New life underground -- Modern necropolis -- Charon's bark -- Urban apocalypse.

New ideas and technologies are transforming the ways we build and inhabit underground space. This book explores how these innovations can help to make our increasingly dense, climate-stressed cities both more resilient and more of a pleasure to live in. While it sets out practical design approaches, Underground Cities is not a technical manual. Designed for everyone with an interest in the future of our cities, it is beautifully illustrated and written in an accessible style that draws on the rich tradition of underworlds, both real and imagined, in art, history and poetry. Global in scope, the book ranges across continents as it surveys the vast expansion in the potential of the underground. The opening section, 'A New Frontier', looks at two pioneering cold-climate cities, Montreal and Helsinki, which developed new uses for the underground from the 1960s on. The closing section, 'Looking Forward', offers glimpses of the city of the future - of what we might be able to achieve in the next 50 or 60 years. Focusing on Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, it shows projects that are going deeper, achieving a greater synergy of uses and preparing the way for new urban forms. In between, it reviews a range of innovative ideas and presents buildings and projects by leading international architects and artists, among them Jun'ya Ishigami, James Turrell, Dominique Perrault and Thomas Heatherwick, which highlight the advances in technology that are making it possible to bring the elements of nature - light, air, vegetation - deep underground. Works include a subterranean oasis, a refuge from the desert heat; a museum extension that deploys light and colour to define space; a multi-modal underground transport hub that evokes the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, but with an added profusion of plants; and a troglodytic house and restaurant, sunk into the earth to create atmosphere.

Did alligators ever really live in New York's sewers? What's it like to explore the old aqueducts beneath the city? How many levels are beneath Grand Central Station? And how exactly did the pneumatic tube system that New York's post offices used to employ work? In this richly illustrated historical tour of New York's vast underground systems, Julia Solis answers all these questions and much, much more. New York Underground takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies above ground, its underground passages are equally legendary and tell us just as much about how the city works.

With over 60 per cent of the world’s population living in cities, the networks beneath our feet – which keep the cities above moving – are more important than ever before. Yet we never truly see how these amazing feats of engineering work. Just how deep do the tunnels go? Where do the sewers, bunkers and postal trains run? And, how many tunnels are there under our streets? Each featured city presents a ‘skyline of the underground’ through specially commissioned cut-away illustrations and unique cartography. Drawing on geography, cartography and historical oddities, Mark Ovenden explores what our cities look like from the bottom up.

This illustrated book gives young readers “a breathtaking and entirely original insight” into the complex systems that exist underneath modern cities (Kirkus, starred review). Caldecott Medal-winning author and illustrator David Macaulay takes readers on a visual journey through a city's various support systems—the many tunnels, pipes, walls, and other structures that help sustain the bustling life above. In Underground, Macaulay exposes a typical section of this intricate underground network and explains how it works. Along with his beautiful illustrations, Macaulay presents “a straightforward yet fascinating description of the labyrinth beneath the feet of any city dweller. And what a complex covered world [he] reveals! He invents an intersection of two streets and proceeds to show what we all might find if we dared to descend through that Alice-in-Wonderland manhole" (The New York Times).

The same wonderful power of describing the marvellous so as to make it seem reality, that ever distinguishes the works of Jules Verne from the writings of all other authors of fiction is displayed to its full extent in The Underground City. An adventure classic and a must-read.