Comment

I'm digging plans to develop capital's underground space

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-17 08:09

I've been shuttling back and forth between my apartment and my office for the past several weeks and not doing a whole lot else, with this cold weather making a misery out of every minute spent outdoors.

And I'm bundling up to make the short commute on my bicycle, with gloves, a scarf, a hat beneath my furry hood, thermal underwear and lord knows what else.

Once at home or at work, I tend to hunker down.

Finally, claustrophobia caught up with me and I turned my back on another day indoors to brave a walk in the park.

I love to stretch my legs and, in the summer, walk most nights after I get home from work for an hour or so, even if I get home at 10 pm.

It was good to get outdoors again and start to pound my way around the big frozen lake at Olympic Forest Park and, for a while there, I was enjoying it.

But, after being blasted with a few salvos of Arctic air that forced its way through all my layers of clothing and that exploded down my throat and took my breath away, it felt like the first twinges of hypothermia were setting in and, fearing I had minutes left to live, I turned tail and fled out of the park, turning my back on its lovely deserted, desolated walkways, and bolted back to the safety of the subway station.

Maybe, I became brave a week or two early.

Yes, it's been said before but it bears saying again - this is a cold city when it wants to be.

Which is why I read with great interest about Beijing's plans to do its developing in a downward direction.

Surely, that has got to be a win-win situation that will work "on a number of levels", with plenty of room down there to grow and with the prospect of a future subterranean Beijing forming in which we might be able to walk and explore away from the biting cold wind that finds its way through all those layers of clothing, no matter how hard you try to keep it out, but that surely cannot find us if we hide underground.

For those who missed it, METRO reported on Jan 13 that several of the city's districts are planning to build massive underground developments in the years to come.

The below-ground building boom is mainly to do with the fact that, above-ground, the city is getting pretty crowded. Chaoyang, Xicheng, Dongcheng and Tongzhou have all said they're going underground.

Xicheng hopes to develop six projects with major underground components and, of the 6 million new square meters being built on Financial Street, 1 million of them will be below deck.

Chaoyang is championing projects with as many as five floors below ground. And Dongcheng hopes to complete a 100,000-sq-m parking lot under Qianmen Street with space for 3,500 cars. There is even a plan for a new section of ring road to dip below the surface.

But the mother of all subterranean areas is slated for Tongzhou district. Its forward-thinking planners are calling for 2.1 million sq m of underground space beneath the 16-sq-km Tongzhou New City that is being developed there.

Tongzhou plans to build underground roads and walkways and even a tunnel beneath the Tongzhou Grand Canal.

I love the ideas because they are practical and exactly what a fast-growing city with a hunger for space like ours needs.

By putting new offices, malls and parking lots under ground, we stand a chance of sparing some of the beautiful threatened hutong and other vulnerable areas on the surface from redevelopment. And with people living and working both underground and above ground, the capital will be able to increase its population without increasing the size of its footprint, sparing farmland outside the urban area from being built upon.

But I'm betting one of the best things of all will be the freedom we will all have in the future to move around away from the cold of the winter and the oppressive heat of the summer in a climate controlled world.

Hopefully, they'll put not only shops and offices and walkways and roads down there but some amenities as well such as parks and playgrounds.

Heck, if they do this thing right and connect all the underground areas up with one another, it's even possible that some people will stay down there the majority of the time, only popping up to the surface to enjoy the easygoing weather of April and October.