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.
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.
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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You are not a fan of nature and sunlight, are you?
i am but a humble underground goblin
Also radon
Scarcity of livable land isn’t exactly an issue at this point in time to heavily warrant it.
A lot of places already have underground malls, particularly those connected to the subway system. Many roads go underground too, especially when there’s a large mountain, ocean, lake, etc. in the way.
But yes, most places are still above ground, as for one, it isn’t cost effective to dig out all of the dirt required to create the large underground chambers, the supports needed to prevent collapse, etc. Many tunnels take years or even decades to become finished, an entire city of ground-dwelling people would take ages to dig out!
Aside from being expensive (in both money and time), there’s a few practical reasons why this isn’t the best idea. You wouldn’t get sunlight, so you would need to power artificial lighting fixtures for all the different parts of the area. You could probably save power by creating artificial nights, but still, it would be a monumental task to find enough energy to sustain something like this. Solar panels become out of the question for the most part*, and depending on where you are, you would need good A/C as well, since it can get hot when you’re underground, and that consumes additional power. Hydropower could be used, but with underground sources of water rather than rivers. Geothermal energy might become more mainstream as well, which would be kind of cool!
You pointed another big problem, flooding. This would be a large risk, particularly if you live in an area with lots of aquifers (sources of water that are underground) or with lots of permeable soil and rock (so rain easily seeps through the ground), flooding will be a significant issue to tackle. Earthquakes might exacerbate the issue as well, and the shaking of the quakes could also be a problem for the supports preventing the chambers and tunnels from collapsing, like how foundations of our aboveground buildings need to be strengthened. Maybe some sort of moving dampener could be used, like those in tall skyscrapers?
*Theoretically, you could have somebody on the surface maintain the solar panels the cover the Earth, but then you need to build all the infrastructure for somebody to move and live on the surface, in which case you might as well not have everybody live underground. Maybe that could be automated with robots, but that’s not feasible with current technology.
I also read about a psychological study of living underground reported by DW News, and the sense of time lengthens when you’re in the dark caves for a long period of time. Really interesting I think! This kind of thing would mess with our Circadian rhythm
You wouldn’t get sunlight
Mad skylights, my dude.
it can get hot when you’re underground
It is almost universally known that being underground is cooler.
flooding will be a significant issue to tackle. Earthquakes might exacerbate the issue as well
Basements typically have sump pumps, and drainage. We build buildings that can withstand earthquakes, why couldn’t the structure of the underground dwelling be similarly strengthened?
you need to build all the infrastructure for somebody to move and live on the surface
Bro we already built that.
It’s cooler underground because it’s well insulated. That also means it’s incredibly difficult to get rid of any waste heat. With artificial lighting, electronics, hell even just people moving around, that’s a ton of heat being out that needs to go somewhere. Not to mention the amount of ventilation that would be required just to have breathable air. Are you imagining people driving around on underground roads?
Mad skylights, my dude.
But then you wouldn’t get the protection from the elements being underground gives you, you would just be more vulnerable to flooding by creating a deep valley. Unless you mean placing glass over the entire thing, but that would be very expensive, it would be very heavy (so needs to have even stronger supports), and would need to be cleaned by somebody on the surface.
It is almost universally known that being underground is cooler.
It depends on where you are. In very sunny places, yes, it would be cooler. However, when you are deep underground, it can get very hot as well! Many construction projects involving digging out deep tunnels and holes have been cancelled because it became too hot for the workers and machines to operate!
why couldn’t the structure of the underground dwelling be similarly strengthened [for earthquakes]?
Yes, you would, I mentioned this point needed to be considered. It’s a larger consideration when you’re underground, as there needs to be additional supports to prevent the chamber and tunnels from collapsing (you might have seen the braces of those mining tunnels, think those but on a much larger scale)
Bro we already built that.
But with the solar panels idea (or your skylights w/ glass), you can’t really use the current infrastructure. You would need special roads, homes, etc. that go around them. Also, I would assume that less urbanised areas would need more development to be able to manage an array of solar panels or glass skylights.
Also, I treated this question more like what if humans never built massive cities above ground and we became underground dwellers (perhaps sometime after heavy construction equipment catched on),
Easier to build the house and cover it with soil and vegetation instead of digging down. The front door and windows can face south to take advantage of passive solar heating in the winter.
I think one of the best uses of “underground” is to run piping in a large circuit around the property. I read in a passive solar book that 4 feet underground it’s about 4C on average world-wide.
Summer: Warm air goes in from the living space, travels along a couple hundred feet of pipe, cool air comes back into the house. I’m not sure if the air would be 4C but should save a lot of electricity.
Winter: Same system but the air pumped into the house should be much warmer than what’s above ground. Usually, the coldest days are sunny so passive solar designs can warm a house to a comfortable level.
Better option is to run a heat pump into that underground loop. You really don’t want underground air getting into your house, and a heat pump will let you cool or warm the air using that same underground loop.
I was thinking of a closed loop system not pumping moldy humid air into a house.
Your idea isn’t bad but does need a space big enough for a technician to service the external unit. Also, the external part of a heat pump isn’t supposed to be enclosed. Not sure if a tunnel counts as enclosed or not.
Ground loop heat pumps are already a thing.
As for maintaining the unit, you just have a service panel you can remove to access it.
Always good to learn something new, thanks.
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.
Do you want Morlocks and Eloi? Because that’s how you get Morlocks and Eloi
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.
I’ve always wanted this. Underground cities would be so dope but everyone wants a 40x40 of domestic grass to do nothing with.
If we all lived underground, there would be no sound! Have you not heard Jamiroquai?
