Substructures, underground space and sustainable urban environments

Abstract This paper examines the International Association for Engineering Geology and the Environment's 10th Congress theme of ‘Engineering Geology for Tomorrow's Cities’, with specific reference to substructures and underground space, by exploring the possibilities of, and barriers to, increased underground space usage. It is vital that some degree of envisioning of the future should be attempted and this means looking backwards to help in extrapolating forwards. Such an exercise must be undertaken in the context of sustainability and, thus, an approach encompassing economic, social and environmental issues is warranted. Using a ‘three-pillar’ approach as the basis on which various alternative futures might be envisioned is helpful and very rapidly shows that current thinking in relation to designs is typically very narrow indeed. Three scenarios are examined to explore how we treat the interaction between substructures and the ground and, thus, what we might need to allow for in designs at different depths. Although acknowledging that different countries have different geological conditions to help or hinder them, examples are drawn from Norway to demonstrate how sustainable underground concepts have been put into place to very great effect over the past 80 years or so. Each example introduces different benefits and shows how designs have progressively improved. In exploring how underground space might be better used, the ground needs to be viewed as a resource for which sustainable practices, such as industrial symbiosis, apply. The many advances in monitoring technology also need to be taken advantage of, so that the uncertainty of performance of hidden elements does not present a barrier. In addition, the uncertainty in what is already present needs to be removed. Recent developments in 3D shallow subsurface soil and made-ground mapping, accompanied by the development of techniques to map the buried infrastructure, are shown to provide an important way forward in the UK.

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