Underground Space for Sustainable Urban Development: Experiences from Urban Underground Metro Constructions in India

Abstract

For thousands of years, underground has provided humans refuge, useful resources, physical support for surface structures, and a place for spiritual or artistic expression. More recently, many urban services have been placed underground. Over this time, humans have rarely considered how underground space can contribute to or be engineered to maximize its contribution to the sustainability of society. Tunneling works and other forms of underground construction have been taken up recently in India as part of urban mass transit operations. The experiences from the various underground metro constructions in India are consolidated along with the technologies used for the tunneling procedure. For this, case studies of the four underground metro constructions in India are presented. The different methods of tunneling and its procedure with their suitability in different situations are also looked into. From the stability point of view, tunneling can be a significant cause of settlement resulting in huge damages to surface structures in densely populated cities. This paper also focuses on the development of computational procedures including DEM and FEM to model the soil stresses and deformations that develop as a consequence of underground construction and underground space creation. Methods are being developed to access the risk of settlement-induced damage of these openings.