THE UPSIDE TO GOING UNDER

BY VIVIAN WARBY

Could subterranean cities that are built beneath those we live in help prevent mass climate migration and allow humans to adapt to the environment? Yes, say some experts.

BOBBY B takes his evening supper alone in his 42m² home.The temperature inside is a comfortable 23°C – the same as it is beyond his home’s walls.

His dinner comes from the hydroponic plant close by, and he will later meet his friends for a drink in one of the town’s drinking pods.

It’s been years since Bobby ventured out of his town to “that other place” – the one above ground where his grandparents were born. These days the temperature above ground is way in excess of 70°C and vast tracts of land are uninhabitable.

The underground city – Rucidifus – in which Bobby lives is the norm in the year 2100.

His story could well be part of a cli-fi book – a new literary genre based on climate fiction – in which Bobby and billions of future climate refugees would live in underground cities as part of their attempt to find ways to adapt to dramatic climate change.

Coober Pedy - an underground town in the Australian outback built to avoid soaring temperatures - looks like a martian wasteland when you approach it, but underground its alive with thousands of people.

Cli-fi is in part a dystopian (and if you’re keen on some hope – utopian) fiction take on what could happen if extreme weather conditions are not prevented.

But it is also not as far-fetched as we might hope.

Recently, the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted that earth’s atmosphere and the seas are warming at rates unprecedented in human history and that some consequences are irrevocable.

London is one of the cities developing underground spaces to alleviate population and environmental pressures.

Even if we put in a big planetary effort to stop the worst impacts of climate change, some currently inhabitable parts of the world could gradually become so hot that people would be unable to live there.

Some believe this IPCC report will be the last to be published while we still have a chance of averting the worst of climate breakdown.

Bobby’s underground life could, on one hand, be what the future might indeed look like if we do nothing to stop CO² emissions and runaway climate change.

On the other hand, underground cities, as one alternative of adapting habitats to deal with extreme weather conditions and overcrowding, are already getting attention from governments and planners.

Subterranean cities are not new and date back to 1800BC when – in the Cappadocia region of modern-day Turkey which was constantly being hit by extreme weather and the threat of war – people dug an entire city, Derinkuyu, in which to live.

More recently in 2010, Helsinki, Finland, took the subterranean approach. The local authority approved an Underground Master Plan which was completed in 2019 and which considers the underground as a part of the city itself. It covers the city’s entire 214km² – combining energy conservation and shelter from the long, cold winters, among other things.

Many other cities around the world, such as in Paris, Moscow, Montreal, London, Singapore and Beijing, are developing underground spaces to alleviate population and environmental pressures.

One of the most famous underground towns is the opal-mining town of Coober Pedy – meaning “white man’s hole” in a local Aboriginal language – in South Australia, founded in 1915.

It has below-ground homes in which a large portion of its residents live. And these trenches and caves were built so people could escape the unbearable desert heat that can reach up to 50°C.

Futurist Belinda Silbert believes Coober Pedy is the perfect synthesis the world requires for a sustainable future.

“They are using tech to live off the grid and also utilising nature and working with what the environment gave them instead of adapting the environment to themselves.”

This, she says, will become important for the future.

Some experts say that as soon as 2069 – a mere 47 years away (so when children born this year are middle aged) – underground cities could have complete self-contained travel and ecosystems where hydroponic farming systems with artificial light are used to grow the city’s own food supply. In London this is already, in part, a reality.

A former World War II air raid shelter beneath Clapham Common is the world’s first underground farm, hydroponically growing salad rocket, garlic chives, wasabi mustard, fennel, pink stem radish and purple radish which it sells to big retail stores.

Li Huanqing, a research fellow at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, who made underground urbanisation the focus of her doctoral thesis, says most cities are planning multifunctional underground spaces that will be occupied by shopping malls and public thoroughfares to free up more surface land for housing, green space and recreation.

So, while It’s technically possible to build underground living spaces for people, “there are a lot of things you can put underground first”, says Huanqing.

The move underground for living space will bring up a number of questions too, the main one being who actually owns the land below the surface – the state or private individuals?

And will it become the reserve of rich people who are already building doomsday bunkers underground to be safe from an apocalypse scenario, or will it be an equitable space for all to live in?

Registered professional urban and regional planner Pravin Amar says some cities, including some in South Africa, already have people living underground informally, not a result of planning but as a result of planning failure. Like informal housing on the surface, underground informal housing comes with its own set of problems, including overcrowding in badly ventilated areas.

Amar says if underground cities were ever to be viable in future, the prospect would need government buy-in.

“For now, governments in some parts around the world are not even getting the basics of planning on the ground right, how are they going to get it right underground where it is more sensitive and complicated?”

Another question is: Will people be willing to live underground? Severe claustrophobics – thought to be about 7% of the world’s population – will take a lot of convincing.

And the rest of us? Maybe not right now but, says Silbert, certainly the children being born today will be able to adapt to it.

“We will see the rise of a new generation unlike anything else even conceived of who will accept change at a more rapid rate than our generation. And they will have a strong awareness that we will face extinction unless we take drastic measures.”

She adds: “If technology and culture can support us in space, they could definitely support us inside our own planet.”

Inside Coober Pedy, the underground town