Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakartaeven Chicago or Londonand you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck speed of twenty-first-century urbanization. But there is something else just as transformative that you wont see: sprawling networks of tunnels rooting these cities into the earth. Global Undergrounds offers a richly illustrated exploration of these subterranean spaces, charting their global reach and the profoundbut often unseeneffects they have on human life.

The authors shine their headlamps into an astonishing diversity of manmade underground environments, including subway systems, sewers, communications pipelines, storage facilities, and even shelters. There they find not only an extraordinary range of architectural approaches to underground construction but also a host of different cultural meanings. Underground places can evoke fear or hope; they can serve as sites of memory, places of work, or the hidden headquarters of resistance movements. They are places that can tell a citys oldest stories or foresee its most distant futures. They are placesultimatelyof both incredible depth and breadth, crucial to all of us topside who work as urban planners, geographers, architects, engineers, or any of us who take subway trains or enjoy fresh water from a faucet. Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, the constant flux within urban undergroundsthe nonstop circulation of people, substances, and energyserves all city dwellers in myriad ways, not just with the logistics of day-to-day life but as a crucial part of a citys mythology.

Publisher: Reaktion Books (July 15, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1780235763
ISBN-13: 978-1780235769