Award-winning title on the benefits, challenges and possibilities of urban underground spaces. The book gives a broad overview of the concept of underground space development investigating the issues that are associated with the sustainable development of urban underground space.

This book shows the benefits, and world-class examples of underground space development and how that translates into sustainable urbanisation.

Underground Spaces Unveiled

• approaches all aspects of urban underground space and brings together both past and present insights
• includes worldwide case studies from the perspectives or a civil engineer and an urban planner, offering a multi-faceted approach to the considerations of underground space use
• places urban underground space within the context of climate change, city resilience and rapid urbanisation
• discusses the various claims to the subsurface including the use for space versus the use for energy.

Written by an engineer and an urban planner ensuring a balanced view and wide appeal, the book is intended for civil engineers, urban planners, urban designers and architects as well as anyone involved with the future of urban development.

Book Reviews

With their book Underground Spaces Unveiled, Han Admiraal and Antonia Cornaro convey their fascination about the urban underground with all its historical and current uses and share the experience they gathered in many years of active engagement in the field. Often written in the first person and building on selected references, the book is a personal account of the role that the urban underground plays, could play, or should play in finding solutions to what drives the world and its cities – now and in the future. 

The authors make a compelling case for consideration of the underground in spatial analyses and planning of cities. Based on case studies from all over the world, they illustrate how this consideration could help cities to become more resilient, deal with challenges like climate change and making cities more liveable for growing populations, while pointing out the legal and organizational obstacles in achieving this.

Loretta von der Tann, University College London 

In a ground breaking new book “Underground Spaces Unveiled: Planning and creating the cities of the future” urban planner Antonia Cornaro (Amberg Engineering, Switzerland) and civil engineer Han Admiraal (Enprodes, Netherlands), challenge the common perception that the development of underground space is only for cities that have a scarcity of land. (...)
The book looks at how policies on sustainable development and urban resilience need to include the urban underground space. At the same time, it recognises that this requires urban planners, geologists and engineers to work together to unlock the knowledge to take the right decisions. Unplanned exploitation of underground space has in many cases led to a subsurface chaos with little room for future expansion, which is now adversely affecting the needs cities have for optimising their spatial development. Many cities however have never looked below the surface for future expansion and this is where the ideas and concepts discussed in the book show real potential. (...) The book provides a unique insight into a journey the authors have undertaken as co-chairs of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association’s Committee on Underground Space (ITACUS). The journey focussed on the central question how to optimally integrate the underground space into the urban fabric and how to make it part of the issues urban planners, engineers, architects, designers and others dealing with the built environment need to consider. In the authors’ vision urban integration is required to combine uses to avoid evermore space claims made by mono-use buildings and infrastructures. Why is it that mass rapid transport systems only transport people and lay dormant at night? What role could they play in urban logistics? Unveiling underground space is about a philosophy on future urban development that is inclusive and as such takes into account what the underground space has to offer in all its richness and variety.

Tunnel Magazine

Written by Han Admiraal and Antonia Cornaro - an enlightened engineer and a visionary urban planner respectively - the chapters of the book provide a balanced view with wide appeal intended for civil engineers, urban planners, urban designers and architects as well as policy makers and anyone involved with, or interested in the future of urban development and the built environment. Documenting the use of underground space from ancient times, through existing underground developments, to the plans for potential integration of subsurface space for cities across the globe, to the visions of disrupters for futuristic transportation models and habitation below the surface on Earth, on the Moon, on Mars, the book reveals the benefits, the challenges, and the possibilities of a spatial dimension that is far from understood in its entirety. It places urban underground space development within the timely context of rapid urbanisation, climate change, and urban resilience and discusses the various claims to the subsurface, including the legal aspects and the potential for value capturing. 
The book is a must read for all those fascinated by the future of human habitation, about this era of transition in which human intervention is influencing the Earth’s natural systems, about the new balance that must be found between nature and humanity, about new paradigms that question the past and will shape the future. True to its title, the authors help lift the veil of ignorance that covers general attitudes towards the value of the underutilized underground space.

Tunnel Talk 

Penned by Han Admiraal and Antonia Cornaro, the work is a broad overview of the concept of underground space development investigating the issues that are associated with the sustainable development of urban underground space. 

Admiraal said of the book, “It must be one of the biggest adventures that Antonia and I have undertaken in our work both for ITACUS and Amberg/Enprodes. I think we've succeeded in writing a book that will create a greater awareness on urban underground spaces. We talk about unveiling underground space not only because we hope the book will do that, but more importantly that the urban planners who are key to how our cities are planned and created will take up the challenge."

Tunnels and Tunnelling