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Introduction

Looking at recent urban developments in the Randstad Holland [1], it appears as though like urban sprawl has become the source of striking new barriers in the daily lives of its citizens: increasing distances in space and time between home, work, services, friends and family, the dependence on the automobile as a single mode of transport, spatial fragmentation caused by large-scale infrastructure and the increasing congestion of the road system, hampering access to vital economic urban areas.

This paper reviews some of the points dealing with the contribution underground building can make by overcoming these contemporary barriers.

Following a wait-and-see policy towards any further urban sprawl, symptom control will probably gain the upper hand. Where bottlenecks appear, society will turn to engineering, seeking to find a way out by the use of innovative methods of underground building. More or less, this is the current situation that can be observed in the Netherlands. The use of underground space is thereby mainly limited to the field of infrastructure, containing the visual, audible and spatial side-effects of the increasing flow of traffic through the open spaces around and between the cities that make up the Randstad.

However, if the problems of urban sprawl are to be solved at their root, cities will have stop spilling over into the countryside by trying to keep up with the socio-economic demand for built-up space within their existing envelope. By then the use of underground space will have to cover a much wider range of applications, aimed at increased compactness and density of the existing built-up areas, while at the same time preserving spatial and living qualities within the transformation process.

This second, more strategic, perspective for the use of underground space is the main focus of this paper.






[1] - The metropolitan areas of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht together are often reffered to as the `Randstad', or in the words of Peter Hall: the Green Heart Metropolis.