What capacity is left to produce an inclusive city, in the context of an accelerated verticalization of contemporary metropolises? At first sight, promoting a denser city would accommodate further growth, provide housing for the people while limiting urban sprawl. That is how densification is justified in many cities across the world. But in a context where regulatory capitalism and entrepreneurial municipalities are participating in the creation of the most favorable conditions for developers to control the urban space, verticalization, and particularly residential verticalization is questionable. If office towers have gained attention recently, the vast majority of vertical developments is residential, a phenomenon having far reaching consequences on the daily life of residents and urban communities. Verticalization, if not new, is currently happening in a very different context than after 1945, when Charte d’Athènes and modernism where the dominant planning principles. Today, residential high-rises are more than architectural solutions, as much as office towers, they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. By shedding a light on the making and the experience of residential high-rises, we assess the contemporary transformation of the city and test it against inclusiveness. Aiming at the construction of a transdisciplinary theoretical framework (architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology), we intend to critically question the inclusiveness of contemporary urban production, through the residential high-rise phenomenon, in Lyon and Sao Paulo. Inclusiveness, as defined by the UN (economic; social; political; cultural and symbolical) is our benchmark, both a state and a process; it is a result and a condition for an egalitarian/equitable urban environment. It lies in the making and in the experience and imaginary of the city. Framed by the above theoretical framework, the project is rooted in case studies, enabling to reveal different types of local-global negotiations in the making of the city. In order to deliver the most, Lyon and Sao Paulo where the partners of the project are based (USP and Université Lyon2, with collaborations with practitioners such as the Municipal Agencies of both cities), have been selected as the core case studies, because of their specific residential high-rise history. The project is thus both international (experts from abroad will be invited) and deeply locally rooted. The project is divided in two sets of tasks, which will use methods never (or too seldom) applied to the study of residential high-rises: oral histories, interviews, house biographies and emotional cartography, long-term observation, and documentaries. Three transversal tasks: project coordination, 2 academic-practitioners workshops, and 3 theoretical workshops that build a transdisciplinary environment of analysis, give a common language, and prepare the final conference of the project. Re-injecting the case studies in the theoretical discussions would help deepen and root the analysis of inclusiveness, around the notions of democracy, accessibility, and “living together in the contemporary city”. Four work tasks. After an initial spatio-temporal contextualization of the two case studies (1), the tasks are ordered according to the two ways of apprehending inclusiveness: first, in the fabric of the high-rise residential building (2), then in the way stakeholders value them and construct their discourses and strategies through time (3). We then look beyond to investigate contemporary practices and usages in high-rise living (4). HIGH-RISE intends to contribute to the discussion on the building and living of the contemporary metropolis in globalization and verticalization pressures, through: actions of scientific communication and in favor of scientific and technical culture, contributions to higher education curricula and recommendations for planners in the two cities.