Abstract
Introduction
The practice of commuting has become an established scholarly area in recent years. However, less attention has been paid to how commuters move through the array of inter-locking spaces that characterise high-density central business districts (CBDs). This article examines people movement between underground, surface and high-rise commercial structures using a case study of Sydney’s CBD, and the growing precision with which these movements are calculated and analysed. It connects with work that has refocused attention on the dimensionality of the built environment, and the conjoined issues of volume and capacity in complex urban spaces, particularly multilevel urban environments that integrate mixed-use commercial developments, public space and private and public transport nodes (Shelton et al., 2010; Yoos and James, 2016).
Optimising connectivity and people flow between vertical and horizontal modes of transport and surface and underground spaces is becoming a major issue in many large cities. In high-density Asian cities, such as Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chongqing and Tokyo, there is a strong correlation between new underground public transport lines and high-density property development. This may involve the construction of station boxes within an integrated project management framework, where skyscrapers and podiums are constructed above stations as part of a singular design (Aveline-Dubach and Blandeau, 2019); or the insertion of high-level monorails built on stilts above existing highways between major development sites (Graham and Marvin, 2002); or even the insertion of metro tunnels within urban housing blocks (Roast, 2024).
Commuting practices are integrated within this reconfiguration of centrality. City centres are noted for their temporally variable movements, with intense crowds filling available infrastructure at particular times of the day, most notably the ‘morning peak’ or ‘rush hour’, lunch-times and the slightly less pronounced ‘evening peak’ (Chowdhury and McFarlane, 2022). At these times, huge quantities of people decant from underground trains and make a pedestrian journey out of the station box into a concourse. From there, they may be offered a number of exits and enter ‘street level’. From here, they are likely to enter the lobby of an office building, and in most cases will complete their journey to their workspace by elevator. The multiple depths and elevations negotiated by commuters in their everyday geographies of traversing cities and the mundane infrastructures and transit spaces that enable passage between these urban layers are sites of transit and navigation (Solomon et al., 2012). Cities rely on a range of experts, public and private, to deliver logistical capacity in elevators, walkways, pavements, concourses and lobbies to move increasing volumes of people.
In this article, we suggest that Sydney provides a compelling site to study the ‘up, down and across’ (Goetz, 2003) of urban mobility, and a window into how both public and private interests understand city life. The project which this article drew upon is drawn from a wider project on volumetric urbanism, focusing on Sydney, Singapore and London. The primary data is generated from semi-structured interviews (
The article begins by developing a framework for understanding the movement of people within dense commercial spaces. It then presents three empirical areas where the governance of this movement can be observed. First, it considers how underground rail planning has adopted new modes of organising capacity, especially in terms of the use of behavioural psychology to manage platform and escalator crowd behaviour. Second, it traces the evolution of how pedestrianism is understood in a calculative and behavioural sense, linking it particularly to how pavements are monitored for capacity. Third, it explores the relationship between elevator technology and the design and development of the contemporary skyscraper office building, and the interaction between vertical people flow analysis and the floorplate design of offices. In each case, we consider how various forms of professional expertise are emerging as significant agents in expanding capacity and maximising the extraction of value from the built volume of cities.
Navigating the volumetric city: Technologies and expertise
The article contributes to earlier work on setting out a ‘volumetric spatial ontology’ of cities (McNeill, 2020), building on this to consider how cities have volumetric capacity, that movement within these volumes is multi-planar, and that volume varies in relation to the temporality of city rhythms. Moreover, within most theories of capitalist urbanisation, volumetric urbanism has a discernible political economy based on using manipulated spatial envelopes to maximise the profitability of the built environment. For the commuter, this plays out in how they experience the navigation of the urban landscape; for those involved in governing that landscape, it includes understanding both the limits of these multi-planar spaces and the efficiency and modulation of flow and dwell time within them. This can be seen as an urbanism of dimensions and stratigraphy, and one of time–space compression of urban space, where increasing public demands on relatively fixed land parcels generate an increased intensity in the governance, planning and operational management of volume.
The mundane technologies of vertical infrastructure
Critical analysis of these vertical infrastructures has been relatively absent from urban geography that has focused largely on horizontal mobility and its attendant infrastructures (Graham, 2016), a ‘horizontalist’ ontology that privileges surface or ground as an organising principle and thus views urban space through the prism of a notion of area, as bounded and flat (Elden, 2013; Graham, 2016). However, this spatial ontology is increasingly problematised by the vertically stacked nature of built form and infrastructure and the logistical challenges of moving people and things above, across and below tightly defined, interlocking sites.
The mundane technologies of elevators and escalators that underpin the micro-commuting practices that hold together city life have been explored by Bernard’s (2014) cultural history of elevators, who notes their very specific hermetic qualities and the heightened olfactory awareness and visual concentration engendered in their temporarily entrapped users. The notion of the ‘elevator pitch’, where would-be entrepreneurs sell their ideas to temporarily entrapped investors or managers, is illustrative of this, as are the cultural norms of acceptable behaviour within the peculiar closeness and confined spaces of the elevator carriage. The elevator is then intimately connected to the evolution of the office as an organisational, psychological and cultural site (Goetz, 2003).
Recent work in logistical geographies offers conceptual tools for understanding the deployment of people movement expertise as a form of urban logistics, deployed to enact ‘geographies of rationalisation and optimisation’ (Hepworth, 2014). These include an emphasis on the frictionless flow of commodities; value added through speed and volume of circulation; and a unifying spatial logic integrating material and data flows. This parallel shift is evolving as a new form of power/knowledge (Cowen, 2014: 25) aimed at optimising
Calculative devices and people movement
The commuter passes through various zones of calculation in their journey, and we can see this as a process of territorialisation (Elden, 2013). There is a strong literature, developed from Foucault, which argues that governmental power is exercised through various technologies of calculation – statistics, census-taking, mapping and counting – that are integral to the operations of state power and the self-governing of populations (Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). As Rose (1999) argues, calculative techniques render territory, including urban space, legible in particular ways: ‘numbers and other “inscription devices”, actually constitute the domains they appear to represent; they render them representable in a docile form – a form amenable to the application of calculation and deliberation’ (Rose, 1999: 198). As Menniken and Miller (2012) argue, calculative techniques can re-define boundaries around what counts as calculable in ways that recast ‘the interface between government and business, private and public interests’. A central question for this article lies in how the boundary between public governance and commercial interests is being re-negotiated through the calculative techniques and knowledge practices deployed to manage movement in increasingly vertical urban environments.
In a separate vein, William Holly Whyte’s classic studies of public space use in Manhattan provide a foundational observational methodology for understanding the varied ways in which commuters and pedestrians occupy urban space and the mundane infrastructures that enable vertical passage between spatial planes and elevations. His micro-ethnographic observational studies are full of thoughts, measurements and diagrams of these transitional spaces of central city life. His work was particularly insightful in showing how space-users occupy the physicality of space: Formulas based on the pedestrian as a transportation unit are most applicable to transportation situations, such as getting from concourse exit A to gate B. But pedestrians are social beings too. Sometimes they stop and chat with someone—even on the concourse. They cluster in doorways. They pause to look at a shop window. In a word, they self-congest. The crowding and the pleasure are inextricably bound up. To put it another way, part of what attracts people to the street is a measure of the congestion the high standards would save them from. (Whyte, 2009: 77)
An important trend in the built environment sector, which has emerged subsequent to Whyte’s observations, is the growth of what is sometimes called the ‘people movement’ industry. These are professional service firms, either specialist firms such as the UK-based Movement Strategies or Sydney’s Behavioural Architects, or teams within larger global consultancies that specialise in simulation modelling of people flow, often using data analytics and insights from behavioural and environmental psychology.
The expansion of the industry can partly be understood in relation to the increasingly complex, interlocking spaces commuters now navigate in their everyday commuting journeys. Often highly constrained, these mundane infrastructures – escalators, tunnels, stairways, elevators and station platforms and concourses – are potential sites of vulnerability where flow and connectivity are likely to become constricted, creating blockages, delays and bottlenecks. Forms of people movement expertise, such as wayfinding, behavioural architectures and simulation flow modelling, are deployed to address the conjoined issues of volume and capacity in increasingly vertical urban built environments such as transport nodes.
Whilst the emergence of people movement expertise has its roots in risk assessment, safety compliance and the securitisation of public space, the industry has evolved over the last 20 years from this initial focus to encompass a more commercially driven agenda to find ‘efficiencies’ and to ‘add value’ through the extension of data gathering and predictive analytics around people flow, particularly at major infrastructure projects. The commercial value of people movement analytics – the tracking and tracing of movement intensity, pedestrian flow, footfall and the temporal aspects of movement (where, when and how long people dwell in a certain location)–can also be understood in a context of the increasingly neo-liberal ‘co-development’ of major infrastructure projects. Mass transport nodes, in particular, are becoming places not only for commuting but also for
Taken together, the mix of techniques deployed by people movement specialists partially serves to improve the efficiency of the concourse area but also to potentially enhance the commercial value of urban space. Reviewing this literature, we can identify a number of significant conceptual shifts in the way people flow is calculated and spatially conceived. The first is a shift from a mapping of pedestrian flow on a horizontal grid as part of a flat network of streets to a three-dimensional kinetic articulation of movement in vertical space; the second is an epistemic shift from data collection (numerical counting) to a knowledge practice involving ‘intelligent movement design’; the third is a form of spatial integration – the shift from pedestrian flow as a series of broken-up events (shopping, work, recreation) in a range of discrete sites to the spatial integration of people flow as a ‘seamless journey’ in which differentiation is collapsed and the public and commercial are integrated.
Within this genealogy, however, is recognition of pedestrianism as an activity that requires calculative action on the part of the state. The attention given to counting pedestrians at all was recognition of the space use and mobility in cities where vehicular traffic was becoming dominant. The subsequent deployment of such studies by, most notably, William Holly Whyte and Jan Gehl, and the canonisation of the pedestrian by Jane Jacobs, enshrined this technique within the toolkit of urban designers and planners.
Commuting and capacity: ‘Algorhythmic’ governance
There is now an established interest in the agency of the commuter within scholarly studies, and their position as both individual and aggregate, as contributors to the ‘crowd’ (Bissell, 2014, 2018; Chowdhury and McFarlane, 2022). The mobilities studies literature, in particular, challenged the abstract, numerically figured commuting aggregate with a more nuanced understanding of the commuter as possessing agency, with complex behaviours, mindsets, tactics and subjectivities (Sheller and Urry, 2006). This included the experiential dimension of travel. For example, as Symes (2013) argued, ‘the significance of the journey as a component of travel has been overlooked’. In particular, the ‘corporeality of commuting … the territorialising and de-territorialising that occurs within crowded spaces of trains and on platforms during peak hours’ requires more research. In his carefully observed vignettes of commuter life, Bissell draws attention to the need for a subtler understanding of commuting as a practice: Where commuting has often been apprehended as a practice that is resistant to transformation, a practice etched with some of the most strictly programmatic temporal logics of our time, these inheritances demonstrate how commuting is also a practice that is curiously out of time: a knotty, fractured, and folded set of durations. (Bissell, 2014: 1961)
Cities operate at different time-speeds, for one, particularly where commutes are long and the cost of labour is not acknowledged (Bissell, 2014). There is, then, an important urban geography of commuter habit: the repetition of particular behaviours that make a place a place; the times when people avoid particular places whether from fear or anticipation of crush and discomfort; the meteorological structures of city life that mean things function differently during heat or rain. These habits are increasingly tracked through mobile devices carried by the commuter. As Bolleter observes: The data generated by tracking of Wi-Fi users in such spaces are beginning to be used in planning for a number of applications including the predictive demand for transport, way-finding, the placement of pathways, ensuring permeability to pedestrian flows and, and in embryonic form, to assess the effectiveness of urban planning and management interventions on user experience, visitation and dwell times. (Bolleter, 2017: 136)
Governing commuting, then, can also be seen as part of the wider suite of ‘algorhythmic governance’ practices that have become part of city life. Drawing on Miyazaki’s (2012) concept of the ‘algorhythm’, Coletta and Kitchin (2017: 5) illustrate ‘how forms of algorhythmic governance are being produced that explicitly measure and modulate urban rhythms’. Aligning with the pillars of smart city policy, techniques such as machine learning allow firms such as IBM to claim to be able to automatically reprogramme traffic flows, deploy public officials, control energy flows and apply various modes of predictive foresight. These calculative techniques are embedded within the governance of volumetric space.
Governing the volumetric commuter journey
In what follows, we describe a generalised journey by a commuter arriving in Sydney’s CBD to work in a high-rise office tower. We break the journey into three stages: first, their arrival through underground tunnels on the Sydney Trains network, followed by a diagonal, vertical commute to the surface; second, their ambulation through the pavements of the ‘surface city’; and third, their ascent via escalator into the workplaces of private office towers.
Underground capacities: Rush hours, platforms and chokepoints
Our starting point is Town Hall station, the busiest in the rail network. In 2018, the CEO of Sydney Trains announced that the station would be periodically closed during the morning peak to mitigate overcrowding. The station had seen a 23% rise in passenger usage to 68 million in 2018 compared with 55 million passengers in the previous year (O’Sullivan, 2018). Other stations on the City Circle loop, particularly Wynyard Station, were also experiencing high volumes of people flow. A recent upgrade of Wynyard to connect the station with Barangaroo, a huge new development along the CBD’s western foreshore, had created new above- and below-ground commuter corridors, tunnels and sky bridges to allow for increased capacity at peak times. The opening of a surface light rail system in 2019 along George Street, the main public transport spine of the CBD, put further pressure on the highly constrained underground heavy rail stations. The NSW Government’s without action the whole rail network would exceed capacity at some point in the mid to late 2020s … More than 1,000 buses converge on the city centre in the morning peak hour, adding to congestion … The number of people accessing the city centre from outer suburban growth areas will increase by around 37,000 over the next 20 years as new suburbs are built. (NSW Government, 2013: 16)
With an increasing amount of office construction, the report made it clear that this tightly defined piece of land, surrounded on three sides by water, would face significant challenges of capacity. With a new underground metro system and a new surface light rail under construction, both due to open in coming years, capacity issues would be felt on the pavements, escalators and elevators which facilitate the ‘last 100 metres’ of the commuting journey.
This issue of pedestrian flow and underground capacity has been identified in other major transport systems such as London’s Underground rail network. With some of the deepest underground stations in the world, London’s tube system is heavily reliant on vertical transport, such as escalators, to connect commuters with different levels of the city, from the underground to the surface street level. From 2015 to 2017, Transport for London (TfL) conducted ‘standing-only’ escalator trials at known ‘chokepoints’ in the system – stations where overcrowding causes delays and bottlenecks, often leading to station lockouts for people outside and safety concerns for those inside. Designed to see if changing commuter behaviour could increase ‘throughput’ and reduce delays, the escalator trials were also designed to test how hard it would be to change people’s habits. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the trials were met with resistance from many commuters, who were essentially being asked to change (temporarily) some deeply ingrained habits, preferences and behaviours. However, the trials also offered a revealing glimpse into the complex physical dimensions of the city’s sprawling underground system and the significance of its increasingly vertical but often overlooked transport infrastructures – the elevators and escalators that lace the system together.
In a similar way, the overcrowding at Town Hall station foregrounds the potential for highly constrained underground spaces and infrastructures such as station platforms, stairways, tunnels elevators and escalators to become
Transport for New South Wales also announced the deployment of ‘dwell managers’ specifically for Town Hall station, with a focus on ‘event-style marshalling’ during the 7 am to 9 am morning peak (Transport for New South Wales, n.d.). As one senior network manager explained, ‘over-capacity’ at Town Hall station is managed through ‘fast-track platforms’ where passengers are held in concourses and then released and distributed along platforms by rail staff, to ensure that trains do not stand for more than 60 seconds and retain a three-minute frequency.
The rail authority also used technology surveillance solutions to assess volumetric capacity on trains and station platforms. For example, on one of Wynyard’s most congested platforms, managers trialled a technology called Dwell Track, ‘which uses infrared depth cameras to track the movement of passengers along a platform, combining it with real-time feeds of the weight of individual carriages, which together creates a profile of the less-crowded sections of the train’. Rail staff can then encourage passengers to move to these doors (Nott, 2019).
At this point, the exiting passengers who alight on the platforms of the busiest CBD stations, Town Hall and Wynyard, will use escalators, steps and elevators to leave the stations in a number of different directions, joining the aggregate throng converging on the surface of the city. However, the experience of navigating underground space is often disorientating, particularly in busy transport hubs where the station concourse is a central node for a network of connective tunnels, access points and multiple exits to street level. At Town Hall station there are 10 exits, some of which are only metres apart. Some flow directly into commercial office complexes, some emerge in the open air at street level and others open out onto modernist public plazas. Faced with multiple exits, non-regular users at Town Hall station may stop or linger in a crowd of faster-moving pedestrians, and the multiple directional changes in aggregate can significantly impede flow. Maintaining directional flow and overall spatial legibility is a major challenge in complex urban underground environments, given that a ‘hyper-accumulation’ of signage and auditory messaging can have the opposite effect, producing instead a form of ‘cognitive overload’. This is especially the case where transport hubs are also developed as zones of consumption – for business, leisure and shopping. Commuters en route negotiate tensions around commercial and public use values where a reliable volume of commuter traffic is also potentially consumer footfall. Value capture in these complex underground environments thus involves capturing the attention of passing commuters and eliciting consumer behaviours such as browsing and stopping that are often at odds with the behaviours needed to maintain commuter flow and station capacity.
The deployment of various forms of people movement expertise such as wayfinding, behavioural architecture and movement strategies has seen a shift in how commuter flow is managed around the station concourse and transit corridors. This ranges from more deliberative modes of governance involving direct informational signage, to spatial interventions in clearing obstacles within the physical environment, to more subtle techniques to nudge behaviour change and encourage directional flow.
In the design and construction phase of large infrastructure projects, ‘movement strategists’ now use simulation software, integrating 3D geometry to simulate flow and calculate infrastructure capacity in complex volumetric environments. Their advice can have a significant effect on both physical infrastructure – the width of platforms, the number and placement of gates, the layout and positioning of vertical transport – and operational decisions such as scheduling, route tracking and re-routeing and assessing commuter behaviour to alleviate congestion. Sydney Trains turned to wayfinding techniques and behavioural studies to improve directional flow and in-station capacity. Wayfinders look for more intuitive ways to influence movement by designing in ‘environmental cues’ with lighting, the shape of movement corridors, material cladding and wall finishes (interview, wayfinding consultant no. 1). Consultants studied CCTV footage of platform behaviour by commuters, and used observational techniques to capture the actual experience. Their findings noted, for example, auditory clutter in the mix of automated announcements and tannoy broadcasts issued by platform managers that created a conflicting set of sounds and informational sources. They also assessed the effects of signage and platform markings, and suggested alterations to the design of signs and the timing of public loudspeaker announcements (interview, rail manager and behavioural consultants).
The final intervention made by the state rail authority related to the station concourse. Many of Sydney’s historic stations are now seen as excessively narrow and lacking in capacity for current crowd sizes and safety standards. While the concourses of many railway stations have become increasingly seen as commercial retail sites, in Sydney the operational control needs meant that this had to be reduced, as at Town Hall station: … [at] Town Hall … to get off Platform 3 to the QVB [Queen Victoria Building, an adjacent shopping centre] used to take you seven minutes during the peaks, because it was just crowded … We’ve since doubled the capacity of the gate line in there to allow that to drop to about two minutes or three minutes. [To do that,] we’ve opened up the gate line. We took all the shops away … we had pubs and fish and chip shops and all sorts of things around the sides. It was a battle and a half, but it had to be done. (Interview, rail manager)
It is at this point that the jurisdictional space of the public transport agency meets two different types of urban space: the municipally maintained pavements of the street; and the various layers of privately owned but publicly accessible commercial space that structure the city.
Navigating municipal ground: Pavement capacity and pedestrian analysis as calculative practice
Once out on the street, most commuters will pass a barely visible boundary separating the property of the state transport agency from land under the jurisdiction of the municipality, in this case the City of Sydney. For Sydney’s municipal planners, the key issue is how to balance an understanding of jobs growth and locational density – captured in their triannual Floorspace Employment Survey – with the hyper-local management of pavement density. At this point, we can see the deployment of various calculative practices to allow planners to understand many things, including the capacity and flow of people across their municipally maintained pavements.
Pedestrian analysis has been a standard element of planning practice in many cities. For example, urban planners in the city of Chicago provided a detailed review of pedestrian counts for the wider American planning community (American Society of Planning Officials, 1965). William Holly Whyte’s influential work on public spaces in Manhattan made many normative observations of how pedestrians adapt their everyday mobility practices to the shifting width of pavements, noting how this shapes their capacity: A wide sidewalk can tolerate obstruction better than a narrow one. On Fifth Avenue, for example, the effective walkway was abruptly narrowed to thirteen feet by two round benches outside of Elizabeth Arden. But there were few jams. In a kind of venturi effect, people anticipate a narrowing and adjust their gait accordingly, some accelerating, some making way. As they debouch from a narrower to a wider space, they may fan out from one or two files to three or four. (Whyte, 2009: 77)
At around the same time, John Fruin (1971), in his book
These calculative practices around pedestrian flow and pavement provision have some striking characteristics. First, the ontology of urban space is manifestly horizontal. Here, the congestion and overflow on pavements, potential conflict with vehicular traffic and horizontal sprawl are identified as issues that merit planning intervention. They are specific modalities of governance. The overall rationale for data collection is one of maximising ‘mobility, safety and pleasure’ for pedestrian travel (Fruin, 1971: 2). Volume is calculated via manual pedestrian counts, gathering data about directional flow, the number of pedestrians and peak times for flow. Pedestrian movement is ‘broken down into various types of walking trips – work, shopping, pleasure – and linked to specific origin and destination points’ (Fruin, 1971: 2). Pedestrian count data is then represented visually in the form of graphs, numerical tables, volume maps – a classic planner’s view of the city as a horizontal grid – and a ground plan of CBD streets with volume shaded at street intersections.
City of Sydney planners use a number of calculative interventions to assess the impact of development on pavement capacity. These interventions have been built through many years of planning practice, and certain influential works have developed into a standard approach to pedestrian analysis. In Sydney, proposals for major skyscraper developments are usually required to include a pedestrian impact analysis. For example, the development application for a mixed-use 55-storey commercial and hotel development at 4–6 Bligh Street included a Pedestrian Assessment Study by Aecom, a global consultancy firm (Aecom, 2018). The aim was to ‘conduct a strategic spreadsheet based analysis to evaluate the future impact to pedestrian footpath comfort and pedestrian movement along Bligh Street once the proposed mixed use commercial and hotel development is built and open’ (Aecom, 2018: 458). Fruin’s work on footpath comfort, using pedestrian crowding studies, was adopted in Transport for London’s (2010)
Drawing on these tools, municipal planners may consider how development applications can be used for improving pavement capacity: If a site was increasing employment population by a certain percentage, we’d look at what they could do at footpath level to improve footpath capacity and all those sorts of things. And we found that most developers [are] increasingly worried about … the public domain, and getting that right because that’s just as an important consideration as how much light and air a building gets. (Interview, city council planning officer)
Additionally, there has been a growing interest among developers in how footfall relates to the retail sector, harnessed to geo-located wi-fi device tracking. Understanding issues around mobility and footfall in particular locations – the physical presence of bodies in real time, the trajectories of pedestrians in space, the temporal characteristics of their movement (events in space) – has the potential to enhance commercial value. Cronin (2008: 99), for example, has traced the links between through-city mobilities, market research and outdoor advertising, where she ‘explored the production of the city through this nexus of energy–time–space by focussing on the outdoor advertising industry’s calculative practices of measuring and classifying people and spaces’. She identifies ‘a particular form of energy – a calculative energy that forms what the industry understands as a “commercial vitalism”’ (Cronin, 2008: 99). Her empirical work explores how this market research is then embedded in particular semiotic strategies in advertising billboards and panels.
Realising this commercial value is now a central practice for many public transport agencies, and one which has become increasingly sophisticated in many Asian cities. Aveline-Dubach and Blandeau (2019) explore the impact and business model of Hong Kong’s MTRC, which operates that city’s metro network while delivering huge amounts of commercial property development. The MTRC has become increasingly involved in the contractual delivery of Sydney’s public transport operations, and the influence of their ‘rail plus property’ model – while not explicitly adopted – was often part of the context of Sydney’s public transport planning.
A key feature of the MTRC model increasingly revolved around station-generated revenue, including asset management strategies based on ‘station shops … advertising, and communication [such as wi-fi]’ (Aveline-Dubach and Blandeau, 2019: 3426). This has an impact on the development of underground metro stations and their co-development as commercial spaces, which in turn affects pavement capacity above ground, potentially re-distributing commuters at multiple exits and extending the ‘value proposition’ of the station. However as one station architect observed, comparing his approaches in Hong Kong and Sydney, the extension of the station footprint underground is closely related to land values above ground, and this commercialisation of space can create major challenges in a city like Sydney: In Hong Kong, they have these tentacle links of footpaths which effectively extend the station entrances 200 metres in one direction and 200 metres in another. So the station footprint is greatly increased and you’ve got multiple nodes or spread of people and value proposition well beyond the immediate footprint of the station … some stations will have 10 or more entrances, therefore you’re distributing that impact more evenly … [T]hat’s something we’re particularly aware of in Sydney, trying to work in the CBD and place the stations and how to have a large footfall, suddenly presented to a three-metre-wide footpath. This is a challenge. (Interview, station architect)
Contemporary pedestrian analysis reveals a number of significant conceptual shifts in approach: from a flat, horizontal mapping to a three-dimensional kinetic articulation of movement in vertical space; from simple numerical counts of pedestrian movement to ‘intelligent movement design’; from pedestrian flow as a series of events in discrete sites to the spatial integration of people flow as a ‘seamless journey’ where the public and commercial are integrated. This interface between municipal benefit and the role of commercial operators to manage the externalities of their buildings is a key issue in urban theory. It is given added significance in the shift that the commuter makes as they step from the lobby into the openly accessible, but privately managed, space of the office building lobby.
Elevator journeys: Modulating vertical flow in the corporate city
[T]he elevator remains extraordinary: human enclosure within them creates a fascinating opportunity for urban anthropology. As density increases, so imperceptible adjustments are made by inhabitants as to their location, demeanour, and eye position. This maximizes personal space and minimizes the risk of unwanted intimacy. (Graham, 2014: 245)
The next stage is probably the most explicitly vertical element of the journey: the commuters who have exited at the busy stations such as Town Hall and Wynyard and who have navigated the pavements of the likes of George Street and Pitt Street now approach their workplaces. The vast majority of these workplaces are in tall buildings. Some are remnant modernist offices constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, which run to only 17 storeys; a range of post-2000 skyscrapers rise to around 35 storeys or higher. To complete their journey, commuters navigate two distinct but connected spaces: the office lobby, and the elevator. For the sake of brevity, we pass over the multiple activities that take place in the semi-private space of the commercial office lobby. Many workers will, indeed, move quickly through this space and catch an elevator to take them to their work floor. At the morning peak, there may be a short wait and a fair degree of congestion as large volumes of workers – along with visitors to the building, such as couriers, caterers and cleaners, as well as non-occupant ‘white-collar’ workers visiting resident firms – are entering or leaving.
Most of Sydney’s CBD offices are in buildings over 120 m in height, and most have multiple firms leasing various floors or sub-sections of floors. For this reason, there is an imperative to increase the capacity of the elevator system to move building users effectively. In many buildings with less sophisticated elevator control systems, some elevators are locked into serving particular floor clusters, moving by express from the ground to, for example, floors 15–20. This rather unrefined method was addressed with the advent of destination control, a system patented by Schindler, where the building user chooses their flow from a control panel and is then allocated a lift via an algorithm that matches load with elevator position and floor demand (in both directions). The decision as to which system to use will have an impact on the building’s design, as one elevator consultant described: we’ll have an overall … 50,000 square metres of floor space over 40 floors or 45 floors, or something like that, and then look at that and try to work out how many groups of lifts we put into that building – is it two groups of lifts, three groups of lifts, four groups of lifts – and that depends on also who’s moving in there. If it’s a single tenant taking most of the building, you’ll try and do larger groups so that they don’t have to transfer from one group to the other as much, but if it’s going to be a lot of multiple tenant people in the building, it may be more efficient to have four groups of lifts serving 12 floors each, as opposed to three groups of lifts serving 16 or 17 floors each. (Interview, elevator consultant)
This calculative reasoning is rarely visible to the everyday user of a building, and nor may it be of great interest. However, it could be argued that the contemporary elevator is one of the most important sites of urban technology innovation in recent years. Apart from being vital transport infrastructures that enable vertical passage to stacked workplaces in tall buildings, elevators are also calculated economic technologies based on very precise height versus width ratios. As one elevator consultant observed: on average it’s about 15 floors per rise in an elevator system that you use, and then it comes down to how big the floor plates are, so 1000 m2 floor plates, 1500 m2 floor plates, we’re seeing some of the big things like Barangaroo at 2000 m2 floor plate, and the bigger the floor plate, the more people, the more lifts you need in that lift group to do it. (Interview, elevator consultant)
In designing a new high-rise, the elevator engineer works with architects and developers to model building movement data, for two main periods of the day: morning up-peak to show the movement of people into the building, and that’s where it’s based on the density, so if it’s one person per 10 square metres that equals so many people in the building, and then from an elevator standpoint, for a premium grade building, we have to move 14 per cent of that population in five minutes, and do that with an average waiting time of less than 25 seconds. And for an A grade building it’s 13 per cent handling capacity in five minutes and less than 30 seconds, or 30 seconds or less. (Interview, elevator consultant)
While having significant elevator capacity would seem to be easily achievable, there is also a significant trade-off in increasing the core where elevator shafts are located: the bigger the core, the bigger the loss of leasable space on a floor, multiplied by the number of floors in a building. This is also why vertical engineers work with quantity surveyors, developers and architects at the earliest stages of planning to ensure the financial viability of a building, which must achieve the twin imperatives of efficient and timely vertical transport for occupants with as little impact as possible on the building’s overall leasable space.
The insertion of elevators thus has a significant impact on the cost modelling for the building, with each lift taking up 8 m2 per floor: with a bank of six, that would remove almost 50 m2 per floor. For a 20-floor building, this would equate to 1000 m2 of ‘lost’ rental. The ultimate decision on lifting capacity is made by the developer based on whether they plan to retain the building via an aligned property trust, where long-term returns based on asset management logic would lead to more focus on building operability due to higher rental returns, rather than cost reduction for quick sale post completion. As one developer put it: ‘If I wanted to be a pure developer to on-sell it, every square metre that I give away to non-income producing purposes is an incrementally larger amount of value that I’ve left on the table’ (interview, property development executive).
Whilst owners and developers of tall buildings seek to minimise loss of rental space, many corporate tenants push for an increase in density of occupancy, arguing that changing work practices such as collaborative co-working have shifted the internal fit-out of floor plates, creating more space for workers. This can include less individual office space and more open-plan workstations with breakout rooms for teamwork and meetings. Density ratios should reflect these changes. As one highly experienced building management consultant explained, the sticking point in negotiating density often comes back to lifting capacity, which must expand to meet increased volume of vertical flow.
Innovation in elevator technology is thus embedded in this nexus of construction finance management and calculation – the competing imperatives to continue to expand whilst also remaining physically constrained. Finding efficiencies and improving vertical capacity are is achieved not through expanding the number of elevator cars or their floor area but through increased interoperability with other building infrastructures to model and predict people flow and behaviour. This requires predictive capacity. Large pools of flow data are created and aggregated through the increasing interconnectivity and data exchange between elevators and access control systems, automatic doors, office lighting systems, surveillance cameras, air-conditioning and smart sensors. This is a service that can also be sold to building occupiers.
We can see that the end-point of the commuter journey is significantly affected in aggregate terms by the cost decisions that underpin the building’s design. The commuter will spend much of their day relatively stationary at a workspace or project meeting room, but this will be punctuated by various elevator trips, whether to access end-of-trip facilities, visit colleagues on different floors, head to a work canteen or external cafe and so on. Their movement will be captured in aggregate by the elevator software, feeding into future behavioural predictive models that can be integrated within Destination Management refinements. As a Hitachi research paper asserted: elevators and escalators have to date been treated as individual units for moving people. However, the use of Hitachi’s people flow analysis technology enables the provision of solutions that allow people to enjoy trouble-free movement through a building from its entrance to their office desk, contributing to their being able to proceed unimpeded to their destination without having to think about their actions. (Hoshino et al., 2018: 46)
From the perspective of volumetric urbanism, we can see that elevators – which in their gathering of strangers remain a public space – are also important motors in the maximisation of value in private assets. Flow management is thus a monetisable service that allows a key element of asset value realisation – the comfort and enjoyment of the asset owner’s tenant and their employees – and continues the path from public transport to private workplace.
Conclusions
This article has provided a framework to trace out the complex dimensional movements through urban space made by ‘vertical commuters’ in their everyday journeys into and through the high-density centres of major cities. We can understand this journey from rail carriage through to skyscraper office floor as shaped and monitored by a patchwork of different software platforms, governance regimes, organisational logics and physical, material objects such as platforms, escalators, pavements and elevators.
This has several implications. First, the calculative infrastructures that sustain volumetric capacity are also becoming increasingly granular, as evidenced by the trialling of infrared surveillance technology to weigh incoming train carriages – measurements that can then be used to re-distribute commuters on platforms to synchronise with available capacity. This aligns with Coletta and Kitchin’s (2017) observations on algorhythmic governance: the logistics of vertical flow in tall buildings, the final stage of the commuter journey, was shown to be a negotiation between the twin imperatives to optimise volume of circulation and tenant satisfaction whilst also rationalising the spatial footprint of the elevator core. Optimising flow in the highly constrained elevators is likely to increasingly involve interoperability and the integration of elevator technology with informational flows from other networked infrastructures – security cameras, automatic doors, sensors, office lighting and security access systems. However, predictive flow modelling made possible by the tracking, aggregation and exchange of movement data will also involve a rationalisation of decision-making by commuters and a devolution of agency to tall buildings’ networked infrastructures.
Second, there are many tensions around the competing logics of commercial and public use values that these different kinds of human movement touch on. The construction of new Metro lines and stations underground in Sydney’s CBD impacts land values, and such large infrastructure projects become important portfolio choices for investment capital. This wraps the value of particular sites into a nexus of privatised underground public spaces, municipal surfaces and private elevator and office environments. It can be seen as part of the CBD ‘productivity complex’: the concept of ‘working while walking’ (Middleton, 2022) can be readily observed in the commuter paths between platforms and offices. This model was shaken by the impact on CBDs of COVID-19 work-from-home and commuting practices. The increased attention to social distancing during the pandemic has arguably increased the importance of calculative practices in both an office and public transport context, and this will mean an increasing interest and reliance on these technologies. Innovations include ‘pinch-point free lobbies’, enlarged elevator lobbies, ‘enhanced ventilation and filtration’ and improved destination control (Kaplan and Davis, 2020).
Third, whilst issues of commuter capacity are often viewed horizontally through the journey into and out of city centres, it is what we call the ‘last 100 m’– as opposed to ‘last mile’– of this commuter journey through the multiple elevations and depths of increasingly vertical city centres, like Sydney, that poses the most complex logistical challenges. We can theorise how commuters navigate the staircases and escalators of station architecture based on diagonal movement through stacked voids, tracked by a precise temporal modelling of crowd throughput, especially during peak periods. This has been a significant moment for the spatial logic of Sydney itself, which aligns it with the latest public transport trends in major Asian cities, at a time when the central city was being significantly restructured through multiple Asian-origin real estate capital investments (Anderson et al., 2019). The article thus foregrounds
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
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