Chapter 7: Building for people – valued underground spaces

The urbanist William Whyte (1988) was highly critical when it came to underground spaces:

What Whyte feared was, as he called it, the ‘dullifcation’ of the street. In his view, and that of Jane Jacobs, the street ‘is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the center. It is the primary place’ (Whyte, 1988). According to him, any actions that take pedestrians from the street will sentence the streets of a city to disuse, to become dull, and, with that, the city will become dull.

When it comes to underground space, the shape of the spaces is very much determined by local geology. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, Hong Kong and, to a large extent, Singapore all share a solid rock geology, allowing them to create human-made caverns of vast dimensions. When boring tunnels through relatively soft soils, as in the Netherlands, the bigger the tunnel-boring machine, the costlier the project. This simple factor then drives engineers to look at the ‘envelope of space’ that the project requires, often determined by the size of the carriages that have to pass through the system. The size of the tunnel, together with the circular shape, seems to have historically determined the size and shape of the platforms and the station corridors, as we can see from metro systems worldwide. Effciency in engineering and construction, but also in transiting people as quickly from the surface to the train and vice versa, determine the shape and layout of underground stations (Admiraal and Cornaro, 2017).