Such a densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality that requires reading in vertical terms. Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks. Privilege prefers to distance itself from the mess of the street by means of altitude – those fiftieth-floor infinity pools, those rooftop penthouse suites – and tends only to delve below ground when that delving offers security or privacy (the deep-sunk document stores maintained by US security firms such as Blackwater, for instance, or the oligarch basements dug down into the London clay at Mayfair and other
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