Sub-City Tunnelling

Mon, 12 May 2003 17:46:00 -0400
/technology

Here’s something from last month’s Wired that I missed. The emergence of tunnelling technologies that appear to make underground suburbs (underburbs?) economically inevitable.

You won’t hear much talk of it outside of specialized engineering circles, but we’re at a tipping point. The cost to burrow down is dropping, while the price (and hassle) of erecting a skyscraper in a dense urban area just keeps rising. The breakthrough comes thanks to tunneling technologies that are now being used on huge transportation projects, like Boston’s Big Dig and Moscow’s Lefortovo highway tunnel project. Over the next 10 years these techniques will be used to hollow out space beneath the world’s great cities.