“…urban networks in the contemporary city are largely hidden, opaque, invisible, disappearing underground, locked into pipes, cables, conduits, tubes, passages and electronic waves. It is exactly this hidden form that renders the tense relationship between nature and the city blurred, that contributes to severing the process of social transformation of nature from the process of urbanization. Perhaps more importantly, the hidden flows and their technological framing render occult the social relations and power mechanisms that are scripted in and enacted through these flows. However, urban networks have not always been opaque. […] In particular, during the early stages of nineteenth-century modernization, urban networks and their connecting iconic landmarks were prominently visual and present […] When the urban became constructed as agglomerated use values that turned the city into a theatre of accumulation and economic growth, urban networks became the iconic embodiments of and shrines to a technologically scripted image and practice of progress. Once completed, the networks became buried underground, invisible, rendered banal and relegated to an apparently marginal, subterranean urban underworld.”