Conducting flows beneath the city. The scientific and cultural imagination of underground infrastructure: the case of Buenos Aires Subway (1880-1930).

ZUNINO SINGH, DHAN

Londres

Workshop; Historical Perspectives on Urban Infrastructures; 2019

Urban Lab, University College of London

Following recent studies on infrastructure and based on my research on Buenos Aires underground transport system, my proposal is to discuss how the city?s subsoil became a modern space for circulation; how engineers, politicians, entrepreneurs conceived that space as the ?artificial belly? of the metropolis and the cultural representations which accompanied the implementation of those infrastructures. The Buenos Aires case helps to introduce a broader discussion about urban metabolism, networked city, and the relation between mobilities and urban space. From a historical and transnational perspective, this case also contributes to explore the ideas, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, about urban transport infrastructure, the relationship between the traffic street and alternatives modes of circulation, also about speed, hygiene, safety and comfort as well as the role of infrastructure in the symbolic construction of a modern metropolis. My research (based on my PhD thesis and current projects on History of Infrastructure in Argentina and Transnational History of Latin America Metro Systems) includes a comparison with American and European cases in the same period to understand the adaption of this transnational infrastructure to a particular city: the transatlantic circulation of this urban infrastructure. Moreover, it explores the relation to other underground infrastructures such as those for conducting water, waste, information (sanitary works, pneumatic tube systems). A special attention to cultural history is given in this study to understand scientific, political, and popular representations, values, ideas, affects associated to the underground infrastructure as ?technical solution? for a clean, rapid mobility without no friction.