How Urban Climbers Dare Us to See Inequality Anew
By the time police arrived, Yao Xinde had been on the roof for over an hour, threatening to end it. Down below, a crowd had gathered on the street. Vehicles had pulled over to the side of the road. Behind was the rising, jagged skyline of Guangzhou, a port city in southern China undergoing rapid development. Within a generation, it would swell to 18 million people, one of many Chinese mega-cities to sprout in the early 21st century. An abundance of new skyscrapers—more than the rest of the world combined—symbolized the country’s fervid bid for economic growth, stirring both excitement and dread in its newly unmoored population.
Yao had been a construction foreman for the student dormitory tower he now straddled. From the initial groundbreaking, his crew had worked seven days a week, on up to 18-hour shifts. But once the work was done, the wages never came. As migrant laborers, their informal contracts often paid out after the project was completed, and left little recourse for legal dispute. For months, Yao pleaded with the developers. As the Chinese New Year approached, workers began showing up at his apartment, demanding their wages to pay for the pilgrimage home. When tragic news arrived about a sudden death in Yao’s family, the loss finally earned him a sympathetic sit-down with management.
Previously, the company had said the wages were in review; then, the wages were canceled out by cost overruns. Now, they simply said they didn’t have the money.
“You’re pushing us to jump from the building,” insisted Yao. “Is that what you want us to do?”
The deputy manager snapped back: “Go ahead and jump!”
And so, Yao and his co-foreman made their way to the rooftop, to demand their right to remuneration.
When this face-off unfolded in February 2003, such performative threats were surging across China, with estimates of over 100 suicide attempts by migrant workers each year. In her recent cultural study, On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (2023), Margaret Hillenbrand explains how these acts became a commonplace in modern China, inspiring its own genre—the “suicide show”—that has since been satirized in cartoons and ridiculed by pro-growth hawks.
Her collected photographs show these suicidal “cliffhangers” dangling from high-rise ledges, telegraph wires, and tower cranes, though when I’ve tried to access the source videos—from sites like YouTube, Tencent, and PearVideo—they’ve all been deleted. Fortunately, she records in text the background audio heard on tape:
“Forced into a hopeless position”
“Hounded to death”
“An unwise move out of utter helplessness”
“Money earned in blood and sweat”
As Yao approached two hours on the roof, there came the familiar plot turn. His manager at the firm emerged from a private car, flanked by armed guards. By this point, city authorities had inflated a portable mattress beneath his side of the building, a grim metaphor for the missing social safety net that forces countless migrant workers to the ledge in the first place. The manager carried a package wrapped in newsprint, containing the owed wages as well as a goodwill premium. As Hillenbrand explains, this sequence “allegorizes the strategic caprice of the law in China: the money is always there, [but] gaining purchase on it is as slippery as gripping hold of a rope on a cliff face in high winds.” Later, the developers would deny that there was ever an issue with payment.
If the suicide show has become both cliche and verboten in modern China, other artists are finding ways to transform the skyscraper into a canvas for protest and public art. In conceptual artist Chen Chenchen’s The Mercy of Not Killing, ten construction workers hang by their fingers from the ledge of an industrial water tower; tied together by the same rope, if one of them slips, they pull the rest down with them (thankfully, no one does). In 29 Levels of Freedom, performance art photographer Li Wi stages bodies being pushed, pulled, and kicked from the window of a generic skyscraper in Beijing’s central business district, evoking what he calls “a feeling of losing grip on things, an uncertainty about the morrow.” In Building Dreams, artist Shu Yong transforms a high-rise construction site into a billboard for migrant labor, enlisting a group of construction workers to shoot and display their large-scale portraits along the sides of the building. Their hundreds of faces span the entire vertical length of the rising tower complex, replacing the “Chinese Dream” propaganda slogans typically plastered over urban construction sites.
Whether it’s striking workers or intrepid artists, these high-flying performances unsettle the blunt boosterism of economic development, and the CCP-sanctioned narrative of a post-class “harmonious society.” They reveal the horror of social and technological “progress” built on the zombified lives of over 300 million migrant laborers, with few rights as second-class citizens under the “hukou” household registration system. The modern “dream” of moving from the countryside to the new Chinese megacity has created mobility for some, while also producing the largest disadvantaged “underclass” in human history.
More than simply exposing this truth, the initial shock of a suicide show or risky high-rise performance invokes a dawning recognition. For all the economic gains of the modern era, China’s inequality curve is still grossly distorted. As much as 65 percent of the population lives in “extremely low” socioeconomic positions, resulting in a sharp, cliff-shaped wealth distribution curve. Even China’s relatively affluent professional class faces stubbornly high unemployment and a grueling “996” work culture, in which firms informally require 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. shifts, six days a week. A growing number of young Chinese are choosing to reject the rat race, trade high-stress careers for flexible gig work, and “lie flat” in smaller cities and rural towns with a lower cost of living.
For a fleeting moment, these defiant public acts reframe the skyscraper as a collective wound, the precarious edge of both modern progress and mass destitution. This practice of trespassing and climbing is also part of a long tradition in urban performance, but one that is surging anew as precarity becomes the universal state, the operative keyword, for our contemporary condition.
Almost a century before China started building skyscrapers, America was erecting these unseemly architectures for the first time—and inspiring novel forms of public engagement.
In the heart of both Chicago and New York, building construction sites naturally became a performance art space. Pedestrians angled to catch a glimpse of the gaping hole in the ground, which later grew into a forest of steel beams, and then a rising wall of brick or limestone. As these architectures multiplied, many steeplejacks and ironworkers entertained crowds of bystanders with free-climbs, head-stands, and even bicycle rides along the edge of the roof. With the uncertain boom and bust of the construction trade, these tricks could even prove a more reliable source of income.
American culture has long propagated a sunny, sanitized picture of labor from this period. The heroic Art Deco murals of the Works Progress Administration, and panoramic paintings from the likes of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Riviera, offer sweeping visions of brawny men and women tinkering with the machinery of the modern world. Among the era’s most famous photographs is “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” (1932). A far cry from Chenchen’s desperately clinging actors, here a dozen immigrant ironworkers sit casually on a high-beam, nursing their lunch pails, lighting cigarettes, huddled in conversation. Their sense of calm feels almost pastoral, as if lounging on a park bench rather than suspended 850 feet (or roughly 70 stories) in open air. As one breathless journalist wrote at the time, these workers possessed “the poise of an acrobat, the skill of a juggler, the strength of a blacksmith, and the team-work of a ball-player… putting on the best open-air show in town.”
Lesser known is the fact that Lunch was a staged publicity stunt. As the new 30 Rockefeller Plaza skyscraper was being built, the developer hired photographers to shoot a series of construction workers for use in promotional materials. In other staged shots along the high beam, the men tip their hats with a smile, or lounge horizontally in a napping posture. Amid the woes of the Depression, the stills of these fearless workers were heralded as a source of hope and optimism — and still are, many decades later. Yet, these men are uncredited and unidentified, as are many of the 40,000 people hired to build 30 Rock. When investigating the iconic photograph for a 2012 documentary, Men at Lunch, director Seán Ó Cualáin found that virtually no work records remain from the project.
It’s hard to know what exactly we’re looking at in such historical snapshots. At first blush, we see an authentic, documentary-style glimpse of American labor, a la Jacob Riis or Walker Evans. But these visions are shaped by the invisible hand of corporate marketing departments. A similar campaign from the period for the Empire State Building featured shots of job sites from low vantage points, turning the workers into monumental giants—again, feeding a mythology of working-class grit with grace, while distancing the new towers from negative associations with corporate power or wealth inequality. The publicity from these photoshoots burnished the reputations of developers and tycoons, and the general ethos of industry as a social good, by manufacturing the impression of a proud working class – and ignoring the lived realities of those very workers. Photographs like Lunch perpetuate a kind of “class-washing,” providing a hollow impression of solidarity. They operate as corporate propaganda, not unlike a crass Chinese dream slogan, though at least offering a more democratic aesthetic.
Despite this outward celebration of labor, early American cities were no less precarious than China’s new mega-cities. Building has always been a bloody affair. By some estimates, in the early 1900s, one-quarter of workers were injured or killed each year, which meant anyone in the business for more than a fleeting summer would likely become battered in some way. There was also systemic hypocrisy: many high-rises were built for life insurance corporations that would never think to cover the ironworkers who built their gleaming new headquarters, and who actually needed coverage more than any lawyer or doctor. Far from the solidarity on display in Lunch, work sites were a hodgepodge of ethnic cultures and language barriers (including immigrants and itinerant workers of Irish, Italian, German, eastern European, and Mohawk heritage), and developers were notorious for inflaming those divides to deter any mounting threats around unionization. For all their political donations and labor-fetishized art, the upper classes were just as quick to criticize the ignorance or unhealthy habits of these white and ethnic working classes.
Another popular tactic that building owners used to drum up publicity and new business was for-hire stunt performers. Harry Gardiner was the first of several men to claim the moniker “Human Fly,” quickly becoming a one-man public relations machine and eventually ascending over 700 buildings across two continents. Gardiner climbed in plain clothes—cloth suit, tennis shoes—without any harness, and in a methodical fashion, believing that “climbing is just my way of preaching” the value of “will power” and “self-confidence.” His successor “Fly”—George Polley—climbed over 2,000 buildings, over a career cut short at 29 by a brain tumor; he introduced dramatic flair to his performances, feigning a slip between floors, or staging a last-second emergency recovery. These high-profile stunts even led to a “climbing fever” among teenage boys in the 1910s and 1920s, as reported in Literary Digest: “Soda fountain clerks are discussing the fad with fair and ambitious customers, argumentative citizens are debating the merits of the toe-and-finger grips, while the local labor-union is considering whether or not to admit the ‘human spider’ into the organization.”
Perhaps this climbing obsession signaled a broader public curiosity, or looming wariness, towards the ever-growing urban skyline. Each illicit ascent offered the temporary fantasy of freedom from crushing conformity and corporate rule. As America barreled into the Depression, the high-rise became a frequent motif in cinema, reflecting generalized feelings of gilded-age fury and despair. In the silent film Safety Last! (1923), the everyman protagonist from Kansas evades police by scurrying up Los Angeles’ early high-rises, and barely survives a potential fall by dangling from the second hand of a broken clock-face. In King Kong (1933), the spurned ape wreaks havoc on New York’s vertical landscape, scaling towers, peering through bedroom windows, plucking and tossing innocent bystanders in search of his true love. Other films like Skyscraper Souls (1932) succumb to the desperate frenzy of the period, depicting what one reviewer described as “the mad desire of everyone from bank presidents to the lowest man in the street, to climb up the ladder of fortune,” leading to a tragic suicide that foreshadows the Chinese cliff-hangers, over a century and half a world apart.
In a penultimate scene of Souls, the greedy tycoon who has ruthlessly acquired the skyscraper, while pushing peers and lovers to their deaths, boasts about his newfound possession: “A million men sweated to build it. Mines, quarries, factories, forests… I’d hate to tell you how many men dropped off these girders while they were going up. But it was worth it. Nothing is created without pain and suffering.” It’s easy talk from the moneyman insulated from any physical sacrifice himself.
After a period of suppressed activity during the postwar period, skyscraper climbing re-emerged in the 1970s with a more enlightened mission. These performance artists and publicity hounds recast the high-rise more directly as a stage for social activism and conceptual art, perhaps at a detriment to the awareness of the precarious construction trades, a sector that is overlooked, underpaid, and poorly regulated decades later.
The earliest glimmer of change was the “socially-conscious” climber, who upon reaching his urban peak had a timely cause or website to share with the press. This message could often feel like an afterthought to the thrill-junkie urge to climb anything in sight, but at least it helped these performances transcend the narrow confines of product peddling. Arguably the most famous of these figures is French rock climber Alain Robert, who was turned onto urban towers in his thirties. While shooting stunt scenes for a documentary, the director suggested he attempt to free solo an urban cliff, and the itch stuck. Robert quickly became the “vertical tourist,” scaling skyscrapers around the world and dedicating many climbs to calls for action regarding global warming—while also drinking vodka with Moscow police, or chowing down eggs and sausage with a London bobby. Across the pond, American Dan Goodwin became known for his Spider-Man clad ascents and novel suction-cup method, which allowed him to scale Chicago’s two tallest towers, the Sears and John Hancock, with their smooth windowed facades. “SpiderDan” dedicated many of his climbs to the cause of high-rise fire safety, after witnessing the Las Vegas MGM Grand hotel fire in 1980, in which lax building codes killed 85 guests and employees.
Of all the skyscrapers in the United States, arguably none has seen more activity than the New York Times Building. While the opportunity to stare down reporters through the window must be part of the appeal, the building also happens to feature a grated facade that runs virtually its entire length, and functions as a ladder to any illicit climber. On a scale of one to ten, Robert rated the building’s difficulty as a “.5” (compared to the “10” of France’s Areva Tower, a sheer glass block that he was only able to scale using the narrow grooves between window panes). Now, the Times building sees multiple attempts every year, with notable protest climbs in support of malaria awareness, against Al Qaeda, and in favor of pro-life legislation.
Beyond these socially minded climbers, such skyscraper hijinks have also taken on new aesthetic forms, beyond mere stunt or spectacle. Another Frenchman, Philippe Petit, brought the high-wire circus act to the grandest of natural and man-made stages, tip-toe-ing across the abyss of the Grand Canyon as well as urban canyons in New York, Tokyo, Paris, and Frankfurt, all with preternatural calm. His most famous walk, between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, has become a cultural touchstone, celebrated in multiple films and lending a kind of postmodern levity to the brutalist symbols of global capitalism. At one point during his 45-minute walk, Petit lies flat on the wire — a kind of Bartleby, suspended in air over the Financial District, unsettling the swarm of white-collar commuters on a late-summer Wednesday morning. Perhaps more impressive than any of his performances, Petit has resisted the allure of another great American past-time: selling out. For forty years running, he has refused to participate in brand commercials and sponsorships.
If artists like Petit and Chenchen tempt danger throughout their acts, other practitioners attempt to capture the fall in its full horror. Alternately called visionary and diabolical, Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action company turns dancers into “action heroes,” navigating creative hazards while overcoming what she calls the “hegemony of the ground.” Her performers are constantly falling forwards and backwards; they cavort around swinging cinder blocks (“Gauntlet”), twirl beneath a spinning I-beam (“Slice”), and swing from the sides of London’s City Hall and Millennium Bridge (2012 Summer Olympics). In Streb’s most demanding piece (“Human Fountain”), dancers continuously climb and leap from various points off a 40-foot scaffolding set, surviving cushioned falls (with a six-inch mattress) much higher than many construction worker fatalities. Even experienced cast members have said “falling never gets less scary,” no matter how many times they perform these maneuvers. Strebs, who practiced her own dangerous dances for thirty years before “retiring” into solely direction, says: “Anything that’s too safe is not action…You have to develop a technique to confront your sense of peril.”
Other activists have used skyscraper climbing to advance quasi-scholarly pursuits. For years, the guerilla practices of “urban exploration” have helped rogue photographers and online content creators capture sensational footage of abandoned places. But this approach can also be a way to investigate overlooked histories and preserve and strengthen our collective memory. In Hong Kong, where land is scarce and the appetite high to continually demolish and rebuild, a group called HKURBEX is collecting a video archive of what they call “wasted spaces” — abandoned construction sites or old colonial-era buildings laying dormant in prime locations where people live and work. Often, these activists are the last ones to see and document a structure before the wrecking ball arrives.
In the United States, our latest grand-scale canvas is in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The derelict Oceanwide Plaza comprises three unfinished luxury condo towers, stationed directly across the street from Crypto.com Arena and the city’s biggest metro rail station. About 60 percent complete, the buildings’ construction ceased in 2019 after the Chinese developers stopped paying their contractors. Not until 2024 did graffiti artists slip inside and begin turning the soaring facade into an epic street-art billboard, featuring hundreds of stylized tags and bold, multicolor lettering visible from miles away across the city. “This is what happens when things just get left,” said the artist Aker, in an interview. “Graffiti artists are like spiders, we’ll go out and put webs up there.”
Observing how cities handle these contested spaces can reveal a truer balance of power and citizens’ rights. In Los Angeles, officials that had ignored the empty condo towers for years only got involved after people started using the space—not just for graffiti art but also campfires, cookouts, and BASE jumping. With LA ranking as the sixth least affordable city in the world, and facing a historic housing shortage of over 400,000 homes, squatting in an unused tower beside public transit and abundant service jobs seems like a supremely rational response. In Brazil, where the constitution allows for a public right to housing, squatters have commandeered dozens of graffiti-strewn high-rises sitting in operational limbo or disuse. Filmmaker Denise Zmekhol explores this community activism in her film Skin of Glass (2023), about a mid-century São Paulo skyscraper designed by her estranged father. While these improvised “favelas” come with hazards and limitations, they are at least a workable option in a market that has failed to provide affordable housing. And, unlike in America, these “eyesores” are allowed to exist, rather than being scrubbed in favor of preserving a hollow corporate totem.
Despite our fraught relationship with the high-rise, its most powerful metaphor is so deeply embedded as to be almost subliminal: the so-called “ladder” of success, as measured by income, job title, social status, or literal height within the vertical metropolis. Cities’ developer-authors and their government shills prefer this simpler narrative of base competition, as it fuels the right acquisitive behaviors, drives property values ever-higher, and smothers more threatening questions about alternative ways for people to live and work together. The soaring skyline has become the wallpaper of modernity, an aspirational symbol of technological progress and prosperity, distilling the complexity and vibrancy of any city (and its many interior cities) into a clean silhouette of upward intent. This token adorns the generic backdrops of live sports, newscasts, corporate websites, digital screen-savers, city-branded T-shirts and coffee mugs, kitschy household art, and much more.
Even the earliest American high-rise literature reflects this psychological view of the social climber. Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff Dwellers (1893) was the first realist novel to depict skyscraper living, in the fictional Clifton Building on the eve of the Chicago World’s Fair. A native of the area, Fuller characterizes the city’s obsession with money and status, so he can castigate the whole scene. Building residents include corrupt real-estate barons, con-man drifters, gossipy socialites, failsons of New England industrialists, and the occasional middle-class striver. The book’s dramatic arc shows how these shallow aspirations curdle and combust, ending in murder, suicide, and bankrupticy. To his credit, Fuller acknowledges the blood that makes these architectures possible, noting—in realist fashion—that precisely 13 fictional construction workers were killed in building the 18-story Clifton.
The ladder mythology has become a cliche of American popular culture and TV, from The Jeffersons’ “movin’ on up” to Manhattan’s east side and a “deluxe apartment in the sky,” to the cut-throat advertising execs of Mad Men (whose opening credits depict a suited figure falling from an abstract, infinite skyscraper), to the surreal corporate parody of 30 Rock and the tomb-like penthouses of Billions. The imagery permeates pop songs from Skeeter Davis’ “Ladder of Success” (1964), in which the narrator rues a lost love who has drifted upwards, to Drake’s zombie-beat anthem “Started From the Bottom” (2013), which fancies the childish fantasy of old friends getting filthy rich together.
Globalization has extended this metaphor to an international plane, sorting the world into categories of alleged economic maturity. In his book In an Antique Land (1992), writer Amitav Ghosh reflects on the predicament of this “ladder of Development,” and the supposed promise of economic mobility and empowerment that also seems to destroy everything in its path. The book details his search for the story of a forgotten slave in the margins of written “History.” In one scene, after a falling-out between him and an Imam, he notes the increasing inability to speak of “things that were right, or good, or willed by God; it would have been merely absurd for either of us to use those words, for they belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development.”
The tragedy of the ladder is that it’s an unhelpful metaphor, reflecting a world that is in fact less than zero-sum. It stratifies as much as it mobilizes. It spurs action, but at the cost of divisiveness. To be climbing is to strive to put rungs—and people—beneath you. How else can you measure your progress, or assert your position? Traditional notions of economic development can resemble a pyramid scheme, relying on a mass of subordinate workers to bolster the wildest dreams of a relative few. Achieving a broad sense of shared prosperity is never compatible with a model based on hierarchy.
If it once took a cruel, almost sociopathic level of injustice to lure someone like Yao Xinde to a rooftop, now it requires only the vague promise of a get-rich-quick scheme.
Taking inspiration from the dare-devil ethos, “rooftoppers” climb not for crowds, or causes, but for online clicks. Before dawn and after dusk, they slip through high-rise service entrances and past sleepy security guards. Unlike urban climbers such as Gardiner or Robert, these young adventurers aren’t interested in the ascent itself, only the summit; they often ride elevators as far up as possible, sometimes all the way to the roof, before stepping outside and over railings to climb flimsy maintenance ladders and reach the very top of the building’s spire. These pointy rods can run another few hundred feet above the actual rooftop, serving largely to boost official height rankings. The video footage from these windy peaks is often nauseating, especially given the wide-angle camera lenses that distort and exaggerate the drop-off to appear even steeper, almost infinite, like a dark blurry abyss.
There are hundreds of rooftoppers with online presences. Two of the pioneers in the genre are Vitaly and Vadim, a young duo from Russia and Ukraine, who post videos under the moniker “Ontheroofs.” Other climbers go by the names “Butters,” “DrifterShoots,” and “Dvision4.” New Jersey teenager Justin Cansquejo made headlines in 2014 when he climbed the new One World Trade Center at just 16 years old, reaching the top of its spire at nearly 1,800 feet—five times higher than the tallest rooftop Harry Gardiner ever saw, and twice the height of the 30 Rock ironworkers in the famous Lunch photograph. Some urbex creators go a step further and BASE jump from these supertall rooftops, relishing a few seconds of free-fall before unleashing their parachute. The trend continuously leads to tragic deaths, even by experienced climbers and jumpers. Calls for regulation have been strongest in China, where social-media platforms like Huoshan enable direct crowd-funding (via virtual gifts) to directly subsidize the daring stunts.
These rooftopping antics represent a rupture in this young and still evolving art form of high-rise performance. From relying on mainstream press for media coverage to directly self-broadcasting these illicit climbs to viewers online. From a fairly marginal activity to a commodified digital entertainment genre. From an artistic and quasi-academic endeavor to a hyper-capitalist death spiral. Rooftopping is universal, sans local character or community dynamics, a product of social media algorithms and online advertising.
We’re attracted to these stunts like any rubberneck, in part because of the action. But the potency of these images also suggests a deeper reckoning. In her classic study, Fear of Falling (1989), writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich warned about the self-destructive bargain of middle-class strivers, who often exploit private advantages (in school or healthcare) that makes everyone’s lives more precarious. For a fleeting moment, watching a cliff-hanger or swinging acrobat makes our own personal abyss—whether a late medical payment, overdue credit card bill, high-interest student loan, or any other prosaic financial curse—feel a bit less daunting. But we might also worry how little it would take to put ourselves in the same life-threatening position.
The traditional ladder narrative has always obscured a more chaotic, amoral game of real-world Chutes and Ladders. Good deeds don’t necessarily nudge you upwards, and you mustn’t err to be pulled down in an instant. No matter where on the ladder you’re clinging—working class or professional; developed country or developing; potato or potahto—the rungs are getting slippier and further apart for everyone except those already near the top.
With every daring climb and high-rise performance, we’re invited to see anew the inheritance of our built world and socioeconomic condition. Many acts challenge our deepest assumptions about economic progress and fairness, revealing the extent to which feel-good narratives run against our best interests. No matter how breathtaking the skyline view might be—from Beijing to Bangalore to Buenos Aires to Baltimore—glimpsing life from the towering edge of a skyscraper rooftop reveals something closer to the collective dream on sale.
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