→ 27 - 01 - 2010

Hollow Cities (Lifting the lid on the city)

I watched the Discovery Channel/Mega Engineering program “Underground City” a few days ago.  While I think the concept of building 300m underground is ludicrous (not to mention anti-human), it did provide some food for thought.
Rather than living underground, what we should be doing is moving more (or all) of our infrastructure underground.  Not 300m underground, but rather at basement level.

Some examples of what should be moved underground:
  • The entire transportation network (including roads and parking, which should become much less of a feature of tomorrow’s city
  • Reticulation;  data, electrical, gas, sewage, stormwater, voice, water
  • Factories
  • Shopping centres (most of which are - to all intents and purposes - already underground
  • Infrastructure operated by only a skeleton crew of people, e.g. power stations
  • Disaster shelters
Things that should always remain above ground include:
  • Houses and apartments
  • Offices and other people-intensive workplaces
  • Parks
  • Walkways and bicycle tracks
  • Entertainment and culture venues
  • Government and other services, from post offices to hospitals

Essentially, anything related to storing goods or moving goods and services around, delivering utilities to the user and all unmanned production should be located in the “basement levels” of our urban cores.
In the same way that infrastructure, services and utilities are located in the basements of modern high-rise buildings, we should provide a basement level for our core/dense inner-city areas.

(I’m not sure why details regarding this program don’t (yet) appear on the Discovery Website.  In fact, very few details regarding the program appear anywhere on the Web.)
Mega Engineering, the idea of building a underground city under Chicago
“Underground City” Can an underground city a solution to the area and transport problems in Chicago? Planners willen net zoals in Amsterdam en Moskou 300 m onder de grond gaan bouwen. Planners want just like in Amsterdam and Moscow 300 m below the ground to build.
(Translation courtesy of Google.)

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