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.
And what, just break our treaty with the dwarves and end a peace that has lasted a thousand years?? We get the top 10 feet, they get everything deeper. I won’t go to war in the dark over a housing shortage we created ourselves through greed.
I’d go bury a shipping container in the woods somewhere tomorrow if I had the means.
Have you seen 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple? The main doctor character has a similar living arrangement.
I’ll check it out.
OP, have you ever planted a bush? After a rain?
Digging. Is. Hard.
It’s expensive.
And stuff down there gets wet.
Also, studies have shown that “enclosed” living is psychologically problematic, at least for a majority of people. This is why rooms where people live/work for extended periods have windows, and why above-ground buildings always have copious exterior walls for them, even when a “cube” would be more space efficient.
Also, having grown up in tornado alley myself, tornadoes aren’t as big a deal as you think. Their area of impact is very small; odds are, you’ll never get hit by one. I’ve never even seen one up close.
Hurricanes. Now those are a big deal. I’ve seen 2 Cat 4s, and some smaller ones, real close. Live in the tropics, and it’s not a matter of if, but when they will come raging by, and living underground is the absolute worst possible scenario (as the biggest danger with them is flooding).
Huh, I guess I’ve been lucky only lived in tornado alley for 15-20 years, and in just a 7 year span I saw multiple F-0 to F-1s, what I’m pretty sure was an F-3, and a confirmed F-4. I’d rather deal with earthquakes and high housing costs, than ever see one of those terrors again. Thankfully no where I lived got hit directly, as you said their impact is small, but terrifying for a couple mile radius.
Do you want to live underground?
To be honest the natural temperature control would do wonders for my utility bill LOL
Who’s gonna live, in all those cities underground? https://youtu.be/ZdPOsk4Aa8Q (great tune)
I can think of a lot of people I’d like to see underground.
Don’t forget fires as a hazard. When you’re underground, there are fewer windows to jump out of
Or mold/air quality. When you’re underground there are fewer windows to open
Plus more people would be S.A.D. There you’re underground there are fewer windows to let sun in
I yearn to live in the mines.
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.
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
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?
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’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?
Afaik you build buildings on raised foundations and the viaduct decks span the gap between buildings creating a raised “ground floor” above the actual dirt. They eventually do wear out given enough loading cycles accumulating fatigue in the metal reinforcement, but can last a hell of a long time if you keep heavy vehicles off of them.
In an ideal world the viaduct top is for pedestrians or bicycles only, and there’s enough space underneath for logistics to supply businesses from loading docks at their basement. Overhead LRTs would be a natural pair with viaducts since you can just build the LRT piers to put their load path into the viaduct columns (which you also engineer to be larger.) that way you can separate all traffic types by verticality instead of all sharing the same grade.
The big benefit there is the viaduct deck doesn’t fatigue hardly at all. Maybe emergency vehicles allowed up on the deck? Otherwise it’s just bicycles or pedestrian traffic.
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.
It’s cold because it has a large thermal mass and nothing heating it up.
Human civilization produces a lot of heat. The thermal mass means it might take years or decades to reach its heat equilibrium. But that equilibrium will be excruciatingly hot.
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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