Climate change presents multiple challenges to cities-not only in terms of the resilience and sustainability of the urban fabric, but also in relation to how urban inhabitants imagine they might adapt to a future transformed environment. This article explores imaginative modes of thinking in relation to future cities and climate change, focusing on representations of urban drowning or submergence. It considers, in turn, climate-change fictions-from J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World to Paulo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities, published in 2012; visual representations from Gustave Doré's The New Zealander in 1872 to Alexis Rockman's 2004 Manifest Destiny; and architectural conjecture, from Wolf Hilbertz's Autopia Ampere project from 1970 onwards to CRAB Studio's Soak City in 2009. The article draws out how these imaginaries intersect with theoretical understandings of science fiction and ecology, contending that an emphasis on multiple imaginaries of climate change is critical to expanding the narrow range of possibilities that currently characterize the literature on cities and climate change. Imaginative texts, images and designs mutually inform each other to encourage holistic ways of approaching how we think about the prospect of urban submergence and to incubate radical responses to it.
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 harbour our own fixations with the underground. In fact, we have just compiled an edited collection that surveys 80 underground sites in every continent, including Antarctica (Dobraszczyk et al 2016). This process dovetailed unexpectedly with this call to consider whether we are indeed all archaeologists now. From the ruins of disused sewage systems to the churning of subterranean space by tunnel boring machines, we, like archaeologists, spend more time with our thought under street level than anywhere else. What we would like to suggest in this short paper is that the excavation of urban undergrounds, as a sort of reverse archaeology where the newest stratigraphy must always go further down, is feeding intellectual interest in underground spaces, which has been accelerating since the large-scale 19th-century excavations of cities like London and Paris. Our key argument is that excavation is not just an archaeological praxis, it is also the process that has led to layer-upon-layer of infrastructure crowding the underground, separating functions, often in the interest of circulation. Circulation is of course another disciplinary bridge we could build between geography and archaeology, trade and mobility being central to both disciplines.Consider the construction of Crossrail in London as a point of crossover. One of the striking elements of the BBC series on the building of the 'Fifteen Billion Pound Railway' is not only the sheer diversity of challenges that engineers face and how they respond, but also the unique opportunities (and indeed challenges) that the project has opened to archaeologists who will soon shed new light on the period of the Black Death. We seek here to forge links between urban, industrial and contemporary archaeology and the broad range of themes that confronted us in the process of collating and making sense of the 80 entries on global undergrounds for our new book, a good number of which brought us into contact with recent scholarship by archaeologists and what has been called the 'vertical turn' in geography.
This article considers the role of technical representations in the building of one of the most significant civil engineering projects of the mid-nineteenth century, London’s main drainage system, designed and overseen by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. It explores the ways in which the contract—composed of engineering drawings and an accompanying specification—mediated the relationship between Bazalgette and his most important ally, the contractor. The article also pays close attention to the variety of audiences beyond the contractor to which these documents were directed: including those who authorized and funded the project, those parties directly affected by construction, and the wider public. The result is a fuller picture of the social context in which the main drainage project was constructed and of the crucial role played by the contract in mediating social relations of many kinds, a perspective that is absent in the existing literature on the subject.
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