Never in history have we humans been so networked and migratory, yet so segregated within our own cities and apartment buildings. Through our communications devices, we feel closer to people halfway around the world than to the person only a few feet away, on the other side of our apartment wall. We feel secure in our digital universes, but we are not.How do our invisible networked lives map onto the vertical infrastructure of our cities?UNIVERSE WITHIN is the result of unique collaborations between documentary makers, academics, technologists, and highrise residents themselves to answer these questions in an original online storyworld.The idea for this project began while I was working on one of the first HIGHRISE documentaries, One Millionth Tower , at two highrise buildings in suburban Toronto.We were spending a lot of time at the buildings — we saw so many residents coming in and out, and yet we knew so few of them. And the mood at the building was so disenfranchised. Residents hurried to their own apartments, rarely speaking with each other, much less with outsiders.We wondered about the digital lives and connectivity of the residents, so we decided to survey the building in a systematic way. Together with the academic team, we designed a participatory methodology, and we recruited a team of 14 residents to conduct a peer-to-peer survey of their neighbours, door-to-door throughout the building. Collectively, the researchers spoke 14 of the languages represented in the building, helping us to reach many residents who would not — or could not — speak with us.It was a great process to be a part of, seeing how a survey, when conducted by residents, could help neighbours get to know each other, and to begin working together to make their home a better place.The data gathered was fascinating. Ninety-three percent of those interviewed had not been born in Canada. More than 50 percent of the population was under the age of 20. Eighty percent of the households surveyed were connected to the Internet, despite the financial burden of doing so. Astonishing results.It was also great to see how the data itself could empower the residents. Many surveys take months — even years — to process data and share results. But we made it a priority to share the data with the residents within a few weeks, and they immediately used it to successfully advocate for a much needed new playground for their children.That early fruitful research formed the basis for a much broader academic and documentary collaboration called Digital Citizenship in the Global Suburbs , which later became UNIVERSE WITHIN. Drs. Deborah Cowen and Emily Paradis of University of Toronto secured an academic research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to develop our partnership. We became an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers, graduate students and documentarians.We began searching for stories around the world. We slowly but surely found amazing ones in Africa, South America, Asia, Europe and North America. Meanwhile, the academic team chose three major sites — Toronto, Mumbai and Singapore — for in-depth research. Their own work in this project will result in an experimental, avant-garde academic publication to be released in 2016.I spent many hours speaking about the ideas behind UNIVERSE WITHIN with faculty and students at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, where I’ve been a visiting artist over the course of the making of this documentary.The research, ideas, critical analysis and knowledge generated through years of conversation with the academic teams are infused in every pixel of this documentary.Also early on, senior producer Gerry Flahive and I approached Secret Location, an award-winning digital agency in Toronto. Our collaboration informed the production itself — the digital team did not come in as designers and developers at the end of the process, but at a key point in its birth. From the writing to the filming of the hosts to the art direction and development of the site itself, the collaboration with Secret Location has been profound.The academic partnerships made this documentary nuanced, complex and critical. The collaboration with Secret Location has made this documentary simple and elegant.And the collaborations we’ve had with highrise residents over the last years of HIGHRISE have been the most important of all. We thank them for sharing their homes, their first-person stories and perspectives in every aspect of HIGHRISE, all with the aim of improving how we build the cities and highrises of the future.UNIVERSE WITHIN is the last iteration of HIGHRISE, a multi-year, many-media documentary experiment, and it’s an exciting and troubling place to leave off. For our species, both the digital and vertical are becoming inescapable. We race toward more digital integration with Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, surveillance, big data and robots, along with often rampant vertical development of our cities that shuffles and displaces millions of people. Whom do these processes exclude? Who wins? Who loses? And how might we harness these new technologies to improve our collective future? It’s up to us; it’s up to you.— Katerina Cizek