Mapping Subterranean Worlds – Public Utilities as Unseen Historical and Social Arenas

Unseen beneath our feet and in our walls is a vast tangle of utility networks. We only have a few points of contact with these networks and thus they remain overlooked and hidden from view. But what if something goes wrong at the point of contact? What sort of bundles of meaning can be drawn from utility failure? This presentation traces the municipal water lines in a remote northern Canadian community to do a contemporary archaeology of the unseen through a GIS and a historical perspective. In doing so, it demonstrates that beyond serving a mere functionalist role, utility networks connect questions on class, colonialism, geography, public perceptions of health, and the material legacies of the utility lines themselves. In so doing, we are challenged to question the unnoticed physical networks that circumscribe both current and past societies.