Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within - Softcover

"Well worth dipping into for its worldwide take on the sheer variety of ways we humans have spun our subterranean webs. . . . These underground stories remind us that buried spaces are places of protection as well as of the fearfully unknown, of hope and of political resistance, of science as well as persistent chthonic mythology. There's always a quirky and sometimes a grisly journey to be had beneath our streets."--London Evening Standarda "Global Undergrounds serves as a catalog that positions eighty underground sites of urban, suburban, and rural development, and most segments offer a connection to the culture of the present and the past. . . . Diverse authors offer approaches as academics, official visitors, tourists, or adventurers, engaging with spaces and places that usually remain hidden from both sight and mind."--Popmatters

As the world rapidly urbanizes, its cities sink themselves into the ground in sprawling tendons of tunnels - conduits for transport, utility, communication, shelter and storage. The excavation of these spaces, at ever-increasing depths and speed, has changed our lives in ways that we tend to take for granted. For the first time, this book charts the global reach of urban underground spaces, bringing together a collection of 80 stories of subterranean sites around the world. The book draws out the extraordinary range of meanings suggested by urban underground spaces, whether their power as places of hope, fear, memory, labour and resistance, or their capacity to evoke both long histories and futures in the making. Illustrated with often breathtaking photographs, Global Undergrounds creates a new sense of the richness and global diversity of urban underground spaces. Its breadth and depth will appeal to all those who are engaged with these spaces: from urban planners, geographers, architects and engineers to urban explorers, photographers and anyone who encounters underground spaces in their cities.Indeed we inhabit a world where the material stuff beneath our feet is constantly in flux, where layer upon layer of things, people and substances circulate, dream and dwell.