Subterranea: myths underfoot in Dallas, Texas
Few would debate that the city of Dallas, Texas stands as a monument to America's car culture. Made famous as the setting for the eponymous TV series, the city began as a compact boom-town before cheap oil awoke Dallasites to the wide open spaces now part of the conurbation known as the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
These days Dallas' downtown core all-but empties before dinner, leaving only the homeless to wander past shuttered office towers and vacant parking lots. The suburbs represent the city's real cultural and economic engine, orbiting the downtown core like planets around a dead star. The suburbs themselves glow with the saturated colours of American optimism.
Dallas is noteworthy not for this expansive horizontality - now common to most North American cities - but rather for its incomplete verticality. Resulting from the flood-prone terrain, up-and-out land use policies, and a deficit of investment in civic infrastructure, Dallas lacks all but the most hesitant and grudgingly necessary underground development. In essence, the city lacks a basement. Houses are built without cellars and the soil underneath the city is bereft of metro stations, underground parking lots, and shopping arcades. Compared with cities where underground construction is often halted for years at a time after archaeological treasures are discovered, Dallas' lack of literal roots underlines a lack of figurative rootedness.
One of the few noteworthy features below the streets of Dallas are the public fallout shelters which were installed at the outset of Cold War. Long decommissioned, some buildings still display signs for these refuges, listing their potential capacity for lucky survivors. Other than these forgotten bunkers, the city's vertical dimension expands solely from the streets up. The underground exists only as a place of fantasy and myth. If digging serves to reveal the past, Dallas' subterranea confirms that in spite of being immortalized on TV, the city's history is yet to be written.