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.
Mold and humidity, look at people who do that and they have to run a heater and dehumidifier to keep the moisture down. Now you could colocate a nuclear reactor and have built in heating and large scale forced air and that would solve it.
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 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.
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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Digging more than a few meters for a building is not only expensive, it can be very difficult and dangerous for the buildings a few hundred meters away, depending on the nature of the soil.
There is a certain cursed railstation project in germany, where the nee railstation is build underground. Though the soil is a specific type, which sucks up any water it gets in contact with and then expands. If there is a significant leakage, we are talking about half a meter difference at ground level for the complete neighbourhood, probably very inconsistent. Building typically don’t like the ground moving that much. So you start investing billions more into the project to make it water tight and still fail to do so.
And after many years you are still not finished and the project seems to be a coup by the car lobby to discredit travel by rail.
Halfing the number of platforms certainly doesn’t help either.
There’s currently a lot of support to finish building the station and keep the old station open anyway. Traffic has increased after all. But they already sold the land the railway switches of the station sit on.
Not really, no. This is the same kind of silver-bullet thinking as self-driving cars, it may feel cool but in reality the best way to improve things are boring and have been known for centuries if not millennia.
Some things absolutely benefit from being underground, like railways in dense urban areas, but for most things it’s just a ton of effort for not much benefit and introducing a bunch of problems (flooding is only going to become more common in the future).What we should be doing is returning to everything being designed for the specific local environment, stop building everything identically all over the world.
Look at traditional construction and you’ll find tons of small features that together make a HUGE difference, a prime example is how hot places had walled backyard gardens with a fountain in the middle, which basically turns the garden into a swamp cooler.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.)
Underground Atlanta is like this, BTW: they didn’t dig below original ground level; they raised the street grid up on viaducts.
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… They also cost a fraction due to no ground disturbance being needed. It’s the same cost as installing power around an industrial plant in cable trays.
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?
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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I wonder the same. Its a big up front cost as digging and drilling is expensive. After that I think it should not be an issue. Ventilation sure would need upkeep but given the milder temps I think savings vs additional ongoing costs should favor less cost at that point. It should be able to be done to not allow water to get in unnecessarily but it might make flooding worse above. Thing is except for deep mines we have not went that far underground. So like unless we did go that deep which would be that much more expensive or have buildings popping up to the surface then you would not have high rises. we would still be growing food on the surface which still takes a lot of land. My guess is it would just be better for people who don’t need to be way out like working or running in a farm live in a high desity urban area and get rid of the wasteful in between spaces.
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
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.
Morlocks
You are not a fan of nature and sunlight, are you?
i am but a humble underground goblin
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.
Also radon
