The following article my wife brought to me this morning while I was eating breakfast because she thought it was interesting. I had no idea what to make of a title like this. The picture accompanying it showed a city with an upside down pyramid structure going from the ground level downward into the ground which I thought was interesting. It appears that cities are starting to realize that parks and other types of non-heated structures can be built underground that don't have to be heated or cooled because no snow, rain, or heat reaches there so the temperature generally stays around 60 degrees plus or minus there year around most places on earth. This greatly decreases power consumption for people there in underground parks and other types of places being developed underground by cities worldwide. Since one of the ways for people to survive on earth is to live underground to reduce the energy needed for heating and cooling, this type of thing is beginning in cities but likely will slowly spread out to the countryside over time.
Begin quote from page 18 of the December 13th 2013 Smithsonian magazine:
"Twenty feet under Delancy Street in Manhattan is a trolley terminal that hasn't been used in 65 years--a ghostly space of cobble--stones, abandoned tracks and columns supporting vaulted ceilings. An ideal place for the city to store, say, old filing cabinets. Yet when architect James Ramsey saw it, he imagined a park with paths, benches and trees. A park that could be used in any weather, because it gets no rain. That it also gets no sunlight is a handicap, but not one he couldn't overcome.
If the 20th Century belongs to the skyscraper, argues Daniel Barasch, who is working with Ramsey to build New York's--and possibly the world's--first underground park, then the frontier of architecture in the 21st is in the basement.
There are advantages to underground construction, not all of them obvious, says Eduardo de Mulder, a Dutch geologist. Although excavation is expensive and technically challenging in places like the Netherlands with a high water table, underground space is cheaper to maintain-- there are no windows to wash, no roof or facade exposed to the weather. The energy cost of lighting is more than offset by savings on heating and cooling in the relatively constant below-ground temperature. Cities with harsh winters or blazing summers have been at the forefront of the building-down trend. Underground real estate in crowded Shanghai and Beijing, expanding at around 10 percent a year since the turn of the century, is projected to reach 34 square miles in the capital by 2020. Helsinki's master plan calls for significantly expanding its tunnels and more than 400 underground facilities, which includes a seawater-cooled data center. end quote from page 18 from the December 2013 Smithsonian.
To read the rest of the article go to the Smithsonian quoted above in a physical paper magazine or online when it is available there.
I think this trend will tend to develop new engineering techniques for raising trees and plants underground as well as how to keep people interested in being underground more of the day by paintings, artwork, plants and other organic and inorganic structures etc. This likely is the wave of the future especially above 216 feet in altitude on the coasts of all nations on earth who are near any ocean. Because it is expected within 5000 years that all connected oceans will be 216 feet higher than they are now.
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