Short Abstract

Urban undergrounds are sites of more-than-human entanglements, infrastructures, politics, and imaginaries, vital to urban life and thought. This panel explores how these spaces mediate relations, resistances, and reconfigurations of the urban.

Long Abstract

Subterranean dimensions of cities receive little attention in both anthropological inquiry and public discourse. What lies beneath the surface is largely taken for granted and expected to function seamlessly, whether it be infrastructures such as water and electricity, or elements like soil, roots, and plants. At the same time, urban undergrounds are often imagined as shady, dirty, and dangerous: sites of criminality, inhabited by the poor and by animals deemed pests, yet also places where resistance to hegemonic politics takes shape.

In an era defined by the climate crisis - coming with, on the one hand, apocalyptic scenarios and denial, on the other - urban undergrounds emerge as critical sites where histories, politics, infrastructures, and multispecies lives intersect. Once conceived merely as void beneath the city, undergrounds are increasingly recognized as zones of adaptation, e.g., through flood-prevention and irrigation systems, informal shelters from rain, heat, and cold, and as subterranean ecologies nurturing possibilities for future urban cohabitation, such as ‘sponge cities’.

While social and economic forces above ground tend toward division and stratification, the subterranean reveals entanglement, permeability, and possibilities of resilience as more-than-human conditions. In this panel, we mobilize the underground as a powerful lens for rethinking the urban - not through a simple spatial polarization of terranean and subterranean - but as a redirection and reconfiguration of flows: of matter, energy, and meaning. We invite underground ethnographies that engage with hidden ecologies and infrastructures not only as objects of study, but as generative sites for reimagining ecological and political responses to current troubled times.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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