Abstract
In the process of urban growth, the underground is often only addressed once all surface alternatives have been exhausted. Experience shows that this can lead to unforeseen conflicts (e.g., subsidence, groundwater pollution) and to lost opportunities (e.g., combined geothermal systems and building foundations or recycling of excavation materials). One challenge is how the underground potentials are assessed by urban actors; data collection, analysis and visualization for the different resources are often conducted in separate disciplinary corners and administrative divisions. This paper presents a mapping method developed within the Deep City project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and its application to San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is interesting in its lack of major underground infrastructure and its few means and political support for short-term underground development. We will specifically look at the production of a series of interaction maps, an original mapping strategy that is complementary to the resource potential maps we have produced in prior work. After situating this research within larger theoretical and philosophical questions, we will show how mapping the combined potentiality of underground resources can serve as a compass for future interdisciplinary discussions that address the urban underground as a source of opportunity, rather than as an afterthought.
Highlights
Mapping the Urban UndergroundCartographical representations of the city are typically founded on the ground plane
The interest in incorporating underground space into strategies to increase urban density or preserve public spaces means that we have focused on mostly those types of activities that find themselves in the urban subsurface, notably parking and commercial activities
That paper evaluated the separate resource potentials using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and aggregated them according to a scenario of underground space development using fuzzy qualifiers to account for different attitudes towards risk, similar to the work by Zhao and colleagues [26]
Summary
Cartographical representations of the city are typically founded on the ground plane. The rationalization of decision-making processes has led to disciplinary divisions in the collection, visualization and analysis of data [13] Within this paradigm, urbanization tends to first formulate needs and problems and only later examines the potential of resources to meet or solve them [14]. The alternative paradigm, of resources to needs, which the Deep City project is advocating, does not presume a global balance as a point of departure or return This precludes thinking in terms of the shortest and least path of resistance for underground resources in the evaluation of their potential in diagnostic phases. They have both imported information that has contributed to their evolution and encode a certain amount of possibility that is latent, but that can be deciphered intuitively [32,33] and mathematically [30,31]
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