Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  It’s also a place of disconcerting memories. The Aral Sea was once enormous. At 426 kilometers long and 284 kilometers wide, it was the fourth-largest lake in the world. Any schoolchild tracing her finger across the map of Central Asia will still find it and pause and wonder how such a big blue shape could have formed so many miles from the ocean. It was once called the Blue Sea and was first mapped in 1850. Soon the Aral Sea was supporting several fishing fleets and a cluster of new villages, and by the middle of the last century it was fringed by nineteen villages and two large towns, Aralsk in the north and Muynak in the south. Today these towns’ harbors are many miles from water.

  The Aral Sea was fed by one of the longest rivers in Central Asia, the Amu Darya, which flowed north for 1,500 miles to spawn an island-flecked delta. Along with the Syr Darya, which fed the Aral’s northern shore, the Amu Darya pumped the Aral Sea full of fresh mountain water. Soviet planners were not slow to see the potential of these rivers to feed cotton and wheat irrigation systems. Starting in the 1930s, huge channels were constructed, diverting water from both the Amu Darya and Syr Darya and spreading it out over millions of acres of fertile land. One of the Soviet Union’s most eminent experts in desertification, Professor Agajan Babaev, explained in 1987, in an article for a Soviet economics magazine, that “the drying up of the Aral is far more advantageous than preserving it.” Even more oddly, he also concluded that “many scientists are convinced, and I among them, that the disappearance of the sea will not affect the region’s landscapes.” The death of the Aral Sea was not only foreseen but actively pursued.

  As the Aral Sea began to shrink, in the 1960s, the irrigation continued, the volume of water drained off the rivers only peaking in 1980. Without the rivers’ infusion of fresh water, many of the Aral’s shallowing pools became almost as salty as the ocean. A new dusty and denuded landscape emerged. Windblown pollutants turned the area into one of the world’s unhealthiest places to live, and infant mortality rates shot up along with respiratory diseases. The loss of the Aral Sea also had an impact on the climate. Such a large body of water had long kept the land warmer in winter and cooler in summer. With its disappearance came more extreme and more destructive localized weather systems.

  Since 1960 the Aral Sea has shrunk by more than 80 percent and its water volume has fallen by 90 percent. The size and shape of the Aral Sea on recent maps varies enormously: sometimes it is represented quite accurately, as fragmented and shrunken, but it is still common to see it portrayed as undiminished and unbroken. With cotton production still an economic priority in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and no real prospect of rehabilitation in the foreseeable future, it is time the Aral Sea was removed from the world’s maps and the “Aralqum Desert” inserted.

  Visitors to the Aral today are faced with whipping winds across a barren plain. It is littered with bleached seashells and the remnants of scavenged boats—a desiccated land that stretches to the horizon. The Aralqum Desert is fringed with ghost towns, abandoned fish factories, and rusting boatyards. Barsa-Kelmes, which translates as “the land of no return” in Kazakh, was once the Aral Sea’s largest island and used to be a nature reserve, renowned for its eagles, deer, and wolves. Today it is just another dead stump of land. By 1993 it was empty except for one resident, who refused to leave, and a few stubborn wild asses. It seems that the holdout, an ex-ranger named Valentin Skurotskii, was rooted to the island by the fact that his mother was buried there. His body was discovered in 1998, sitting in a chair with his head in his hands.

  In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan people have grown tired of sad tales and bad news about the Aral. Much of the regional news coverage about the Aral over the past two decades has been about the damming and “rebirth” of the so-called Small Aral Sea in the north. The implication is that the rest of the Aral should be abandoned to the sand. The newly built dam that keeps the waters of the Syr Darya in the Small Aral further restricts their flow farther south. In 2008 the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stood on a new dam near Aralsk and declared that one day the waters would return to the town’s harbor. Thanks to the new dams and locks, he may be right. The waters of the Small Aral have risen and become fresher. But it is a meager triumph compared to the loss of the “Large Aral Sea.”

  The Aralqum is not simply a vast new desert; it is also a huge experiment, the world’s largest example of anthropogenic primary succession. Primary succession refers to the development of plant life on land that is devoid of any vegetation. The classic examples are volcanic islands like Surtsey, which emerged from the Atlantic, twenty miles south of Iceland, in 1963. The first plant on Surtsey was spotted two years later, and today much of the island is covered with mosses, lichens, grasses, and even some bushes. While it’s a natural process, it’s the anthropogenic, or humanly caused, part that turns it into something less predictable. These days most examples of primary succession are caused by humans, and they have nothing to do with volcanism or glaciers. They occur in the wake of the dead landscapes caused by nuclear testing or are found on top of slag heaps or at battle sites or in the cracked tarmac and paving stones of our cities.

  These plants seem such doughty invaders that it is easy to assume that, given time, the green world will always grow back and take over. It’s early days yet, but at the moment it seems that the Aralqum is suggesting otherwise. The salty, dust-blown, and often poisonous seabed makes conditions very hard for new life. A German team from the University of Bielefeld has studied the limited plant life that is taking root. Along with other experts they predicted that the desert will only be greened by people going in and planting species that are not just salt resistant but can withstand the extreme temperatures and winds of the dry sea floor. Yet 70 percent of the Aralqum is salt desert. To turn it into something living would be an expensive, long-term, and probably thankless task. The Aralqum appears to be showing us that, at least in the short term, nature cannot cope. A problem created by us can only be solved by us, but so far it appears to be beyond us. We have gotten used to seeing natural places as places that can be protected and nurtured, but the story of the Aral Sea indicates a daunting challenge, of moving beyond designating zones of conservation toward rebuilding entire ecosystems and landscapes on a vast scale.

  In the meantime, the new desert is sharing its secrets. It seems this is not the first time that the area has been dry. On the old sea floor Kazakh hunters have found the remnants of a medieval mausoleum along with human bones, pottery, and millstones. Satellite images have also revealed the courses of medieval rivers meandering through the desert. These findings confirm a local legend that the Aral Sea was once land. The area’s folklore has since been updated. Now old-timers look forward to a second inundation, a new flood to give them back their blue sea.

  Lost places have an uncanny presence in our lives. In a century that has seen the obliteration of so many places, it might be thought that these ghosts would have been exorcised. But that’s not how humans work; place means too much to us for its disappearance to ever feel easy or complete.

  The Labyrinth

  44° 56′ 14″ N, 93° 12′ 03″ W

  In a world where it is easy to assume that everywhere is fully known and fully charted, places that don’t appear on maps become intriguing and provoking. Hidden geographies are the inverse of lost places; they hint at the possibility that the age of discovery is not quite over. The surprising resilience of closed cities and unnoticed uses of existing landscapes challenge us to see ordinary streets in new ways. The underground city provides more intimate hidden places that manage to be both near and far.

  Urban exploration took off in the early 2000s. I first knew it was going mainstream when my sixteen-year-old nephew told me he had spent the night in an abandoned mental hospital. He showed me the photos: empty wards full of fallen plaster and upended radiators, grinning teens posing in front of the goofy monsters they had painted on the walls. I didn’t ask why he did it, because I already knew. A decade earlier I’d helped
set up a magazine dedicated to the experimental geographical wanderings and disorientations known as psychogeography. We called it Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration. It ran for only four issues and was full of purposefully perplexing accounts from the geographical avant-garde. What brought the group together was an understanding of urban exploration as a kind of geographical version of surrealist automatic writing. Our real-world adventures were little more than pegs on which to hang our interpretative essays, which usually came with pendulous bibliographies featuring situationists and Magical Marxists. For me it was only when people like my nephew started going out and laying claim to hidden parts of the city that I began to understand that open-air haphazard ramblings can seem very tame when compared to more purposeful adventures: geographical missions targeted and designed to gain access to forbidden and unseen spaces in and under the workaday world.

  Today this kind of urban exploration isn’t, for the most part, done for the sake of art or politics but for the love of discovery. The web is filled with message boards for modern urban exploration, where you can find reports from groups in dozens of cities. New legends are being established by thousands of metropolitan Columbuses. Some of the best-known play spots are the catacombs and quarries of underground Paris, the dead subway stops of London, and the abandoned factories and embassies of New York and Berlin, but the nomadic spirit of urban explorers keeps finding new possibilities and taking ever bolder risks to journey into the map’s blank spaces. The burgeoning nature of this scene is reflected in the fact that it has begun to suffer from internal splits and territorial disputes. At least some of the discoverers of the hidden city like to think that they have sole rights to their finds or, at least, that access must be restricted to an elite clan of fellow travelers.

  This story is about the secret world under Minneapolis–St. Paul, which has been labeled the Labyrinth by urban adventurers. The excitement of exploring the multifarious tunnels and cave systems that make up the Labyrinth was captured by the Action Squad, a band of Twin Cities explorers who specialize in subterranean voyages. After trying plenty of manholes, they found the entrance to the rumored system, a portal that eventually revealed to them seven interconnecting tunnel routes and myriad man-made caves and underground chambers of demolished buildings. Like any other group of pioneers, the Action Squad relished the idea that they were the first to find this lost world, noting on their website the “almost perfect absence of graffiti, explained by the lack of access points achievable by anyone but truly dedicated explorers.”

  The Labyrinth is hard work, but it offers that mixture of adrenaline rush and breakthrough that makes the effort addictive. “We’ve spent hours digging tunnels through solid sandstone using butter knives and other primitive tools to bypass barriers that stood in the way of our exploration,” recalls a team member on the Action Squad homepage. “We’ve exclaimed dozens of variations on the theme of ‘holy fucking shit!’ as we found still more amazing places to explore after thinking we’d already seen it all. God, we love that place.”

  The dedication of the Action Squad and the quality of their finds have drawn other adventurers to the Labyrinth. In an example of urban exploration tourism and homage, a Calgary-based explorer called K.A.O.S. visited the Twin Cities in 2007. “I had to do the Labyrinth. I knew the stories too well,” K.A.O.S. writes on a Canadian urban exploration website, adding, “To me it was like stepping into the original UE mythos.” After taking a guided tour through some of the Labyrinth’s highlights, the natural caves and under-river passages, K.A.O.S. is left with reverence for the “people who did this for the first time, not knowing whether these tunnels led anywhere, facing the possibility of getting stuck or causing a cave in. That’s gotta take balls.”

  Many of the once hidden places discovered in the first wave of urban exploration have become well known among the cognoscenti, and knowledge about where and how to progress through them grows increasingly commonplace. The shift from an activity shared by a hardy few to a leisure pursuit enjoyed by thousands is a cause of regret among those who want to keep places like the Labyrinth pristine. Another of the early voyagers into this system, university geologist Greg Brick, noted in his local handbook Subterranean Twin Cities how, from a few “committed souls,” the scene had boomed: “The result was predictable: the subterranean venues, hitherto silent and inviolate, were overrun.” Brick has attacked Internet-savvy “point-and-click kids” for despoiling the cities’ hidden kingdoms and, in a move that provoked outrage within the Twin Cities underground community, placed a lock on the entrance to one prime site, the Heinrich Brewery Caves.

  “I thought that was kind of—pardon my French—but kind of a dick move,” complains Action Squad member Jeremy Krans. “It’s not his place. None of us go locking things up trying to keep other people out.” Krans was talking in 2013 to a reporter from a Twin Cities newspaper that headlined the article “Cave Wars.” The story had added bite because the Action Squad claims Brick plagiarized their missions for Subterranean Twin Cities. Brick denies this, and a bitter legal dispute has resulted, which has opened unexpected challenges for this formerly carefree community of trespassers. It seems that once their activities become widely known they change in character. Following the routes and finding the places of others, even if those routes and places are illegal and dangerous, may still be an act of adventure, but it is less clear whether it’s an act of exploration.

  Such thorny issues are likely to become more visible as urban exploration grows. Yet too much emphasis on originality and being the first misses the point for most of its participants, which is about the thrill of discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary city. Bradley Garrett, a geography lecturer at the University of Oxford, who has brought the topic to the pages of geography’s scholarly journals, explains that the core values of urban exploration derive from “desires for emotional freedom, the need for unmediated expression,” and “associations with childhood play.” In 2012 Garrett put his words into practice by climbing up the outside of the Shard, a new London skyscraper, a month before it was finished.

  Another explanation comes from Brandon Schmittling, the founder of Survive DC, a kind of citywide game of adult tag based in Washington. “I think people like to believe there’s more out there that hasn’t been seen,” he told Newsweek, adding that urban exploration challenges people “to shed their fears about the city.”

  What is also striking about the urban explorers is their affection for the previously unloved places they discover. They often picture themselves as ragged desperadoes, but their relationship to their sites is actually one of care. They research and document the places they discover with an attention to detail and an offhand but deeply felt respect. Not so much punk Columbuses, perhaps, as urban Alexander von Humboldts, they collect and collate fragments of information in order to create a sense of possibility and celebrate the fact that the mundane world contains within it, or under it, far more pathways and far more fun than we previously thought.

  Zheleznogorsk

  56° 15′ 00″ N, 93° 32′ 00″ E

  In April 2010 two white-coated scientists laid flowers on top of the control rods of a nuclear reactor in Zheleznogorsk, a town founded in 1950 for the sole purpose of making nuclear weapons. For forty-seven years the reactor had been producing weapons-grade plutonium in a city that officially did not exist and was closed to the outside world. The ceremony on the reactor marked the end of an era, and it might have looked like the end of Zheleznogorsk itself, for its ninety thousand residents were nearly all in some way dependent on this one site.

  Zheleznogorsk is a grid city of wide boulevards, a place of calm solemnity and perseverance. It was once a secret city. It did not appear on Soviet maps and is still missing from many. For most of its existence it didn’t even have its own name and was referred to by a post office box number, Krasnoyarsk-26—Krasnoyarsk being the nearest big city, forty miles away. It was only in 1992 that its existence was officially confirmed,
when President Boris Yeltsin decreed that closed cities could finally be revealed.

  Yet Zheleznogorsk is still closed and entry is highly restricted. The hosts of any visitor must submit their request to the security services and the Ministry of Atomic Energy, and even local residents need to get permission to come and go. Surprisingly, Zheleznogorsk remains closed because its residents like it that way. In 1996 they voted to remain shut away from the world. It is at this point that the story of Zheleznogorsk begins to contradict our preconceptions about life in secret places within authoritarian regimes. Closed places and secret cities fitted snugly into the paranoid mindset of Soviet communism, but in a postcommunist era there are other reasons why communities might decide to be cut off from the rest of us. It’s not only about hanging on to secrets; it’s about holding on to a lifestyle.

  Closed cities were once among the best-funded and most prestigious settlements in the USSR, with well-paid jobs that attracted high-achieving technicians and scientists. They were aspirational destinations. The tranquil, kempt character of Zheleznogorsk, with its large park, lakeside setting, and forests and hills, is something its residents want to preserve. They have witnessed what “opening up” has done to the rest of Russia, and they aren’t keen to go the same way. Soviet nostalgia hangs heavy in Zheleznogorsk: it’s the kind of place that the USSR always promised its citizens. The adulatory website “Zheleznogorsk: Last Paradise on Earth” appears not to be ironic. It’s where one local writer, Roman Solntsev, describes the town’s appeal as a “wonderful feeling of relaxation, calm and peace of mind.” Solntsev goes on to point out the “sharp contrast with the soot-covered, noisy industrial centers and big cities.”