Concrete and Paranoia

I am standing amidst a stony Mediterranean mountain landscape with sparse wintertime vegetation. The sky is clear; some sheep and a donkey are grazing in the distance; the mountains further away appear quite high with their snowy peaks. The whole scene evokes an almost alpine idyll and a sense of safe, timeless existence somewhere behind the back of the world. But then the eye catches a glimpse of some stony grey, partially moss-covered bumps—a series of concrete domes about 100–200 metres apart. I am near the town of Gjirokastër in Albania, and the bumps in the landscape are remnants of Enver Hoxha’s totalitarian rule (1944–1985) and his ambitious defence programme that aimed to cover the whole land evenly with shelters for all citizens. There were three types of shelters; the ones here are of the most common type, designed for one to two people—small and virtually unequipped round concrete bunkers of which there were supposed to be 750,000, although assessments on their actual number vary greatly. Hoxha, whose foreign policy had led Albania into total isolation and who found Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and eventually also China insufficiently communist, became increasingly paranoid over the 1960s and 1970s, fearing an attack. From that perspective, it was only logical that security should be sought by building as many underground or concrete-clad defensive structures as possible. Despite its persistent lack of housing and weakened economy, still recovering from the II World War, Albania poured an enormous amount of resources into the bunker programme, and any senior military officials who dared to point out its inefficiency were simply shot. Hoxha’s bunkers—equally conspicuous in the streets, fields, and highlands—were obviously building mainly a symbolic, performative sort of security. I gaze at the stark dome-filled landscape and get a bodily sense of a wholly different kind of society, steeped in fear and intimidation. The spacetime frozen in that scene feels unreal. At the same time, it all seems to bear on our current moment in an unsettling way.

Towards an inevitable catastrophe

Our current fears are of a somewhat different kind, but hardly any less intense. On the contrary—the vaguer the threat, the more unfathomable and threatening it seems. Our entire contemporary life is tinged with a constant and pervasive anxiety—we are gripped simultaneously by personal and existential, social and political, environmental and climate-related worries. What should we prepare for? And how? Which threats are the most imminent, and which ones might leave us a little more time? Social scientists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck claimed already in the 1980s that we have transitioned from an industrial society to a risk society, where the main issue is no longer the distribution of production outputs and commodities (goods), but threats and hazards (bads). Life has always been fraught with risks, of course, and catastrophes and doomsday events have been predicted and expected since the dawn of time. The foundational text of Western culture features the myth of an all-destructive flood, admonishing us to prepare; Ragnarök and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ have been awaited throughout centuries; apocalyptic prophecies have been sought from sources as diverse as Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar. However, our contemporary risk society is distinct in that instead of natural or external threats, the greatest risks are now those of human origin, having to do with climate change, technology, the financial system or global politics. Early 20th-century promises of progress had, by the end of the century, been replaced with a trajectory toward self-destruction, an unintended byproduct of the modernisation process itself.[1] Risk society is characterised by the conviction that the likelihood and severity of an impending catastrophe are steadily growing, all the while there is less and less faith in science’s ability to give an adequate assessment of risks and do something to mitigate them. There is less and less consensus among experts. According to Eva Horn, contemporary life is perceived as a catastrophe without event, a gradual and barely noticeable, but no less inevitable inching toward a calamity whose eventual shape we nevertheless fail to conceive.[2] Thus, people act in contradictory ways—on the one hand, they devour dystopian films, literature, and all other sorts of ‘collapsology’; on the other hand, they ignore the flood of information and just continue their usual business of travelling, planning families, and managing real estate. It is a paradoxical condition, characterised by extreme well-informedness and anxiety, but at the same time passivity and a kind of paralysis. Indeed, collapsology could even be said to express a sort of desire for catastrophe—let it come already! If the shape of the impending disaster were finally revealed, the true state of the society would be revealed—and the prepared ones would be separated from the naive.

Prudential preppers

Such prudential preppers form a kind of global subculture whose worldview is founded on the conviction that governments and other institutions of society cannot be counted on—saving one’s hide is everyone’s own business. Thus, everyone needs to prepare for what is coming and do it immediately. Two questions need to be resolved—how to survive the catastrophe (which requires first getting a clearer idea of what it is likely to consist in and how long would one need to endure), and how to build a new life in the presumably adverse post-catastrophe conditions. In the United States, where this mindset reflects both the individualism of a society stemming from the ages of the Wild West and the nuclear threat propaganda from the Cold War era, there are about 23 million active preppers spanning all ages and social groups,[3] although some preparations for unforeseeable troubles are in fact made by every third American.[4] In Europe, people have been more accustomed to relying on the state when facing major disasters, but recent experiences with the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have significantly expanded the prepper community here as well. Intentions and action plans vary, of course, ranging from acquiring basic outdoor skills and stacking up emergency supplies to creating fully autonomous households or communities in peripheral, maximally hidden locations. Urban preppers are preparing for a guerilla-style existence in a post-apocalyptic urban environment, whereas eco-preppers emphasise that prepping-related changes are necessary for transitioning to a more sustainable lifestyle in any case.

Prepping is obviously also a huge business. Although the prepper pathos involves not only distrust of the state but also a highly critical stance toward the woes of consumer society, it is paradoxically accompanied by the belief that security can be bought—whether it be in the form of the best and most specialised sleeping bag, weapon, or air filter. Or bunker. Extensive state propaganda in the Cold War-era United States encouraged everyone to prepare for a nuclear attack by building their own concrete bunkers in their backyard, for which there were also numerous standard designs and technical solutions; modern developers have gone further and are offering ready-made products for all budgets, tastes, and fears. One can buy a modular panic room or shelter unit that can be installed in the garage or beneath the living room and disguised as a wine cellar, armoury, or guest room. For instance, one of the most successful manufacturers, Texas-based Atlas Survival Shelters,[5] offers a wide range of shelter modules made of concrete, bulletproof steel, and corrugated pipe that are delivered in one piece so they can be placed under new homes or in gardens and equipped on-site with ventilation, plumbing, electricity, internet connection, and other necessities. The entrances are bullet- and gas-proof; additional options include decontamination chambers, weapons storage rooms, and filters for chemical, biological, and radioactive threats. The shelters placed outside the house offer various camouflage options; larger models come with a separate escape tunnel. At the same time, by offering laminate floors, wardrobes, shower rooms, and modular kitchens, it is emphasised that being holed up in a bunker does not necessarily mean sacrificing comfort. The product selection of another popular manufacturer, Rising S Bunkers,[6] ranges from a 9-square-metre bunker with two bunk beds to luxury models with telling names like Venetian, Presidential, and Aristocrat. The latter features not only living quarters, a full kitchen, a garage, large storage spaces, and an artificially-lit greenhouse, but also a sauna, a gym, a bowling alley, a shooting range, swimming pools, playrooms, and more. According to the CEO, the business goes hand in hand with events in political life: the first major surge in bunker sales came after the September 11 terror attacks, and another sales boost (700%) followed Trump’s election victory in 2015, since the latter brought along a whole new target group—startled liberals.[7]

Reusing military infrastructure

Many bunker developments have made use of existing military facilities. Vivos, which is currently active in the United States, Europe, and Asia,[8] began in 2016 to develop a vast former bomb testing site in South Dakota where there were 575 decommissioned weapons storage depots, originally designed to withstand explosions of up to half a megaton.[9] The development would feature meticulous security systems and security teams, and was advertised as the world’s largest survivalist community that would fit 6,000–10,000 people—this was no longer about equipping individual shelters but a comprehensive vision of a post-apocalyptic society in which a certain wealthy and ideologically uniform group is protecting itself from impoverished and hungry masses. Another Vivos development near the city of Jena makes use of Cold War-era East German infrastructure—a five-kilometre-long complex carved into the mountainside will feature 34 two-storey apartments, each more than 400 square metres in size and individually designed to the customer’s specifications. The comparison with a luxurious cruise ship is rhetorically fitting—it brings to mind a privileged class sailing blithely through a doomed world. Vivos Europa embodies the idea of maximal hedonism in a maximally secure environment. It is said to withstand a direct nuclear hit, earthquakes, tsunamis, chemical weapons, electromagnetic pulses, and nearly all conceivable kinds of armed assault, and is equipped with a filtration system against biological and chemical agents, a backup climate and ventilation system, autonomous supply of water and electricity. Indoor transport is covered with electric vehicles; contact with the outside world is maintained via a helicopter. The common area will have restaurants, bakeries, a brewery, a wine cellar, sports facilities, chapels, prayer rooms, and a hairdresser; furthermore, there is a TV and radio station, a security and detention centre, decontamination chambers, repair workshops, and a fully equipped hospital. There are also plans to include a mini-zoo and an archive of cultural treasures, whatever the latter may consist in.

And yet, in a scenario that involves prolonged sheltering, having security, autonomous functioning, and luxurious amenities will not suffice—instead, the decisive factor will be psychological resilience. This has been perhaps most clearly acknowledged in Survival Condo—a 15-storey complex in Kansas, USA, built in a former missile silo from the 1960s that reaches 60 metres underground.[10] Completed in 2012, the complex was conceived not only by interior architects but also enlisted a psychologist to help with creating the illusion that life in the bunker constitutes normalcy. The shelter accommodates up to 75 people in tastefully designed 80- and 170-square-metre ‘apartments’, but pays special attention to common areas and activities—in addition to the habitual gym and swimming pool, bar and restaurant, cinema and library, the developer emphasises the importance of having a supermarket in order to retain a safe routine, even when it offers five years’ worth of goods for free.[11] The complex tries to support the body’s natural circadian rhythm even as you reside underground. The colours and lighting used in the interiors are deliberately warm; artificial windows simulate the daily light cycle and offer views of Hawaiian beaches, Alpine resorts or Japanese gardens. The impression of a safe reality is further reinforced with appropriate recorded soundscapes.

Although Vivos Europa still exists only in the form of dreams and renderings,[12] and Oppidum, the most well-known luxury bunker project that had been planned into a 1980s-built nuclear shelter for the Czechoslovak communist party elite near Prague, announced a couple of months ago that it is shutting down altogether,[13] it is nevertheless the case that modern doomsday shelters for the super-rich remain a distinct phenomenon and serve as perhaps the most scathing diagnosis of the state of our contemporary society. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has poignantly noted that a civilisation that facilitates the sort of business that Vivos runs is, in a certain sense, already a collapsed one.[14] It relies, among other things, on an unconditional faith in technological utopias—a belief that human progress is unceasing and unstoppable and there are no possible crises that could not be solved with the help of some new innovative technology. However, unlike a few decades ago, when techno-utopianism was at least rhetorically still about saving the world more generally, the modern billionaires no longer bother much to mask their true goals behind philanthropy. What remains is the bare cynical question: how to save one’s own skin in a world made uninhabitable by one’s own extractivist, profit-driven actions? How to bend the rules of physics, economics, and ethics to escape the apocalypse of one’s own making? But even here, the issues that are the hardest to predict and manage do not concern concrete structures or technological systems, but the human factor—for instance, how could one maintain and motivate the sniper on the shelter roof after the monetary economy has collapsed?

Estonia amidst preparations

Estonia has likewise plenty of Soviet-era military infrastructure and shelters, but there are no known plans to return them into use with their original function. In the late 1980s, Estonia had 543 civil defence shelters, 7,343 simple fallout shelters, and 21,000 basements suitable for sheltering, with a total capacity of more people than there were living in the country.[15] Today, we have 170 public shelters with a total capacity of approximately 10% of the population.[16] A working group within the Union of Estonian Architects is trying to develop requirements and standards for shelters to be built in new apartment buildings, but also looking at a quicker solution of removing the legal barriers that currently prevent people from building their own shelters. And yet, people seem to have surprisingly little interest in doing this. A quick survey among Estonian architects and real estate brokers was unequivocal—none of the respondents remembered anyone commissioning or buying a home who also planned to have a bunker, safe room, or even sturdier sort of basement. Nor did there appear to be much emphasis on seclusion or security when choosing the location or plot. At most, preparations are limited to installing a backup heating or power solution. Instead of investing in a bunker, anyone with the means to do so invests in backup real estate in Spain—which seems pretty unreasonable from the perspective of a traditional prepper, as one would have trouble reaching it in a WTSHTF situation.[17] Given our circumstances, the prepper subculture in Estonia is surprisingly thin—there is a closed Facebook group, but except for during the pandemic, it has been relatively inactive. Then again, many of the survival skills promoted by American preppers are still part of conventional wisdom and common sense around here.

Vulnerable measures

Where, then, should we ground our existential, political, and environmental anxieties? The tangible and immediate materiality of concrete might calm us down for a while, but in reality, even the most sophisticated and superior bunkers are extremely vulnerable in even slightly prolonged or more complex threat scenarios. Autonomous hydroponic food production can be spoiled by an invasion of inappropriate bacteria, one could have a dental infection in the best underground restaurant, a perfect technological system can be ruined by a careless action of the user, with no spare parts to repair it. And how to even reach your metaphorical desert island when the navigation systems are down? Furthermore, think of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built in 2008—a bunker not for people, but food crop seeds collected from all over the world. Countries across the world deposit varietal seeds there so they could restore agriculture after unforeseen cataclysms. Built beneath Svalbard’s permafrost, this repository for global food security was supposed to be fully secure and protected against all conceivable natural catastrophes and man-made threats. And yet, ten years down the line, water had already begun to seep in due to changes caused by climate warming. Just like with the concrete domes in Albania, the actual protective efficiency of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the luxurious doomsday bunkers is conditional—but even so, these projects demonstrate architecture’s efficiency in creating emotional and symbolic security. Both the concrete beak protruding from Svalbard’s wild landscape and the extremely diverse contemporary bunker architecture embody, above all, our current sensibilities. They reflect an all-encompassing yet nebulous sense of danger, a distrust in society and its authorities, and an individualistic fantasy of self-sufficient survival outside the bounds of the law—but perhaps also, more surreptitiously, a longing for a functioning and reliable community in some world-to-come. In preparing for the unknown horrors that lie ahead, it would probably be more prudent to invest in solidarity and functioning human relationships rather than in concrete.

[1] Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Suhrkamp, 1986).

[2] Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe (Columbia University Press, 2018).

[3] Anniina Koivu, ‘The Business of Prepping’, in We Will Survive: The Prepper Movement, ed. Anniina Koivu and Jolanthe Kugler (mudac, 2024), 66.

[4] Richard Laycock, ’74 million Americans prepping for disaster’, Finder, 11 April 2023.

[5] Atlas Survival Shelters, https://atlassurvivalshelters.com.

[6] Rising S Bunkers, https://risingsbunkers.com.

[7] Bradley Garrett, Bunker. What It Takes to Survive the Apocalypse (Penguin, 2021), 83.

[8] Vivos Underground Survival Shelters, https://www.terravivos.com.

[9] Marc O’Connell, ‘Real estate for the apocalypse: my journey into a survival bunker’, The Guardian, 17 April 2020.

[10] Survival Condo, https://survivalcondo.com.

[11] Bradley Garrett, Bunker: What It Takes to Survive the Apocalypse (Penguin, 2021), 228–229.

[12] Bradley Garrett, ‘“Our top search term is nuclear“: US bunker sales soar as anxiety over Russia rises’, The Guardian, 29 March 2022.

[13] Kilian Marti, ‘Medien weltweit berichteten über Schweizer Luxus-Bunker – nun macht die Firma dicht’, Watson, 2 December 2024.

[14] Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).

[15] Liisa Tagel, ‘Kui kõik valmistusid tuumasõjaks’ [‘When Everyone Was Preparing for Nuclear War’], Postimees, 24 September 2014; ‘Elanike kaitse võimalused ja astmed massirelvade kahjustuste eest. Seletuskiri’ [‘Possibilities for and levels of civil protection against weapons of mass destruction. Explanatory note’], ERA.T-14.4-6.35456 (1986).

[16]  The Government Office, Ministry of Social Affairs, and Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Estonia, Civil Defence Action Plan 2024–2027 (2024).

[17] ‘When the shit hits the fan’. One of the most frequently used acronyms among the many featured in the prepper subculture.