Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (6 page)

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.

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.”

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.