The HighRise project

 

The Highrise Project is an interdisciplinary research programme involving architects and geographers at the University of Edinburgh It has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.

This project explores the play of difference and repetition in a global urban form, that being the modernist residential highrise. It investigates two cases that encapsulate the varied fortunes of the highrise: the UK, where the form is routinely condemned, even demolished; and Singapore, where it is embraced enthusiastically and continues to be built at greater heights and densities. The project elaborates an ethnographic and visual methodology, and a theory of relational materiality, to investigate the multi-scaled logics of such divergence and its implications for understanding social and urban space. The study contributes to current debates on in geographies of architecture and materiality, architectural technology, everyday urban life, transnationalism, and high-density living.