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As Manuel de Solà-Morales noted, urbanity relies on the variety and quality of relations between things, materials and human beings. Considered as such, how are we to achieve an underground urbanity? This paper seeks to address this question through a focussed reading of a number of European urban projects from the 20th century; all of which put special care into ensuring the quality of their subterranean passageways. We begin with the carrefour à giration, which was designed by Eugène Hénard in 1906, in order to identify four fundamental attributes of this kind of urbanity: legibility, spatiality, accessibility and activity. We then continue with a qualitative analysis of the 1933 Blå Bodarna passageway designed by Tage William-Olsson and Holger Blom in Slussen (Stockholm). Looking ahead some decades later, the sequence of passages under the Vienna Ring, built during the mayoralty of Franz J. Jonas, provides a good example of how fundamental the connectivity to the underground public transport system was to the success of these spaces. Finally, the article closes with a review of those underground places found in Santiago Calatrava’s Stadelhofen Station and the Stationsplein by Manuel de Solà-Morales: from the carrefour à étages multiples to the ‘inner street’.

RESUMEN El proyecto del Slussen diseñado por el arquitecto Tage William-Olsson y el ingeniero Gösta Lundborg entre 1929 y 1935 en Estocolmo expresa sintéticamente la irrupción del automóvil en la ciudad europea de principios de siglo XX. El conjunto de más de treinta propuestas anteriores ilumina la evolución de un espacio en contraste confrontación entre la infraestructura y los intentos por dotar de una configuración urbana a un lugar estratégico entre Gamla Stan y Södermalm. El artículo sintetiza estas declinaciones en cinco episodios sucesivos: del Slussen como discusión de ingeniería hidráulica a sus primeras consideraciones urbanas, del Slussen como arquitectura organizadora del espacio a las primeras irrupciones de las formas del viario, del Slussen como “máquina del tráfico” al hallazgo de una estética propia, del Slussen gris a la arquitectura encajada en sus intersticios y, finalmente, la comprensión del Slussen como una pieza frágil e inestable en el paisaje urbano de la “Venecia del Norte”. Dicha evolución permite destacar el Slussen como un registro paradigmático de la implosión del tráfico sobre la ciudad europea y un ejemplo pionero en la relación interesante entre infraestructura y urbanidad. SUMMARY The Slussen urban project designed by architect Tage William-Olsson and engineer Gösta Lundborg between 1929 and 1935 in Stockholm, synthetically expresses the emergence of the automobile in the European cities at the beginning of the 20th century. The combination of more than thirty previous proposals highlight the evolution of a space in contradicting confrontation with infrastructure and the attempts to give an urban form to a strategic place between Gamla Stan and Södermalm. This article will summarise these declines in 5 successive stages: from the Slussen as a discussion in hydraulic engineering to its first urban considerations, from the Slussen seen as a matter of architectural composition to the first irruptions of the road forms, from the Slussen as a “traffic machine” to the discovery of its own aesthetic, from the gray Slussen to the architecture embedded in its interstices and finally, the understanding of Slussen as a fragile and unstable piece in the urban landscape of the “Venice of the North”. This evolution allows Slussen to be highlighted as a paradigmatic record of the implosion of traffic on the European city and a pioneering example of the interesting relationship between infrastructure and urbanity.