Urban Undergrounds: the worldwide perspective Roberta VARRIALE
CNR – Istituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, Via Guglielmo Sanfelice,8 – 80134 Napoli, varriale@issm.cnr.it
There are numerous man – made structures and objects to be found in the underground of contemporary cities. Intended as ways to manage natural resources, to confront the risk of conflict or simply goods and objects stored underground and consequently having survived the test of time, these artefacts allow us to extend our studies of the history of the places and the people to whom they belonged. The underground presents a parallel world, the analysis of which, in its darkness, helps throw light on many aspects of the worldwide urban experience. According to the approach carried on in the paper, the underground has always played a particular role and still withholds artefacts and structures which stand as direct witness to every phase of urban development in a global perspective.
There are common characteristics which mark the ways the worldwide populations have used the underground resources, and also many divergences. It is indeed surprising how it is frequent to find more numerous identifying aspects of the worldwide urban attitude in the use of the underground than in the use of the corresponding surface areas. The underground is often the result of the employment of over-ground development skills being utilized below ground: it is a fact that the idea of a negative building culture became very popular in order to resolve problems caused by common social and climatic conditions such as defence from the harsh climactic conditions, communication, religious practice, scarcity of resources and more. In these cases, the dominant local building know-how was reconsidered and new underground building skills were adopted. Thus, the underground architectures of diverse geographical locations have much more in common than their corresponding above-ground architectural styles.
The variety of uses of the underground to support urban development is so vast that, in order to illustrate effectively the contribution of the hidden areas to the development of those above ground, it is useful to categorize these by their function.
Ten distinct functions are studied with examples from all over the world: stone-age, caved cities, communications, religion, stratification, water management, urban sanitization, submerged cities, economy and finance and self – defence.
Questo era l’ultimo intervento del Congresso Internazionale Hypogea 2015