Abstract
The recent rapid increase in urbanization has led to the inclusion of underground spaces in urban planning policies. Among the main subsurface resources, a strong interaction between underground infrastructures and groundwater has emerged in many urban areas in the last few decades. Thus, listing the underground infrastructures is necessary to structure an urban conceptual model for groundwater management needs. Starting from a municipal cartography (Open Data), thus making the procedure replicable, a GIS methodology was proposed to gather all the underground infrastructures into an updatable 3D geodatabase (GDB) for the metropolitan city of Milan (Northern Italy). The underground volumes occupied by three categories of infrastructures were included in the GDB: (a) private car parks, (b) public car parks and (c) subway lines and stations. The application of the GDB allowed estimating the volumes lying below groundwater table in four periods, detected as groundwater minimums or maximums from the piezometric trend reconstructions. Due to groundwater rising or local hydrogeological conditions, the shallowest, non-waterproofed underground infrastructures were flooded in some periods considered. This was evaluated in a specific pilot area and qualitatively confirmed by local press and photographic documentation reviews. The methodology emerged as efficient for urban planning, particularly for urban conceptual models and groundwater management plans definition.
Highlights
Cities are intricate areas, where different elements interact
The methodology proposed in the present paper is composed of 4 steps: (1) implementation of a 3D geodatabase for underground infrastructures (3D GDB), including the calculation of the underground volume occupied by infrastructures, (2) groundwater table reconstruction (GW), (3) calculation of infrastructure volumes (VOL) below the water table by combining the results of the previous steps, (4) evaluation of flooding of non-waterproofed infrastructures (FLOOD); the comparison between the results of this evaluation and actual flooding events, testified by local press news and photographic documentations, is used to qualitatively validate the whole methodology
Underground volume occupied by infrastructures, (2) groundwater table reconstruction (GW), (3) calculation of infrastructure volumes (VOL) below the water table by combining the results of the previous steps, (4) evaluation of flooding of non-waterproofed infrastructures (FLOOD); the comparison between the results of this evaluation and actual flooding events, testified by local press InSePwRSsIantn. dJ
Summary
Cities are intricate areas, where different elements interact. In the past, their expansion has generally occurred in the horizontal direction (urban sprawl) [1,2,3]; despite this, underground urbanism was already conceived [4,5,6,7,8]. As a consequence of this rapid urbanization, space hunting is moving towards a three-dimensional trend [10,11]: vertical urban development has been adopted to counteract urban sprawl [1], increasing population density. This urban densification is leading to the building of deeper structures [12,13], which increases the tendency to “go underground” [14,15,16,17,18]. Four subsurface resources are key to pursuing sustainable urban underground development: space for constructions, materials, water and energy [10,19,20,21]
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