as Deeply Political Projection of Spatial Power: the sep-
aration of surface and subsurface rights reveals hidden, uneven,
and sometimes violent powers of the State and over time,
expose the suppressed rights of pre-State populations and the
dispossession of aboriginal land rights; if consumption requires
extraction then the remote spaces of resource extractionof so-
called resource hinterlands, are as urban as the city-centric
spaces of consumers.
Air as Thick, Fuzzy, Complex Space: the conflicts between flows
across different airspaceabove ground, below water, or under-
ground (aircraft flight path and bird migration, industrial fish-
ing and fish migration, deep mining and land resources) are
no longer linear or direct, but they may be better designed,
planned, and synchronized.
Spatial Risks as Relative, Temporal, Interconnected: the vulner-
ability and risks of coastal populations is less dependent on the
distance from shorelines or setbacks from coasts than by the
quality and concentration of coastal ecologies including the dif-
ferent latitudes of littoral flora and altitudes of biota that lie
above and below the surface.
Across time, and into the future, this deep sectional set of pro-
jections brings to light the inseparability of environmental forces
and flows, climates and temperatures, pressures and atmospheres
that regulate the range of senses, sites, systems and infrastructures
of contemporary economies. Here, in this field of motion and this
stratified landscape of information, multiple grounds can be read
and revealed as both index and interface: a registration of existing
temporalities, shifting territories, indigenous interests, and emerg-
ing agencies. Change both occurs from below (e.g. an earthquake or
a tsunami), as it does from above (e.g. an airquake such as the
attacks on the Twin Towers during 9/11). Altitudinally, change is
as much environmental and spatial, as it is political and ecological.
This longitudinal landscape provides an augmented understanding
of where we live in relationship to thermodynamic exchanges,
2 Editorial / Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology xxx (2016) xxxxxx

latitudinal variations and hydrological ranges that are associated

with vectors of movementfrom logistics to communications,
policies to legislations, planetary processes to intertidal cycles, cli-
matic differences to barometric pressures, to better understand the
live, dynamic ecologies under the influence of, and exerting pres-
sure on, the altitudes of contemporary urban life (see Figs. 1 and 2).

Note

This project was first exhibited and developed at the Harvard

Graduate School of Design in 2013 for the conference and exhibi-
tion Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age chaired
by Sonja Dmpelmann and Charles Waldheim, between October
30, 2013December 19. The Altitudes diagram was produced
by OPSYS with research and graphic assistance by Chris Bennett,
Einat Rosenkrantz, Laurent Corroyer, Oscar Malaspina, and Xiaowei
Wang. Additional information is available at opsys.net
A Brief Bibliographic Primer on Altitudes, Infrastructures, and
Ecologies of Urbanization

Fig. 1. Seeing from the side: altitudinal section showing depths of extraction with
underground urbanization to the deepest hole in the ground at 10,781 m below sea
level to atmospheric urbanization with satellite revolutions at 380,000 km in high
earth orbit.
 Editorial / Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology xxx (2016) xxxxxx 3

Fig. 2. Synchronization as strategy: the flows, forces, processes and patterns shown at different heights and elevations of the altitudinal section are synchronous and
simultaneous (occurring at similar times). From the side, they propose how overlaps or frictions between different systems (constructed vs natural) at different elevations can
be re-designed, re-planned, or re-engineered at different times (to avoid conflicts between the controllable and the uncontrollable, or the determined and the indeterminate,
or the planned and unpredictable) through a range of temporal measures such as strategies of sequencing, scheduling, and synchronization.

Further reading Voss, J.D., Masuoka, P., Webber, B.J., Scher, A.I., Atkinson, R.L., 2013. Association of
elevation, urbanization and ambient temperature with obesity prevalence in
the United States. Int. J. Obes. 37, 14071412.
Brenner, Neil, 2013. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary
Williams, Rosalind, 1990/2008. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on
Urbanization. Jovis Verlag GmBH, Berlin, DE.
Technology, Society, and the Imagination. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Carson, Rachel, 1937. Undersea. Atlant. Mont. 78, 5567.
Wirth, Louis, 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. Am. J. Sociol 44 (1), 124.
Cohen, Joel E., Small, Christopher, 1998. Hypsographic demography: the
distribution of human population by altitude. PNAS-Proc. Nat. Acad. Arts Sci.
95 (24), 1400914014. Pierre Blanger
Federal Aviation Administration, 2008. Airspace. In: Pilots Handbook of Harvard Graduate School of Design, United States
Aeronautical Knowledge FAA-H-8083-25A. US DOT, Washington, DC. 14-1
<http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/pilot_ E-mail address: belanger@harvard.edu
handbook/media/PHAK%20-%20Chapter%2014.pdf>.
BuckminsterFuller, R., 197071. Planetary planning. Am. Schol. 40 (1), 2963 Received 8 August 2015
(Winter).
Geddes, Patrick, 1925. Valley plan of civilization. The Survey, 288290, June 1. Accepted 28 September 2015
McHale, Todd, 1969. The Future of the Future. George Braziller Inc., New York.
Rotch, Abbott Lawrence, 1895. Comparative altitudes. In: Studies of the Upper Air. Available online xxxx
Boston, Commonwealth, Boston, AM, p. 1.
Sloterdijk, Peter., 2009. Airquakes. Environ. Plan. D: Soc. Space 27 (1), 4157.
Verne, Jules, 1864. Voyage au Centre de la Terre. Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Paris, France.