The Guardian has reported on how the space under cities is getting busier – from transport excavations to billionaire’s mega-basements – and asks ‘how to keep track of what’s down there?’
The Guardian writes:
…In London, a city with 150 years of trenching, digging and boring to its name, the chaos is reaching new depths. According to Newcastle University’s Global Urban Research Unit, more than 4,600 basements have been granted planning permission in the last decade – in just seven of London’s 32 boroughs.
The space under London is now getting so busy that the Ordnance Survey, Future Cities Catapult and the British Geological Survey have joined forces to create a new initiative called Project Iceberg, which will attempt to aggregate cities’ subterranean data. In London it will include transport tunnel information, geological records and maps of 1.5m km (0.9m miles) of underground utilities and four million kilometres of telecommunications lines…
… Subterranean scholar Dr Marilu Melo of the University of Sydney explains that not all countries behave this way. In Mexico, for example, ‘property rights are effectively superficial, they do not extend volumetrically into the earth,’ she says…
… ‘Land prices tend to force private construction downwards, especially where there are planning limits on upward expansion,’ says the Ordnance Survey’s Rollo Home.
… Enter Project Iceberg. The goal is to serve as a framework for data on all of these underground elements, from which a comprehensive visualisation can be built. The resulting map would need to be an all-inclusive spatial database, but how volumetric cartography might look is not yet imagined. It could perhaps be something like Bruno Imbrizi’s real-time 3D tube map that went viral in 2013. Or the framework could feed an augmented reality engine, so that aiming a phone camera at the ground would reveal what is underneath….
