What the Maps Leave Out

Steve Duncan has been documenting the insides of cities for years—drainage channels, decommissioned subway tunnels, buried rivers that used to appear on maps before the city grew over them. With filmmaker Andrew Wonder he made Undercity, starting in New York, where the footage landed in the New York Times and Wired and spread from there. The new project goes to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is an interesting choice because the surface is so deliberately total. The strip exists to make you forget there’s anything underneath it—no sky visible between the casinos, no sense of the desert three blocks away. And underneath, in the flood control channels running below the city, there are communities of people who’ve built homes down there. Duncan went in. The film is at undercity.org, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel slightly guilty for only ever seeing the top of cities.