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

by Alastair Bonnett

  Zheleznogorsk is part of a club of approximately forty “closed administrative-territorial formations,” which are home to 1.3 million Russians who embrace what might look to the outside world as something imposed. One ex-resident of another closed city labeled with a box number, Kuznetsk-12, posting on a chatroom about why, even though he lives in the United States, he comes back every year with his daughter, writes: “It is a unique place on earth where my child can experience a freedom of exploring a small town, independence and beautiful walks in nature without the fear of anything happening to her since everyone knows each other.”

  Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16, a city of ninety-two thousand, which is still an important center for nuclear missile development, has also fought to restrict entry. It was disappeared from the map in 1946 but remains closed off through local determination rather than Moscow edict. A town tour guide, Svetlana Rubtsova, explained to Russian journalists, “Being part of a closed city gives you a feeling of comfort and protection—that people of this city are all together your family.” Sarov, like a number of other restricted cities, is also an ethnic Russian enclave, situated as it is in the ethnically mixed and potentially separatist region of Mordovia. By remaining closed “we defended it from chaos,” says Sarov resident Dmitry Sladkov. An urban planner by training, Sladkov moved with his family from Moscow in 1992 in order to escape the disorder engulfing the capital.

  In an era when claiming to be open to the world can seem mandatory for cities that wish to prosper, the dogged survival of closed places may appear shortsighted and misanthropic. But Dmitry Sladkov’s desire to flee with his family from the “chaos” of open cities is not a uniquely Russian sentiment. It isn’t just in Russia that people are building closed communities. As modern cities around the world have become increasingly unpredictable and fragmented, people with enough money have either moved out to villages, turning them into urban exclaves, or created gated, safe havens within the city. If we don’t call Zheleznogorsk a closed city but a gated community it suddenly becomes not an echo from history but a very contemporary reflection of urban distrust and consumer choice.

  But living in a gated community still has its problems. In Zheleznogorsk, besides being vetted by the security services before being allowed to visit, there isn’t much for visitors to do. The Motherland movie theater in the center of town and one restaurant seem to be pretty much it. “It’s difficult to start a business in a closed city,” one local resident told the Russian Gazette. “The process requires many agreements, so there’s no competition.” For a fun night out she has to drive the forty miles to Krasnoyarsk.

  How can it survive? Although its anchor industry, plutonium production, has been shut down, Zheleznogorsk has learned to reinvent itself in a number of ways, and there are plenty of other types of manufacturing that are attracted by complete privacy. Zheleznogorsk now nurtures a range of high-tech and “sensitive” forms of production. Three-quarters of Russia’s satellites are produced in the city, including all of the GPS satellites. Israel, Indonesia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have all bought satellites made in Zheleznogorsk. Another niche that is opening up for the town is storing nuclear waste. An underground laboratory is being built that will investigate how much nuclear waste can be buried in the surrounding hills. It’s the type of project that would be controversial elsewhere but that is facilitated in Zheleznogorsk by the pliant mindset of the locals, who have learned not to question those in authority: of its ninety thousand residents, only fifty bothered to look at the application details for the waste storage project.

  Zheleznogorsk has successfully made the transition from a communist to a capitalist closed city. Its broad avenues may look like a Soviet stage set, but this is a place that says less about the past than about the high levels of privacy and security that are being demanded by contemporary companies and contemporary citizens.

  The Underground Cities of Cappadocia

  38° 22′ 25″ N, 34° 44′ 07″ E

  For a while the history of human dwellings seemed to be one of ascent: lifting us upward, plucking us out of dark caves, and placing us higher and higher aboveground. The dream house of modernity is the penthouse, not the pit. Of course such high-flying aspirations require a multitude of underground pipes and wires, but the rattling metros and oddly lit corridors and vents that service the sun-kissed surface dwellers have long been dismissed as the metropolis’s idiot twin, useful but unlovable.

  Today this stark divide is breaking down, for the lure of the subterranean is too strong. When nuclear apocalypse threatened, the only secure place seemed down there, and as we run out of space on the teeming topside, we are digging. Down there is where safety lies, in the one place we can escape the pollution and chaos of the scarred and scary surface and where we can control the temperature as the climate changes. New plans for underground cities are taking root from the Netherlands to China. The Amsterdam Underground Foundation claims that the public has now “embraced the mystical character of being underground.” It’s a provocative idea, because it suggests that we’re not going downward merely as a technical fix or to avoid the bad weather. There is something else; something down there; something we are drawn to.

  Underground cities are, understandably, hard to find on maps. Conventional maps are good at representing surface features but have trouble making visual sense of the multistory city. This is one of the reasons that buried places get overlooked and forgotten only to be rediscovered years later. The ancient underground cities that are still being uncovered in the Cappadocia region of eastern Turkey are a case in point. Some local experts believe that anywhere from thirty to two hundred may await discovery. Although that number is likely to include the ruins of cave monasteries and rock-cut villages, it is probable that we have seen only a small portion of the region’s subterranean urban heritage. The largest underground city that we know of, Derinkuyu, came to light in 1965 and still remains only partially excavated. It was discovered by chance when a local resident was clearing out the back wall of his cave house. The wall gave way, revealing another chamber. And this chamber led to another, and then another. To date, Derinkuyu has revealed eight stories of underground rooms, and was large enough to have accommodated thirty thousand people. It had living quarters in its upper layers, as well as wine and oil presses, stables and food halls. A staircase leads from the third story down to cellars, storage rooms, and a church, carved out in the shape of a cross, at the lowest level. Derinkuyu also contains miles of man-made tunnels, one of which leads six miles south to another large underground town, called Kaymakli.

  Buildings aboveground are designed around a supporting structure and take access to the air for granted. The underground cities of Cappadocia turn that model upside down, as excavators would have started by digging ventilation ducts and then worked outward from these shafts, opening up rooms and corridors, stables and sleeping quarters.

  We find some clue as to why they were built in the place names: Derinkuyu means “deep well” in Turkish and used to be known as Malagobia, derived from the Greek for “difficult subsistence.” In the first century B.C., the Roman architect Vitruvius proposed that the rock houses of Cappadocia were first built by the Phrygians some five hundred years earlier. Vitruvius wrote that because the Phrygians live in a “country destitute of timber,” they “choose natural hillocks, which they pierce and hollow out for their accommodation.” The hardened volcanic ash that covers the area, called tuff, is stable and easily carved. However, the progenitors of the local habit of cave-dwelling remain a source of controversy. The legendary German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann sided with Vitruvius, but others push the origins of carved cities back further, to the Hittites, some one thousand years before the Phrygians. In any case, neither of these ancient peoples was directly responsible for either Derinkuyu or Kaymakli, for both were dug out from the eighth century A.D. onward by Christians. At that time Cappadocia was a lawless frontier region of the Byzantine Empire, and its long-established Chris
tian population was suffering from periodic waves of invasion and banditry. In response to these threats, local Christians developed the region’s existing architectural traditions to create underground settlements that were big enough to house whole communities.

  Both Derinkuya and Kaymakli are built defensively. Entrances are small; each level can be sealed off with massive stone doors. Moreover, the spots where the numerous air ducts break the surface to the outside world are well disguised. There are also several cisterns and wells in the bottom levels, which suggests that inhabitants could lie low for extended periods. The question of how long people were down there at any one time hasn’t been resolved. Most authorities suggest that we should look at the underground cities as boltholes, big enough to accommodate livestock and almost everything else that could be shifted, but occupied only when it was unsafe to go outside.

  The troglodyte habit clearly bit deep, since the local population still lives by it. The outer and upper chambers of Derinkuyu, which spreads out underneath the surface town of the same name, have long been put to use as storage areas or stables. Many of ancient Derinkuyu’s entrances are inside private houses, and people still draw water up from below through the city’s old ventilation ducts. The tradition of underground construction is alive throughout Cappadocia, and the last century saw large subterranean stores being built across the province to house vegetable and fruit crops. A large percentage of Turkey’s lemons and potatoes spend the spring and autumn in these cool caves.

  These contemporary echoes speak of continuity, but the underground cities also have more uncomfortable messages. They symbolize a buried history of religious plurality in what later became a purely Muslim nation. Over the last five hundred years the Christian population of Cappadocia dwindled away. The final remnants of a significant Christian presence in Turkey fled in the early twentieth century, victims of the 1923 ethnic population exchange between Turkey and Greece. Nearly all surface-level Christian villages have been erased from the map. One of the few places where the two-thousand-year history of distinct Christian townships in Turkey is preserved is under the ground in empty chambers.

  Such places bring back memories of a past that has been pushed down but lingers on. Today tourists, Turks and foreigners alike, are drawn to these ancient Christian labyrinths in increasing numbers. The fact that they present a repressed stratum of Turkey’s national story goes a small way to explain why. But the mystical character of the underground must also be acknowledged. As we descend into the dark we feel we are glimpsing something authentically archaic. That’s the feeling, the prickle down the neck, the strange and discomforting urge to go deep. It’s both a personal journey and a species-wide harking back to the precivilized, perhaps the prehuman. Michael Moorcock in Mother London and Peter Ackroyd in London Under make the case for the underground as a site of fear and desire, a dark font of possibilities. “All is true in underground writing,” writes Ackroyd, and proceeds to speculate on a troglodyte race that has lived in London’s tunnels since the Great Fire of 1666. As the underground cities of Cappadocia increasingly come to appear as ancient examples of a contemporary trend, and the subterranean becomes an ever more practical and occupied place, we will have to learn to talk about our expectations and fantasies of buried landscapes. As developers speculate about subterranean real estate, Cappadocia also serves as a reminder that only the truly fearful choose to live under the ground.

  Fox Den

  54° 58′ 54″ N, 1° 35′ 21″ W

  Among our habitats other animals have created their own homes and pathways. Occasionally when I see an urban fox I have the urge to follow it, to know where it goes. There’s a small fox that I’ve seen in the back lane behind my house, and I’ve been told it probably lives in the rhododendron and holly bushes at the overgrown western edge of Newcastle’s Heaton Park. One day I ducked down and pushed my way among the branches. Some way ahead were the back fences of the big houses on Parkville. I came across some rubbish bags and a decaying wicker crib. The den was likely to be against the fence or dug from under one of these hefty shrubs.

  In the countryside foxes like to spend the daytime resting in woods and fields. Only vixens retreat to their dens for any length of time, usually to give birth and look after cubs. They are not at all fussy about where they make their dens, the reused earths of badgers being a favorite site. But urban foxes have different habits. There are no badgers in the twenty-two acres of Heaton Park, which is made up mostly of woodland interspersed with playing fields, so its resident foxes have to dig out their own dens or make use of hollow trees or spaces underneath sheds or other debris.

  All foxes like their den entrances to be in the sun. They also prefer light, well-drained soil and to have a number of emergency exits. All of which meant that if the hole in front of me was a fox den, it wasn’t a very good one. There was a scrabbled, gloomy entrance about a foot across at the base of one of the trees, but I could see the faint light of water from inside the hole. I squatted and reached down; my hand dipped into a cold pool. This den had been flooded by the winter rain, and the animal must have moved on.

  There are few things more thrilling than finding an animal’s home, even when it is empty. Who doesn’t want to pick up a fallen nest, to know its weight and peer inside and touch its bedded center? Even if our intent is to destroy them, the intimate care of the wasp’s nest and the ant’s miniature tunnels draws in our eye. It’s not just the intricacy of these places that is absorbing but their indefatigable energy. My search for a fox’s den in the hidden, marginal land of the park initially felt like a hunt for something fragile and rare, but if we didn’t keep pouring on concrete and tarmac, all the places we call home would soon succumb to a quiet colonization. For a place-loving species, watching our place being overrun and turned into their place is a common fantasy. It’s a possibility that is both appalling and fascinating. In The Drowned World J. G. Ballard argued that there is an atavistic desire for this kind of submergence lodged in the deepest, oldest parts of the human brain and based on a genetic memory of life’s kindred emergence. Ballard’s thesis could be mapped onto biologist Edward O. Wilson’s notion that humans are programmed to be “biophiles” and have an evolutionarily determined love of living things. I would add that our dark fantasies of nature’s revenge can also be seen as a byproduct of our suppression of nature. It’s because we keep pushing other species down that the idea of their return haunts us.

  We want to share the city even as we insist it is ours alone. The fact that the urban fox’s habitat is spreading delights and alarms us. They have been living in British cities since the 1930s and have achieved a population density of up to five family groups per square kilometer. It was thought for many years that urban foxes were a uniquely British phenomenon. But in the 1970s they began appearing in cities as far apart as Oslo, Århus, Stuttgart, Toronto, and Sapporo in Japan. Wildlife ecologists who have been tracking them have found that rural and urban foxes have become markedly different, to the extent that one study discovered that “the border between the city and the surrounding grassland and forest was hardly ever crossed” by the two breeds. Another researcher discovered a “reduced gene flow between urban and rural populations.” The urban fox also has a different diet and a different relationship to humans and its landscape. There have been at least two substantial projects on what ecologists call urban foxes’ “daytime harborage.” One, from 1977, was carried out in London and tracked down 378 foxes. Nearly 60 percent of them bedded themselves down in “gardens, sheds, cellars, houses”; the rest were found in sewage stations, in builders’ yards, on vacant land, and in parks. Cemeteries and railway lines also proved popular. It is surprising that more people don’t trip over them.

  A second, more recent study carried out in Melbourne found a preference for “exotic weed infestations.” The removal of these exotic weeds, the Australian experts concluded, will “assist in reducing the abundance of urban foxes.” In Australia, foxes are often seen as a d
estructive alien species. This is the direction that a lot of academic ecology seems to gravitate toward: identifying habitats is all about finding better ways of stopping animals from spreading. In continental Europe the latest research on urban foxes has been driven by the discovery that they sometimes harbor a parasitic disease called alveolar echinococcosis, or small fox tapeworm. It’s an infection that can be transmitted to humans, causing large cysts that require chemotherapy. Although the Institute of Parasitology at the University of Zurich has shown that distributing bait that expels the parasite is a more effective and sustainable way of dealing with this problem, the threat of the spread of small fox tapeworm will provide considerable ammunition to those who want to launch a war against the urban fox. However, the British, who have the longest experience of dealing with urban foxes, have come to the conclusion that trying to exterminate them is futile. Local authorities have given up that costly effort and found that the fox population soon reaches a state of equilibrium that foxes and most humans can live with.

  I hastened away from the dark patch of wood, though retreating backward out of the bushes wasn’t easy. Dirty water trickled off my hand and I felt a little cheated. Urban foxes may be fairly common, but they have developed the knack of disappearing into the city, so when they do appear it often takes people by surprise. That morning I’d read that construction workers in London had discovered a young fox living off their leftover sandwiches on the unfinished seventy-second floor of the Shard, the UK’s tallest building. They decided to take the fox to an animal shelter, which released it back into the city. It was a gesture that carried a different type of ecological argument: while it’s occasionally difficult to share the city with foxes, it is also inevitable. The release of the fox also acknowledged a bigger idea: that topophilia and biophilia are mutually sustaining—or, to put it another way, that accepting that the city is a multispecies environment benefits us all by enriching, enlivening, and, ironically, humanizing our sense of place.