Underground space for Sustainable Urban Development: Singapore 2004

The ITA Open Session for 2004 was held in plenary session on Tuesday morning, May 25, 2004. The session was chaired by the President of TUCSS, Rajan Krishnan, and ITA President, Andre Assis. Five presentations were made on the subject of Underground Space for Sustainable Urban Development. Presenters were from the USA, UK, Singapore, France and Korea (In-Keun Lee: Text / Slides).

Harvey Parker, USA, began the session with a paper describing sustainable development and the substantial work ITA has done in the field including ITA’s recent proposals to the United Nations to help reduce poverty by earth-sheltered structures and food storage underground. He then concluded that the rapid increase in the number and size of megacities will present challenge and many opportunities to the underground industry. ( Text / Slides)

Rodney Craig, UK, presented the results of the work of ITA Working Group 15, Tunnelling and the Environment, has been doing on the environment and sustainable development. He described the nature of the work being done by the working group and presented several case histories worldwide where tunnelling was used to improve or preserve the environment. ( Text / Slides)

Jean-Paul Godard, France, made a very colorful presentation on Why Go Underground. This illustrated the results of ITA’s work on subsurface planning and other working groups. He also presented ideas on how planners and our industry can get more benefits from underground space. ( Text / Slides)

Ms. Sushma Goh, Singapore, made a very interesting and challenging presentation on humanizing underground space which was fully illustrated by diagrams and photographs of good examples of underground space architecture. She challenged our industry to always consider the human aspects of our industry. ( Slides)