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On the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic lies an innocuous iron disc about the size of a dinner plate. If one were to prise this disc open, they would find the remains of the world's deepest vertical hole. Reaching a depth of over 12 kilometres, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled in the pursuit of excavating scientific knowledges for a better understanding of the Earth's crust. Whilst the borehole produced some important findings, and hosted an international delegation of researchers, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it fell into disrepair. Since its closure, the Kola Superdeep has become lost to history, but its existence as a ruin has generated new artistic engagements with the underground. This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird. By resisting the notion that the subterranean can be objectively known through science, I reveal how the Kola Superdeep produces other relations, knowledges, and ways of sensing the subterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a research agenda for the interrogation of urban space as being ontologically constituted by its volumetric properties: that is, the ways in which the arrangement of dimensions and capacities above, below and in relation to the surface of the city are measured. The paper reviews the nascent 'volumetric turn' in explaining the production of urban space, noting the growing interest among scholars in understanding how verticality, surface, and the subterranean relate to the power and political economy of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is claimed that our current environmental crisis is one of the imaginations: we are in desperate need of new means to understand relations between humans and their environment. The underground was once central to the evolution of Western environmental imaginations. Yet, this has waned throughout the 20th century as eyes and minds turned up and out. After outlining some of the history of the underground as a site from which to evolve environmental imaginations, the article will explore how the underground might propagate environmental imaginations fit for pressing contemporary environmental concerns. It will do so using examples of three caves evolved through an ongoing arts practice-based research collaboration with artist Flora Parrott. Exploring these three caves, I will explore how the underground offers a powerful site for doing the imaginative work that our current environmental crisis requires, focusing in particular on the challenges of engaging lively earths and deep times (pasts and futures) that have become commonplace in the Anthropocene. To close, the article begins to reflect on the possibilities of collaborative creative geographies as a means to rethink the idea of the imagination within geography, as not just something that might be studied but that these creative practices might enable the creation of much-needed new imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica's aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country's first "water war." I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologies such as satellite imaging have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how state territorial development strategies, financial and regulatory practices and architectural and engineering expertise shape 'volumetric' urban space. In doing so, it frames the built environment as being an envelope through which state accumulation strategies are materialized through both the technical manipulation of territory and the metrics that accompany it. It focuses on a key site of post-Independence Singaporean urbanism, the Marina Bay area, to examine how dimensional urban development has been combined with governance practices to produce and extract new territory. The paper illustrates this through three processes: the engineering of land platforms that could be developed to expand the logistical productivity of Singaporean territory; the deployment of 'atmospheric engineering' such as the use of air-conditioning technologies in creating controlled environments that maximize the value of interiorized territory; and the creation of a calculative regime for governing underground space. It describes how Singaporean state agencies have deployed experts in engineering, surveying and architecture, as well as implementing new legislation and regulation in producing these volumetric affordances. It is argued in conclusion that the calculative manipulation of key sites in the built environments of global cities such as Singapore should be accorded more significance within studies of nation-state territorial strategy, and the geopolitics of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So-called global land grabbing is not only a response to socio-ecological shifts but can also generate substantial subterranean and atmospheric biogeochemical changes. As land acquisitions for agricultural development play out in Indonesia, the country’s peatlands have been a key to rapid and expansive oil palm development. Oil palm production in tropical peatlands, however, requires soil drainage through hydrological engineering, which stimulates carbon dioxide emissions. Research on the quantities and mechanisms of those carbon emissions has been central to generating scientific consensus stipulating peatland conservation and rehabilitation, rather than agricultural development. Yet, alternate scientific knowledge networks have generated what I call divergent expertise, which supports a peatland management strategy of continued development despite ecological risk. This divergent expertise raises questions of how land is made suitable for large-scale acquisition and investment for agricultural development, and how to manage the biogeochemical crises that can ensue when land is incorporated into land grab regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses data from interviews with 69 self-described members and associates of street gangs in London to explore how young people choose their actions and construct their identities from the material and cultural resources they find in their locales. It explores ‘drift’ as a potential explanation of actions of gang members and finds it wanting. It suggests that Giddens’ concept of structuration, when combined with Matza and Sykes’ notion of subterranean traditions, offers a powerful tool for the explanation of how and why some young people in socio-economically deprived urban areas seek association with gangs through the performance of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that critical urban research is characterized by horizontalism. It argues that the swathe of recent urban writings have neglected the vertical qualities of contemporary urbanization. The article’s introductory section elaborates this argument in detail. The paper then elucidates three areas where vertically oriented research is emerging. These encompass: the links between Google Earth and urbanism; the connections between social secession and ascension through buildings, walkways and personalized air travel; and the links between verticalized surveillance and urban burrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]