The undergrounds’ underground: strategies for mapping what is both covered and invisible

Increasing densification of contemporary urban environments has brought corresponding spatial contestation to the space under cities; the urban underground. While above ground urban environments are subject to regulations and strategic plans, the use and exploitation of the underground has continued to proceed largely unplanned, resulting in the development over time of a layering of un-coordinated, overlapping and conflicting series of interventions relating to extraction and infrastructure.

Urban scholars have rightly connected serious urban problems, such as the flooding of large urban areas, to ill-considered interventions into the complex environmental systems of the underground and this has led to a growing consensus among urban researchers that underground space development will need more integrated planning, regulation and monitoring. As policies and strategies begin to be developed to deal with the spatial and environmental protection of the underground, a parallel concern has emerged: how to protect cultural sites and meaning of the underground?

This paper outlines the broader context of research and methodologies to conceptualise, document and plan for the urban underground and identifies a gap in existing approaches in relation to understanding cultural aspects of this space. The paper discusses the types of sites that could be considered as part of the cultural underground and draws out the importance of these sites for different stakeholders, in particular Indigenous communities in Victoria. The paper argues for the importance of knowing, mapping and protecting these sites as part of a broader strategy for planning the urban underground. Finally, the paper discusses the challenges of mapping sites which are both ‘covered up’ and also contain social or cultural meaning which is ‘invisible’. Through reference to existing methodologies developed for recording intangible heritage and ethnography, the paper speculates on a methodology for mapping the cultural underground sites as a layer of information that can be included in and relevant to existing modes of spatial planning and urban design.