Towards weird verticality: The spectacle of vertical spaces in Chongqing.

Critical scholarly attention to vertical urbanism has expanded greatly in recent years but has seldom engaged with the variety of high-rise urban forms developed in mainland Chinese cities following the demise of socialist urban political economy. This paper introduces the case study of Chongqing as a critical example of the cultural significance of vertical urbanism in the post-socialist Chinese city, examining how supposedly 'weird' spaces of vertical density are materially and discursively constructed. Chongqing has undergone rapid urban expansion since the 1990s within a narrow and mountainous terrain, resulting in a number of extraordinary instances of extreme vertical density in the city. These sites have subsequently become 'spectacles' in themselves, widely photographed and discussed on social media. This paper surveys online discourse and imaging of these sites to categorise them as examples of connection, compression and luxification. Verticality is used to construct imaginaries of urban futures, and designations of 'weird' verticality differ between outsiders and locals. Such imaginaries may also obscure the history of urban restructuring which gave rise to these spaces in the first instance, and the conflicts between public and private space which emerge from this restructuring. The example of Chongqing provides an important demonstration of verticality as an everyday, historically grounded and contested environment within the city, rather than a recent imposition on a residual horizontal way of life. This paper concludes with a call for greater ethnographic attention to the weird qualities of such vertical spaces in the production of new urban theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

近年来，对垂直城市化的批判性学术关注大大扩展，但很少涉及随着社会主义城市政治经济的消亡而在中国大陆城市发展起来的各种高层城市形式。本文介绍了对重庆的案例研究，将其作为后社会主义中国城市中垂直城市化文化意义的一个重要例子，并考察了所谓"奇特"的垂直密度空间是如何在物质和话语上构建的。自 1990 年代以来，重庆在狭窄多山的地形中经历了快速的城市扩张，导致该市出现了许多极端垂直密度的非凡实例。这些地点本身随后成为了"奇观"，在社交媒体上被广泛拍摄和讨论。本文研究了网上关于这些地点的话语和图像，将它们归类为连接、压缩和奢侈化的例子。垂直性被用来构建城市未来的想象，何谓"奇特"垂直性在外人和当地人看来有所不同。这种想象也可能掩盖了最初产生这些空间的城市重组的历史，以及这种重组所产生的公共和私人空间之间的冲突。重庆的例子提供了一个重要的证明，表明垂直性是城市内日常的、有历史根据的和有争议的环境，而不是最近强加于残余的水平生活方式之上的。本文最后呼吁在新的城市理论中对这种垂直空间的奇特品质给予更多的人类学关注。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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