Underground housing, underground businesses, etc. Would that be better for the environment + possibly save on energy costs? Also possibly safer in certain scenarios like tornadoes etc.
Potential issues that immediately come to mind are ventilation, earthquakes, and flooding. But it’s not like underground dwellings/basements/etc. aren’t a thing, so maybe those issues have been addressed in ways I’m not familiar with.
I certainly enjoy my pandemics trapped in a network of caves full of infected people.
Human internal clocks get advanced about an hour each day by exposure to light. Living in perpetual darkness (or under light bulbs only) wrecks hell on the system.
Plus you need some way to get rid of excess heat. Human society uses a lot of energy. That all turns into heat eventually.
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My graveyard-shift friend simply gets sunlight before going to work later.
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It’s cold down there. Have you ever gone into a basement? That heat is useful.
What’s the point about your friend. Apparently they are still getting their sunlight every day.
Have you ever spent time in one with other people? My basement (furnished hangout space) warms up pretty quick when I have guests.
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It’s much more expensive to build underground.
Yes, but “expensive” depends on what and how you measure.
Do you want to suggest a measurement scheme in which underground building is cheaper? As is I don’t understand your point.
Do you consider lifetime costs? Do you consider the value of biological services of an undisdturbed land surface and habitat? Do you consider the value of a lifetime of energy savings for heating and cooling? Do we factor climate change opportunity costs? Do you consider the disaster resilience of a subterranian building built once vs the multiple constructions of a tornado or hurricane built and rebuilt?
Sometime what seems cheapest can be the most expensive.
For a single family dwelling (or any structure that isn’t too deep), reduced heating a cooling costs could make building underground cheaper in the long run.
For a large structure that goes deep, I doubt if it could ever be cheaper to building underground.
There are several underground spaces where people work, and live. Chicago, Toronto both have underground systems. There is a town in Australia that half the people live underground because it’s so hot.
Some issues with underground spaces; it can be expensive to dig the proper tunnels, you have to make sure the geological make up of the area will support the structure, water draining down from above after rain storms can cause issues, and the big one is ventilation, you have to be able to move air through out the entire system.
Coober Pedy in South Australia
The tradeoff for resilience in emergencies is that the if the ventilation fails hard enough, everyone who can’t get out suffocates. Flooding, as you guessed, is also a serious probelm. Everything that can flood a basement now floods a living space.
Heat and AC are normally going to cost less, but the cost of construction, maintenance, and modification of the structure are way higher and generally kinda dangerous. Not worth it.
It works, when designed well enough. The problem is how do you continue to support the above ground structures, if you aren’t as lucky as Chongqing geographically. You have to essentially plan not only all the weight of the structures of each underground level, but also above ground level. That takes lots of highly specialized engineering teams to figure out, which is a huge upfront investment.
Which brings another major problem: Cost. Creating underground structures requires massive mining rigs and blasting and getting rid of the material that comes out and constant review of any potential damage that does when further expanding the city out; all of that costs just so much money compared to normal buildings. If your goal is for-profit development, you’ll never break even.
And of course the most obvious problem, most humans are not mole people and do not want to be underground. Sun-deprivation and outdoors-deprivation have serious mental and physical health issues attached, which are not solved by artificial UV-producing lights or indoor plants.
Better? Probably not. Maybe it eventually starts making more sense with extreme temperatures.
I would be interested, but looking at the cost of something a remote as Whittier, AK does not inspire confidence. Though even if it were non-monetary, I still probably couldn’t pull my own weight. (also getting there, social compatibility etc)
There are indeed places where large amounts of human activity takes place underground, often being metro systems and their associated retail spaces; Tokyo Station in Japan comes to mind as having an underground mall attached to it.
But the same caveats for underground construction of transportation systems also apply to all other underground structures that humans would like to build. Consider the differences between ground conditions in: the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, and New York City.
The Bay Area is the outlet for major rivers in northern California, bounded by mountain ranges on virtually all sides. The surface is either a thin covering of soil atop this mountain rock, or is a layer of looser soil or mud, made from the sediments carried in by those rivers. This makes for fantastic agricultural conditions but presents a real risk of liquifaction when there’s an earthquake. While an underground structure wouldn’t fall over – because it’s within the ground – it could certainly lose its supports unless it has piles all the way down to the rock. And that’s only buildable on the narrow shoreline region where there’s sufficient depth before hitting the rock layer.
With Denver, it’s basically all rock, so to build within the rock would require blasting it away and building within the hole, or to build normally then bury the structure in fill, so that it’s below grade.
With NYC, it’s a different story because the ground conditions make it fairly easy to dig tunnels and drive piles, and the bedrock layer beneath Manhattan is strong enough to support the weight of supertall-class skyscrapers. On this point, the New York Fed’s Gold Vault is in the basement in Manhattan, precisely because the volume of gold inside would be a serious strain on any foundation and the geology beneath.
All that said, the surface conditions in some extreme climates may warrant building underground, or avoiding the underground outright. Burying a dwelling in New Mexico would make a lot of sense, due to the hot and dry Southwestern climate. But in Alaska, an underground dwelling would cause melting of the permafrost layer below, resulting in a similar situation to liquefaction. I suppose this can be mitigated, but it would be a monumental effort, akin to Camp Century in Greenland. That project was abandoned due to changing ice geology.
I think it would be great for a lot of our transportation to be underground. Underground roadways if needed, otherwise a much expanded subway system in cities
Road cause so many issues it’s ridiculous. Have all the roadways and motor vehicles underground and only pedestrian/bikes up top with green spaces and public areas.
Underground is not necessarily better for the environment. I think if we compared the ideal underground build to the ideal above ground build, underground would actually be worse for the environment.
Think about it this way: The advantages you might get from underground are related to reclaiming ground and comprehensive city planning. But you can reclaim roof space to make up for the ground, and you can get the same benefits from city planning building above ground.
The idea that you’d just leave pure wilderness on the ground level when you build underground is not realistic. You could grow the crops you need right there above it, instead, for example. A certain amount of land is needed to support each person. But either way, people would be going to the surface every day. If you build underground, you’ll also be building above ground.
Meanwhile, underground requires quite a bit more stuff. You have to plan more to manage heat and ventilation. It’s difficult to increase density underground because you can build higher more easily than you can dig deeper.
Think of how energy efficient your HVAC would be, though. Especially once the planet really starts cooking.
AC sure, but not ventilation or heating, unless there’s geothermal energy available. And geothermal sites tend to correlate with low safety underground because of geological activity and nasty gases.
I’ve always wanted this. Underground cities would be so dope but everyone wants a 40x40 of domestic grass to do nothing with.
Everything you think would be good about underground would be more easily and cheaply accomplished by building aboveground buildings that connect. (Or said another way, by effectively raising ground level to roof level without the expense of digging.)
The irony is if you designed a city with viaducts, the savings on ground disturbance and the extension in life for utilities (now high and dry instead of rotting in the dirt and corroding, being hit by fiber-seeking backhoes) pays for the viaduct system itself even if it costs tens of billions for a city.
When your domestic water system now lasts a century instead of 40 years, and leaks can be spotted and repaired from a catwalk, the savings compound over that same century. Apply that to power, gas, heating, cooling, telecom… Plus they stop hitting each other any time you need to dig more than a foot. Now telecom will stop hitting water lines when they go to repair broken fiber that was hit by a new construction excavating a foundation.
A 40 year buried power lifespan that cost $5 billion to install for a city means each year you need to replace 1/40th or your power cables and would annually spend 1/40th of $5 billion, or 125 million.
Those same cables in a utilities rack within a city viaduct system might last 2-3X as long since they’re dry, don’t move with frost heave, don’t experience being driven over by fully loaded semis, aren’t at risk of being hit while repairing something else…
effectively raising ground level
I can’t say I follow what this means. Moving everything we have at ground level up? I understand that this kind of thing has happened historically but only in periods where we barely built a couple of stories high.
I’m looking out over the Tokyo skyline right now and there’s every level of building. How do you get everyone to agree on the one right height?
I’ve actually been there. Like I said, it’s a gallery with little depth and does not answer how this would be applied to modern architecture n any kind of scale.
The city burned down which allowed these sweeping changes to happen. The minimum height is set by preventing yearly flooding due to heavy rains and strong tides since the area was filled in tidelands. The maximum was set by the rest of the city and its Hills. This is an engineering problem so you solve it the way an engineer would.
The way you would do this for a modern city is by first considering geography and your design requirements. “How much do we need to raise it and why?” If you only need to fit utilities in there and nothing else your necessary lift isn’t that high. Maybe a few meters. If you want to also cram cars or trains down there so you can build to viaduct top lighter by mandating no cars, and to make it a walkable city, you can set a higher requirement. You’re basically building a bridge that spans the entire city and the same calculus works for a viaduct city as it does for designing a bridge. Your biggest expenses are regrading, foundations, redoing drainage, and routing utilities into the viaduct passageways and abandoning existing utilities in the ground from the old city. That’s all if you can avoid eminent domain or conflicts with property owners.
All of this is obviously way easier to do with a newly built city from day 0, or a city that burned down. The reason it happened in Seattle is because residents were sick of yearly flooding and they needed to rebuild with fireproof materials anyways. So why not solve both?
how do you replace viaducts? Would that need demolishing buildings on top?
Consider the following scenarios:
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You start with a hill, then dig down into it and build a building such that it has a flat green (vegetated) roof at the original ground level.
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You start with flat ground, build the same building on top of it, then mound dirt up around the sides to form a hill.
Two methods to the same result, right?
But now, imagine that instead of one building, you’ve got an entire city worth of buildings like that bunched up touching each other (no roads between them, just interior corridors). With scenario #1, you’ve still got to do a bunch of excavation for each and every building. But with scenario #2, you only need to do earth-moving around the perimeter of the city (if you even bother). Still the same result, but now method #2 is much, much cheaper.
I’m looking out over the Tokyo skyline right now and there’s every level of building. How do you get everyone to agree on the one right height?
This is a very hypothetical thread, so that’s the kind of issue that could just be hand-waved away as part of the initial premise. But if you want a real answer, that’s easy: “zoning codes.” Cities have absolutely no trouble exercising their authority to regulate building height.
Both of your scenarios seem to start with an empty landscape. When I heard “move the ground level up” I took that to mean that we are starting with an existing cityscape that has a ground level, and everything must be elevated.
If we’re just talking pure theoreticals built on a tabula rasa, okay then. Like you said, everything can be hand waved away.
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In a number of places, it’d be great in a number of ways.
The big issue, as usual, is cost. Want a house? Fast growth wood frames can be built in a workshop/factory, stood up quickly, capped with more fast growth wood roof frames, skinned with thin boards made from woodchips and sawdust, or just chickenwire and cement, roofed with tar, and slathered in cheap acrylic paint. The engineering is all off-the-shelf at this point because it’s so common.
Want a U-house? You’re going to be digging. Digging down a foot or two isn’t that big of a problem but tends to get more difficult the deeper you go, so expect a lot of excavation costs compared to the stick-built house. Then you have to make all those walls strong enough to hold back the surrounding earth. Get ready to spend a lot more time doing engineering tests to make sure the retaining walls will hold, the water won’t turn it all to mush, etc. There is an earth pressure underground just like there’s water pressure in the ocean. Then there’s the roof. If it’s really underground, that’s a lot of weight to support. All that support has a material cost. All the engineering work to make sure it’s safe has a labor cost. Hiring workers who have the kind of training needed to do more than run a nail gun and a paint sprayer has a labor cost. The finding of those people at all can be a difficult task for the contractor/developer, and can be quite difficult when most house builders haven’t been doing that kind of construction.
And at the end of all this you have to get someone to pay for it. Getting people to pay even the same cost as the stick-built house for a house that doesn’t fit into their dreams of looking like the vision of success implanted in their brain by the pop culture of their youth is way harder than just cutting corners and being the Walmart of housing. Being a slacker sometimes pays incredibly well. Greatness can never succeed in capitalism because the one-size-fits-most model is always more profitable.
I actually quite like the idea of an underground house - it’d be easier to get a nice stable temperature year round and would be much easier to design for bushfire resilience (steel sheets over skylights/doorway, steel mesh over ventilation and you’re pretty set). I could do with my own personal hobbit hole.
I would however want it to be in a position where it does not require pumped drainage. That restricts you to places on a decent slope so you can use gravity to keep things dry and cozy rather than rely on pumps that could break down. Not having a view in the vast majority of locations would also be a downside, but to be fair being able to see a good bit of distance is sadly not something you get in most normal houses anyway.
Do you want to live underground?
To be honest the natural temperature control would do wonders for my utility bill LOL
