So, technically, we can live underground. But will we? Annette Kim, having seen first-hand the effects of Beijing’s housing demands, thinks we might. “If we continue to have this rapid urbanisation and people want to come to the big cities, we’re going to have to, yes.”
She says it also depends on how the space is used: “A lot of these people are going there to sleep at night. It’s not as if it’s my ‘home sweet home’ to hang out in – they enjoy the public spaces above ground to be in the sunlight and air.”
Li Huanqing, a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University who made underground urbanisation the focus of her doctoral thesis, says most cities are not planning underground houses, but 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.
Zhou says this makes sense. “There’s no reason why people cannot live underground,” he says, but “there are a lot of things you can put underground first