Underground Cities

A light tour of 30 cities and their subterranean constructions, including transit systems, waterworks, and nuclear shelters. Each city only gets a few pages, so it’s a fairly high-level summary.

I struggled to read this – the prose isn’t difficult, but because each chapter is so short, there’s no continuity and I kept getting distracted. That’s a pattern; in future I need to be careful of books that don’t have some sort of narrative.

The photography is beautiful; some of the illustrations less so. I struggled to grasp the scale of some of the constructions from the illustrations alone.

The absence of any African cities felt a bit odd; surely there are places with notable underground constructions? The chapters are organised by continent, so the omission stood out.

Overall this was fine, but nothing amazing.

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