The Walt Disney World Underground

Abstract

This article has grown out of a larger project on representations of subterranean space in the modern city. It explores the meanings of the “utilidors,” the underground infrastructure of the Magic Kingdom, within the broader experience of the space of Walt Disney World. It relates this experience to a particular mode of representing the modern city as divided between its respectable, aboveground spaces and its hidden, underground spaces. The author concludes by suggesting some of the insights the power of Disney’s spatial divisions can provide in thinking about current images of the city as simultaneously a site of “Disneyfication” (e.g., the new Times Square) and as a place of ruin, crime, and decay.

Negotiating Absence and Presence: Rural Muslims and ‘Subterranean’ Sacred Spaces

“…Accounts of these spatial imaginations discuss such diverse aspects as colonialism (Scott, 2008), Victorian imagination (Williams, 2008), infrastructure (Pike, 2005), urban exploration (Garrett, 2011), and popular music (Solomon, 2005). In these works, two characteristics emerge which are central to the subterranean: invisibility and verticality.…”

“…Many services and infrastructures that sustain contemporary societies exist in a subterranean state. Sewage systems, electricity cables and even spare costumes at Disney World are separated from the surface so as to preserve its aesthetic appearance (Pike, 2005); the successful and smooth operation of the surface depends on their functionality. Consequently, there is a distinction between form and function (Cresswell, 1996) that underpins the division between surface and sub-surface.…”

Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water

“…This shift becomes necessary as analytic tropes such as landscapes and routes of movement cannot grasp the impossibility of dwelling in subsurface formations such as aquifers. Those formations require a form of volumetric thinking that is only possible by articulating horizontality and verticality, a shift scholars are exploring in a variety of historical and geographic contexts (Elden 2013; Braun 2000; Buys and Farber 2011; Pike 2005; Ballestero 2018). The move to think about aquifers volumetrically necessitates considering depth and distance as enveloping and surrounding spatial forms, not as measurable units in a flat plane cut by a horizon.…”