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COVID In the city: high-rise buildings, elevator lifts and fallen symbols

ABSTRACT This article examines what the coronavirus crisis reveals about the unexamined presumptions of existing discourses of urbanisation and globalisation. It takes a micro-oriented focus on the impact of the pandemic on the future of the high-rise buildings which are central to both the functionality and the imaginary of the modern city. Its focus is specifically on the constraints which the pandemic has imposed on current norms of vertical mobility (via lifts/elevators) within these buildings. It then considers the broader significance of the potential obsolescence of previously prestigious architectural and technological forms, including the high-rise building and the cruise ship, both of which have come to be enveloped by this pandemic within dystopian forms of symbolism.