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Building the case for burying the infrastructure
Engineer, Ming Lu - Photo by SINTEF
WESTERN Australia’s new Government Architect, Steve Woodland, has been talking of ways to make a walk through Perth more pleasurable - such as covering the freeway with a landbridge to link the CBD to King’s Park.
A similar “cut and cover” concept was investigated in Dallas where consultants calculated the $US70 million project would generate $US312.7 million in economic benefit - plus push up local property values by $US91.1 million. (TransScan October 2006 p13)
If the returns are that great, how much of a city’s vital infrastructure could be “buried” to make the urban environment more attractive? One city that is actively investigating such a proposition (although not entirely for aesthetics) is Singapore.
In a country where surface space is already at a premium, city planners are now begining to think that ever-soaring high-rise may not be the solution. To test the proposition, the Singapore Government has ordered a feasibility study into putting key elements of the country’s infrastructure and manufacturing underground. Norway’s SINTEF Building Research organisation has been appointed to help develop a master plan. (The research organisation claims more than 50 years engineering experience in tunnel construction, including underground storage “halls” for oil and gas, hydropower projects, swimming pools and underground sports areas.)
According to SINTEF government departments in Singapore have already been asked to identify what could go underground and so far the list includes water treatment plants, reservoirs, airport logistics, shipping container storage, and microchip manufacturing.
“If these facilities are built, the process will involve digging shafts, boring access tunnels and building huge caverns,” says SINTEF’s chief scientist, Ming Lu. “We are talking about very large areas all over the island. It’s extremely interesting for us to contribute to a job like this, since we are talking here about the first project of such dimensions anywhere in the world.”
He says Helsinki was looking at a smaller scheme but there the motivation was not lack of space but a desire to move the city’s “unaesthetic or noisy elements” of infrastructure away from the surface. In Singapore, the 693km2 island is simply running out of land. For example, as one of the world’s shipping hubs, storing 20ft and 40ft containers underground would release many square kilometres of surface space.
