Underground Cities


photography
Underground City, Cappadocia, Turkey. Public Domain.
photography
Underground City, Cappadocia, Turkey. Public Domain.

An Underground City is probably exactly what you think first: it is a series of underground structures which form a city. While a single place for living is a SubterraneaCave House an underground city requires much more:

This is - by the way - not a real definition. This term is not a scientific term, it's just a descriptive term used for classification. In other words, this page is describing how this term is used on showcaves.com and nothing more. Nevertheless, if you look at the respective Wikipedia page, you will see that the definition there is quite identical. There are discussions on how to exactly define the term. We include the following three types of underground structures.

Archaeological or Historic Underground Cities

During history, man built underground cities for reasons like defensive refuge or protection from climatic influences. Or simply because hollowing out soft rock is sometimes easier than erecting a building.

Nice examples for this are the underground cities in Cappadolia, where early Christians lived underground because they were persecuted for their religion by non-Christian neighbours. Or underground cities on the Krim peninsula, which were built underground to hide from the frequent raids of the neighbours. Or they used underground structures which already existed, normally because of mining activities.


Modern Underground Cities

photography
Jungang Underground Shopping Center, Jeju Island, Korea. Public Domain.
photography
Jungang Underground Shopping Center, Jeju Island, Korea. Public Domain.

Even today, there are good reasons to build underground. Normally it's not persecution or frequent raids, as we handle that with open or not so open wars. Mostly, it's a result of an extreme lack of space in modern cities or to avoid the nasty climate. An american synonym for such a city would be underground mall.

Fine examples for the climate thing are the underground cities in Canada, most famous is probably PATH in Toronto or the Ville Souterraine in Montreal. Others are found in Finland, Russia, and other northern countries where the temperature, ice, and snow in winter are an issue. The same with high temperatures can be found in Australia, Spain, and Iran.

And of course there is the main reason for anything: money! A lot of those cities developed because many people used the subway to get into the city, someone opened a shop which was frequented by commuters and flourished. The results are underground shopping malls of enormous size, which may even connect two or more subway stations. So if you are done with shopping, you just look for the next station to get home...

Unlike other underground cities, these shopping malls do not include living quarters, except probably some hotels, they only offer the complete infrastructure for living. There are shops for everything, fast food and restaurants, and even banking infrastructure. In some cases, working and living takes place in the buildings on top of the underground mall.


Accidental Underground Cities

These are underground cities, which never worked as an underground city. You could say these are above-ground cities which went underground, normally after they were abandoned, or they were abandoned after they went underground. Sounds strange, but this category is actually quite common, much more frequent than you might guess. The point is that in former times, new cities were built on top of the old cities, mostly because there was no heavy machinery to remove the debris. So if a city was destroyed quite massively by an earthquake, a fire, a flood or something else, it was sometimes abandoned, the floor raised, and the new city built on top. However, there were also cases where a town was simply raised one storey, for example, due to flooding. The ground floor became the basement, and the former shops and pubs are often still almost completely intact.