Underground Spaces Unveiled

In a ground breaking new book “Underground Spaces Unveiled: Planning and Creating the Cities of the Future” urban planner Antonia Cornaro (Amberg Engineering, Switzerland) and civil engineer Han Admiraal (Enprodes, Netherlands), challenge the common perception that the development of underground space is only for cities that have a scarcity of land. In their book, written for urban planners, urban designers, architects, geologists, engineers, and for policy and decision makers, the authors unveil a hidden urban asset that is able to provide solutions for many of the challenges urban areas face now and in the future.

The book looks at how policies on sustainable development and urban resilience need to include the urban underground space. At the same time, it recognises that this requires urban planners, geologists and engineers to work together to unlock the knowledge to take the right decisions. Unplanned exploitation of underground space has in many cases led to a subsurface chaos with little room for future expansion, which is now adversely affecting the needs cities have for optimising their spatial development. Many cities however have never looked below the surface for future expansion and this is where the ideas and concepts discussed in the book show real potential. As Dr. Joan Clos, former executive director of UN-Habitat, writes in the foreword: “The use of underground space can help cities remain compact, be energy efficient or find the space needed to include new functions in the existing city landscape.”

The book provides a unique insight into a journey the authors have undertaken as co-chairs of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association’s Committee on Underground Space (ITACUS). The journey focussed on the central question how to optimally integrate the underground space into the urban fabric and how to make it part of the issues urban planners, engineers, architects, designers and others dealing with the built environment need to consider. In the authors’ vision urban integration is required to combine uses to avoid evermore space claims made by mono-use buildings and infrastructures. Why is it that mass rapid transport systems only transport people and lay dormant at night? What role could they play in urban logistics? Unveiling underground space is about a philosophy on future urban development that is inclusive and as such takes into account what the underground space has to offer in all its richness and variety.

Underground Spaces Unveiled
ICE Publishing
248 pages
Language: English
Hardback, 210 x 210 mm
Price: £70.00
ISBN 9780727761453

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