Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945

Subterranean space and the vertical city as a mode for representing modernity. Four parts: theory of urban space; view from above and the devil in the modern city; view from below and the mysteries of London and Paris; threshold spaces of modern urban culture.

VLC arquitectura. Research Journal, 2017

As Manuel de Solà-Morales noted, urbanity relies on the variety and quality of relations between things, materials and human beings. Considered as such, how are we to achieve an underground urbanity? This paper seeks to address this question through a focussed reading of a number of European urban projects from the 20th century; all of which put special care into ensuring the quality of their subterranean passageways. We begin with the carrefour à giration, which was designed by Eugène Hénard in 1906, in order to identify four fundamental attributes of this kind of urbanity: legibility, spatiality, accessibility and activity. We then continue with a qualitative analysis of the 1933 Blå Bodarna passageway designed by Tage William-Olsson and Holger Blom in Slussen (Stockholm). Looking ahead some decades later, the sequence of passages under the Vienna Ring, built during the mayoralty of Franz J. Jonas, provides a good example of how fundamental the connectivity to the underground public transport system was to the success of these spaces. Finally, the article closes with a review of those underground places found in Santiago Calatrava's Stadelhofen Station and the Stationsplein by Manuel de Solà-Morales: from the carrefour à étages multiples to the 'inner street'.

Journal of Transport History 35 (1), 2014

Archaeology is the academic discipline most preoccupied with what is underneath us. It is also a field of study that until relatively recently has been predominated by work in non-urban areas. We are three urban scholars who have our own fixations with the underground. In fact, we have just compiled an edited collection called Global Undergrounds (Dobraszczyk et al. 2016), which surveys 80 underground sites from every continent, including Antarctica. This process coincided serendipitously with this call to consider whether we are indeed all archaeologists now.

City, 2015

This paper discusses an unrealized urban plan from the 1960s that proposed to build a network of tunnel motorways and monorails underneath central London. By reframing this plan as a work of fiction, I want to underscore how literary geography perpetuates a limited tradition that merely focuses on fiction produced in or about the city, and not literature produced by or for the city. In the process of re-reading and, to an extent, reclaiming these plans from the National Archives, I argue that these abandoned visions provide an interesting text for literary geographers to access a genre of literature that bisects the built environment and fiction. The scope for this tactic is potentially vast, but a renewed look at unbuilt, unrealized or abandoned architectural texts and similar unconventional forms, would allow for literary scholars to perform a greater, more active role than before: from connecting their analysis directly to the built environment and the contemporary moment in urban space, to discovering new unbuilt works that disrupt established cultural narratives.

History of Photography, 2014

Félix Nadar’s pioneering photographs of the Paris underground, taken during the period from 1861 to 1865, have been long overlooked in favor of his famous caricatures and portrait photography. However, the nearly one hundred albumen prints of the catacombs and sewers form a crucial photographic archive of the subterranean city during Haussmannization, and their cultural significance and poetic resonance merit further study. These images constitute a metonymic investigation of the materiality of the Paris substratum and a metaphorical mapping of the metabolism of the urban body. Nadar’s work articulates the city’s relation to its exclusions – decay and filth – and its struggle to cleanse and regulate human remains and wastes. Nadar not only engaged with historical memory, sanitary reform, and scientific development, but expanded the aesthetics of the sublime and the uncanny by experimenting with different states of perceptibility and psychological force of shadow. In the context of flourishing topographical photography in the mid nineteenth century, the underground series present Nadar’s meaningful elaboration of photographic Romanticism and reveals his attitudes toward the urban transformation and tourist spectacle.

Fractured Scenes: Underground Music-Making in Hong Kong and East Asia. Damien Charrieras and François Mouillot, eds., 2021

Underground Built Heritage Valorisation A Handbook, 2021

Underground Built Heritage (UBH) plays a specific role in structuring and transforming urban spaces, intended as multi-layered settled areas featured both by social and cultural aspects and by deep symbolic implications still interacting with contemporary planning decisions. Its specificity can outline general urban history’s items, crucial steps into the processes of settlement transformation, together with forms and modalities of the processes of spaces semantisation and re-semantisation. The analysis of situations and case studies helps to clarify and to define key concepts, definitions, and practices in urban planning processes, settlement transformation and heritage enhancement. Perspectives of integrated enhancement of urban environments are also highlighted, as well as urban planning actions based on the cultural and identity dimension of heritage and societies.