Abstract
The booming of three-dimensional (3D) land use brings a change of the connotation of land rights, which will expand “flat” 2D land legislation with 3D land legislation. The legal issues of urban underground space for 3D objects in large cities around the world have been attracting more and more attention. A supportive legal framework is crucial for underground space utilization in a country. This paper analyzes the present 173 representative laws and regulations of urban underground space utilization and management of China from 1998 to 2018, and attempts to interpret the current laws and regulations of underground space from four aspects; by quantity, spatial distribution, legislative force and content. The result shows that poor legal framework of urban underground space in China, including low-level of legislative force, disunity of local legislation standard and absence of special statutes and regulations, are the main reasons causing ownership disputation, registration chaos, as well as no unanimous judicial practice. To address these issues, the paper refers to a case study for underground space legal framework in Japan and aims to form a set of top-down unified legal framework, including basic law, special statutes and regulations, as well as supplementary policies and documents of urban underground space, and proposes that the underground space planning should be incorporated as one essential portion of the master planning in China. By studying the legal system of underground space in Japan and China, this study may offer better insight for those conducting UUS legal framework research as well as serve as reference for countries with similar legal issues.
Highlights
The increased stress on urban sprawl and land use will lead to the acceleration of three-dimensional (3D) utilization of land
When changing land use spatially from horizontal to vertical, it changes the connotation of land rights, which creates a need for redesigning the legal framework, bringing flat (2D) property rights legislation into three-dimensional (3D) property rights legislation [6,7]
By studying the legal system of underground space in Japan and China, this paper aims to determine what obstacles existing laws and regulations entail to UUS utilization and concludes with key points to offer those conducting UUS legal framework research to support the UUS utilization and planning support, as well as reference for countries with similar legal issues
Summary
The increased stress on urban sprawl and land use will lead to the acceleration of three-dimensional (3D) utilization of land. Going downwards, the concept of earthscrapers has appeared, which indicates that urban underground space (hereinafter referred to as UUS) utilization will become an inevitable requirement of the low-carbon, livable city under the implementation of sustainability and resilience ideas [2,3,4]. With focus shifting from 2D to 3D property legislation, the concept of 3D property rights and its legal framework has been set up successively in some countries, for example the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, and Korea. The legal reform of 3D property rights is imperative for various countries around the world, because legal ambiguity cannot meet the increasing use of multi-storied developments and leave a latent trouble for future tenure security. More and more of the literature pays attention to the legal issues of 3D property rights, so far there is not much research that has analyzed laws and regulations of UUS in the form of a hierarchical legal framework
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