The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Steve Pile
are as much real as imagined, that the spatialities of the body are bound up
in the production of urban spaces, 12 and that there are very strong emotional
investments in the spaces of the city. The underground links one place to another
in unseen, perhaps even unconscious, ways; but the underground is
also the clandestine infrastructure without which the metropolis could not
function. It may well be that looking into “the pit” will enable further explorations
of the unknown city.
Beneath the city, there are connections that make the city work.
These connections are not, however, innocent of power relations. The subterranean
city becomes the site both of concrete connections within the city
(and beyond) and of symbolic (even mythic) relationships between the city
and the earth. Of course, as Lewis Mumford and Rosalind Williams have argued,
the idea of the underground city has been the focus of both utopian
and dystopian visions of urban futures. 13 But there is a stronger sense that
metropolitan life is predicated on the technologies of the underground: real
limits are imposed by the movement of water, sewage, electricity, information
(via telephone lines), and people through, and beyond, the metropolis.
Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman observe,
Every time we turn on the tap, pull the chain, pick up the telephone,
there is an underground movement: a gurgle of water, an
impulse along a wire. Sometimes we are conscious of this movement;
more often we are not. As we bask in the electric sunshine of
our city surface, we are quite unaware of the subterranean labyrinth
honeycombing the ground beneath our feet. 14
The idea of the subterranean labyrinth gives a kind of mythic quality to the
city under the city: a honeycomb of rat runs, a series of tubes and holes that
hold, hide, and move those things “civilization” would rather not admit
(to). Away from the glare of enlightenment, the repressed infrastructures of
the city write themselves into the soil. And it is in the earth that the unknown
traces of urban civilization might be found: as Williams reminds
us, “the subterranean environment is a technological one—but it is also a
mental landscape, a social terrain, and an ideological map.” 15 Even so, the
subterranean is also a space of burial, of loss of another kind, of death,
of decomposition. 16 Below the sun-blessed surface is an entombed world of
shrouded truths and meanings.
The development of the underground city involves a double-edged
sword of progress (just as the unconscious involves the tension between opposing
elements; just as the uncanny involves the play of the familiar and
the strange): technologies capable of building the city underground are simultaneously
destructive and creative. 17 In order to enable the metropolis to