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- Convenors:
-
Kathrin Eitel
(University of Zurich)
Elisabeth Luggauer (Humboldt University Berlin)
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- Formats:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper explores how homeless women inhabit Hong Kong’s pedestrian tunnels as sites of material and affective entanglement. Through acts of ‘making home’ amid state cleansing, their subterranean domesticities reveal how care, matter, and resistance interweave underground.
Paper long abstract
This paper engages with the panel’s call to rethink the urban from below by examining how gendered forms of marginality, matter, and care intersect in Hong Kong’s subterranean spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research with women living in a pedestrian tunnel, it traces how everyday practices of ‘making home’ materialise through acts of hoarding, repair, and cohabitation with objects.
Their ‘underground’ existence is continually shaped by municipal regimes of cleansing that seek to erase habitation under the guise of hygiene and order. Yet the women’s material improvisations transform these tunnels into precarious but affectively charged domestic worlds. The accumulation of objects, often dismissed as waste, emerges as a ‘technology of the self,’ anchoring moral worth and agency within an environment of exclusion. By foregrounding the entanglement of humans, materials, and infrastructures, the paper situates the pedestrian tunnel as more than a space of deprivation, it is a generative terrain where matter, care, and resistance converge. Through these subterranean domesticities, the city’s margins are revealed not as voids but as dense and vital sites of urban becoming.
Paper short abstract
Tapping into the City Through Illegal Water Connections
Paper long abstract
This paper unpacks the art of illegal water connection in KwaDukuza and eThekwini municipalities on South Africa East coast as a layered underground practice. Both covert in its legal status and its material form, residents routinely dig down to expose buried state water infrastructure in order to splice in their own plastic piping and guide water into informal household networks. While these interventions are framed by officials as theft, they also reflect a more complex politics shaped by chronic supply gaps, uneven service delivery, and long histories of infrastructural marginalization.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2026, the paper traces how people learn to read the landscape through its hidden infrastructures: the sound of moving water under a concrete verge, the vibration of pressure changes, the mapping of older pipelines whose records no longer exist. These techniques reveal a kind of expertise in the anatomy of the city that emerges outside of formal engineering.
I argue that Illegal connections stake improvised claims to reliability in a system that is chronically intermittent. They reshape buried network into spaces of resistance, conflict, and survival, allowing households to quietly negotiate their own terms of access. At the same time, these practices entangle residents with more-than-human forces: shifting soil, aging pipes, fluctuating pressure, and the unstable flow of water itself. By foregrounding illegal connections as underground acts the paper shows how the subsoil becomes a contested arena in which residents remake the city’s infrastructures—and their own place within them.
Paper short abstract
Arctic undergrounds (permafrost, soils, mines) demand methods beyond single disciplines. We propose collage as a curatorial research practice that brings Indigenous knowledge, urban climate science, and art into productive co-presence—revealing more-than-human urban entanglements in climate crisis.
Paper long abstract
Arctic urban undergrounds expose the limits of single-discipline approaches. As permafrost foundations shift beneath housing, urban soils carry mineral content alongside ancestral meaning, and mining-induced subsidence destabilizes entire settlements, the subsurface becomes a political and more-than-human arena that demands methods able to hold multiple ontologies without translating Indigenous knowledge into external terms.
We propose collage as a transdisciplinary curatorial and art-based research method for engaging subsurface complexity. Drawing on Sandra Harding’s borderland epistemology, collage works through deliberate juxtaposition, assembling urban climate science and remote sensing, Indigenous protocols, governance, and cosmologies, alongside everyday material practices and artistic forms, so that differences can remain visible rather than being forced into consensus.
Developed over five years through four Arctic collaborations, this method operates across scales—from monitoring data and field recordings, through co-produced materials, to public exhibitions. Collage-making in exhibitions and workshops placed, for example, acoustic recordings of thawing ground beside community-governed clay practices; mining-subsidence narratives beside satellite images; and data visualizations beside artist-made materials produced through agreed local protocols.
Crucially, collage can accommodate refusal: some underground knowledge must remain withheld to protect sovereignty and safety. Methodologically, this shifts the project from “including” Indigenous perspectives to redistributing curatorial authority through co-led and Indigenous-curated formats.
For urban research in the climate crisis, collage offers an ethical and epistemological framework that values entanglement over extraction and productive incompleteness over totalizing accounts, revealing what neither engineering, nor anthropology, nor art alone can see about how infrastructural fragility, multispecies life, and Indigenous futures are negotiated underground.
Paper short abstract
Urban undergrounds, whether recognized or overlooked, are integral component of the urban fabric. This paper examines the use of basements and shelters in New Belgrade neighbourhoods under varying circumstances, both in everyday life during peacetime and in crisis situations.
Paper long abstract
New Belgrade is a district of Belgrade developed on a former floodplain as a state-led urbanization project that embodied the ideals of socialist modernity and intended to serve as the capital of the envisioned future Yugoslav socialist state (Blagojević 2007, Kulić 2013). Since it was established during the Cold War, the political and social principles guiding its construction incorporated specific security objectives. These were expressed both above and below ground, through representative and public architecture; among the others through underground spaces such as basements and atomic shelters.
This study investigates how those underground spaces in New Belgrade are used, focusing on management practices and inhabitants’ perceptions, and explores the purposes they serve, if any. I draw on narratives from inhabitants of selected neighbourhoods, reflecting on their experiences from socialist Yugoslavia and the 1990s wars, including the NATO bombing, to the recent conflict in Ukraine.
Research reveals that underground places are not only buried and wasted (García, Pike 2025) but are also integrated into urban life both in everyday routine and crisis situations. For instance, basements, which generally serve as storage, may be adapted as service premises or venues for residents’ council meetings. Similarly, atomic shelters can be leased for commercial purposes, such as hosting a gym.
Research for this proposal was conducted within the project entitled 'Komshiluk in a Big City? Neighbourly Relations in New Belgrade' (NCN Miniatura, 2023/07/X/HS2/00085). The findings are derived from field research conducted in 2024. The research methodology was based on in-depth interviews and participant observation.
Paper short abstract
Underground transportation is a feature of the metropolitan cities. Many smaller cities, however, also have their own virtual undergrounds which only exist as schemes and descriptions on the web pages and social media, which serve to (re)shape urban landscapes, both online and offline.
Paper long abstract
Underground transportation is a feature of the metropolitan cities. Many smaller cities, however, also have their own – virtual – undergrounds which only exist as schemes and descriptions on the web pages and social media (in Russia alone we have detected over 50 such subways, which became the material for the presented study). In these “imaginary undergrounds” the perception of the cityscape and its focal points is translated into a transportation scheme and then into a narrative which follows the framework of official descriptions of metro’s history and functions. Entangled in the complex network of institutional and vernacular narratives, they are used to make sense of otherwise dystopian cities with significant lack of transportation connectedness and structure them. Yet, ironical as they are, these non-existent undergrounds can become a very tangible source of local identity and pride, a tourist attraction (like in Valday, where gift shops sell entrance tokens for non-existent tube), unofficial symbols (as in Omsk), a “weapon of the geek” (Coleman 2013) and an argument in controversies between urban activists and city government. In the paper I'll show how various actors - local citizens, businesses, artists, urban administration, etc - use these virtual objects to challenge and (re) shape urban cultural and physical landscape.
Paper short abstract
The Ruhr’s post/mining underground instantiates the subterranean Anthropocene, which I explore through visualizations across diverse media. I trace the implausibility of the extractivist progress narrative and make tangible alternative human-environment relationships in an industrial lifeworld.
Paper long abstract
Once a major center of heavy industries in Europe, Germany’s Ruhr Valley is transitioning into a postcarbon, climate-adjusted ecology and economy. This includes landscape restoration programs that became possible through the closure of hard coal mines. Scholars studying the Ruhr’s “great transformation” as well as key actors in this transformation readily acknowledge that the return of nature above ground depends on the high-tech management of the underground. Present technologies of knowing and managing urban-industrial infrastructures beneath the subsiding Ruhr terrain of 4,400 square kilometers (e.g. mine drainage, sewage system), continue the techno-scientific definition of the underground as “legible nature” that arose in the 1800s with the new science of geology and the onset of industrialization. Approaching the Ruhr’s mining and postmining ecology as an instantiation of “subterranean Anthropocene” (Melo Zorita, Munro and Houston 2017), I extend my study of miners’ narratives of the underground to explore visualizations of the Ruhr’s subterrain in museum exhibits, art, films, maps, and AR/VR applications. Highlighting the punctuations of linear histories of socio-technological development, my aim is to trace the implausibility of the modern narrative of extractivist progress and to make tangible alternative assemblages of meaningful human-environment relationships in an industrial Western cultural lifeworld.