New urban environmental and city spaces: optimizing the use of underground resources

This reflection, based on a research carried out at the University of Pavia is intended towards examining the conditions and project results connected with underground architecture, as works that have a meaningful relationship with the context in which they have been inserted. Constructing below the ground has exigencies linked to the density of the city and lack of space. It also presents an opportunity to protect and conserve the landscape and could point towards architecture optimize the use of underground energy resources on an urban scale. Historically, architecture has many examples of underground cities, Western society, right from the myth of Atlantis and Leonardo da Vinci's vision of a multi-levelled city has first imagined and then constructed subterranean tracts for infrastructure, public and commercial spaces, service spaces. Throughout a new 'alliance' with the earth and therefore with nature, at the same time, experience takes us back to history through the idea of a stratified city that can handle the complexities and challenges of contemporary living. Parallel to this, sensitisation to ecological themes permits the idea of urban spaces below the ground that is in terms of energy use and landscape, in which the architecture and the water underground systems becomes the medium of this cultural transformation.