For all the attention given to the role of cars in our urban landscapes, lifts are becoming the global city’s truly indispensable transport. At a recent event held by Otis to sell its new “Gen2 Life lift” into London’s ascending skyline, there was a real sense of being in a bull market.

“Already two billion people travel by lift every day ­– that’s a quarter of the world,” said Otis’s commercial director Bertrand Rotagnon. “Cities are becoming taller and need densification. Mass lift transit is part of the future city landscape.”

Add ageing populations, disabled access, the lust for “signature skylines” with better lift technology, and the future of the lift appears secure and profitable – a market estimated to be worth $125.22bn by 2021.

“There’s been a meteoric rise in lifts,” says Patrick Carr, with no pun apparently intended. Carr is the New York-based director of the Elevator Historical Society, which, until it closed down last summer, claimed to be the world’s only lift museum. “There are many hundreds of thousands more elevators now than there were 15 years ago. In China, the growth of lifts has been massive. Otis and Schindler are in a life and death struggle to get the best lift out [on the market].”

So the vertical transportation trade and R&D war is on. Otis’s Gen2 Life model aims to bring the “smart lift” to the mass market, with an app that calls the lift from your smartphone, plus “revolutionary flat-belt technology” said to allow the working guts of the lift to be more compact and energy efficient.

Meanwhile, its arch rival Schindler has introduced a solar panel lift, and ThyssenKrupp is launching a cable-less lift powered by magnet-based technology. There are also growing numbers of double-decker lifts; and, of course, an ongoing race to be the fastest – currently riding high is the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan, where the lift travels at 37.7mph.

Soon enough, lifts will move horizontally as well as vertically within buildings. They will do without buttons and become part of the internet of things, gathering data about components and users, anticipating your floor stop, and monitoring your “dwell time”.

This may cause panic among those of us that don’t particularly like lifts – but if you don’t want cities to sprawl, Carr says, we’ll just have to accept them. “If every building stopped at the fifth floor – which is the maximum people want to walk – then New York would stretch to Ohio and London halfway to Manchester.”

Shaping the urban realm

In the 150 years or so of their commercial existence, lifts have shaped the urban realm. In Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, author Andreas Bernard notes how the lift has not only changed the appearance of cities, but their inner life: moving luxury living from the ground to the once-cheaper top (in Haussmann’s Paris, the least desirable garrets were always the highest); even possessing a certain sky-bound romanticism (the Empire State Building’s 86th floor viewing area has long been a marriage proposal destination).

Lifts even trump nature. At Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s highest building, you can see two sunsets in a day by viewing it on the ground floor, then taking the lift to the top.

Still, lifts carry a certain baggage of alienation. Urbanist guru Jane Jacobs wasn’t a fan, thinking that the creation of “elevator apartments” hollowed out street life. And they can be incubators of anxiety: those queasy mirrors, the blank faces of fellow, forward-facing passengers – not to mention the ever-present fear of getting stuck, or plummeting to the floor.

So lift designers are trying to humanise their cabs and siphon off those underlying worries. Carr, who remains a big fan of large early lifts (“I particularly love ‘birdcage’ elevators with velvet seats”) says much effort is being put in “to make elevators prettier and less claustrophobic”. For its part, Otis is promising to transform the lift into what it calls a “fashionable and functional room”.

At the same time, proponents of active health design suggest we might be too reliant on lifts, and there are growing moves to steer us away from them.

In the US, the Center for Active Design encourages stair use – as does the NHS – and the health injunctions for “incidental activity” are growing, with stair climbing an obvious first step. A social enterprise, StepJockey (seed-funded by the UK Department of Health) aims to nudge behavioural change by way of branded signage. “We need to be directed to stairs as lifts have been prioritised for too long,” says its director Paul Nuki.

Most walkers can tolerate five or six floors, and most buildings go up to 10 floors – still manageable for many. But even in taller buildings you can cut down on lift use.

“Often companies take four floors in bigger buildings; we believe they should encourage staff to walk between them, to the gym, the canteen,” says Nuki, who thinks that lifts are a 20th-century idea, defined by the anachronistic notion that true luxury is being inactive.

It is also argued that lifts are less efficient. A 2010 IBM Smart Cities paper found that US office workers in 16 cities over one year spent a net 33 years waiting for lifts, with clear effects on productivity. And rather than bring people together, lifts can be antisocial: when US biotech firm Sigma-Aldrich installed a central staircase, it raised employee interaction.

Meanwhile, there’s been a return to grander “statement” stairs. Tate Modern Switch House architects Herzog & de Meuron’s wide and graceful stairs are specifically designed to promote interaction. Apple has patented the design of its in-store – and on-brand – glass stairs, while Paul Cocksedge Studio’s planted “living staircase” for the Ampersand office building in Soho is designed to bring people together.

But as lift consultant John Newbold of SVM Associates says: “Stairs are stylish but space-hungry, so they tend to be emphasised by more progressive developers rather than volume developers.”

Given they’re inevitable, lift companies are working to make their products more attractive – and more active. “As cities became more impersonal,” says Rotagnon, “we now have to make lifts feel more personal.” As well as smart technology, this means promoting better interior design so that, as Newbold puts it: “lifts become more like a cosy room, with inviting surfaces and media.”

The next thing, perhaps, is to bring back a bit of that old glamour. Joe Kilgallon, sales director at Otis, says he is increasingly fielding calls from private buyers and boutiques asking for “Zen” all-white lifts, and revivals of old iron concertina lifts.

Some of us will always try and walk – and good for us. But lift historian Carr is firmly in the other camp: “I say reserve all that energy for the fun stuff,” he growls.

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