Research in urban development in the social sciences has increasingly emphasized the importance of underground infrastructure for envisaging sustainable cities and for critiquing the economies of extraction. Urban Undergrounds: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Perspectives demonstrates the urgency of integrating a below-ground perspective into the emerging field of urban humanities.

The collection is divided into three thematic sections that cluster and revisit different sets of well-known motifs in underground studies: “Displaced”, “Wasted” and “Buried.” It showcases the intermedial nature of underground-focused analyses in literature, extending from literary texts to a wider range of cultural forms, including films, graphic novels and videogames. The contributors build on recent scholarship that has expanded the field into new interdisciplinary areas, including intersections with memory studies, ecocriticism and decolonial perspectives. Urban Undergrounds also explores lesser-studied subterranes, including Warsaw, Athens, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Santiago de Chile. The book’s substantial introduction offers a guiding theoretical and methodological framework for future scholars working with underground perspectives in literary and cultural studies.

This thought-provoking and illuminating collection is a valuable resource for students and scholars of comparative Literature in the areas of Literary Urban Studies, Underground Studies and Geocriticism, and more broadly in the Urban Humanities and Spatial Humanities.