Urban planner Antonia Cornaro works in Zurich and has written a book on the use of underground spaces. “The space below ground will become even more important for cities in the future if we don’t want to overuse the space above ground,” she is quoted in an article in the Swiss daily newspaper the Tages-Anzeiger. The article explores different ways of using underground space.
It is already common knowledge that underground spaces can be used for tunnels and sewers, but there are several projects that are exploring new ways of using the ground beneath cities. These include the Cargo Sous Terrain freight metro planned in Switzerland and the Hyperloop project by Tesla boss Elon Musk, which envisages magnetic trains travelling through a tube. Projects in Montreal and Helsinki have developed “entire shopping streets” underground protected from the weather, and in Singapore a working space called Science City will be built underground for 4,000 scientists.
Factories, warehouses, restaurants and data centers are other ways that underground spaces are being used. “And in Paris, underground car parks that are empty due to a lack of city traffic are being used as greenhouses,” according to the article. It also points out the important role played by Swiss scientists in this urban development. Systems, materials and machines can be tested under real conditions in the Hagerback test facility in Flums in the canton of St. Gallen, which was recently used to test various details for Alpine tunnels.
Experiments are also currently being carried out there on underground plantations, which could be used in the future to provide fruit and vegetables to urban populations. When Antonia Cornaro asked her students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) what they think of this, she found that “over 80% are in favor of such cultivation systems and said that they would have no problems eating these vegetables.”
