Choose a limited space and state who would use it, for how long and for what purpose.
500 Queens / Subterranean City Building
Subterranean City Building
Break the underground-city vision into inspectable systems, human needs and decisions that can be tested.
Follow the connections. Choose your direction.
The need worth working on.
An underground settlement would depend on geology, structure, air, water, power, access and a life people actually want. These systems cannot be made credible by drawing a large city all at once. A useful enterprise begins with a specific component or planning question and treats human experience as seriously as engineering.
What the enterprise could offer.
Develop a digital systems model and a full-size surface mock-up of one underground-like space. Examine a workshop, service corridor or shared room before making claims about habitation. Link the model to maintenance access, evacuation, everyday comfort and the consequences of losing a supporting service.
People to build with
- Infrastructure and building researchers
- Resilience planners
- Human-factors and access designers
One space and its supporting services
Map every dependency, including ventilation, water, power, waste, communications and exit routes.
Build a surface mock-up or digital walk-through for access and maintenance review.
Run a service-failure exercise and publish the conditions that would make the concept unacceptable.
The first result
A dependency model, reviewed spatial brief and next-test programme for one component.
What needs to be demonstrated.
Speculative concept
The starting evidence
The source includes autonomously built resilient cities as a long-term ambition. No inhabited underground city design is validated here.
The open question
Whether the proposed setting can provide an acceptable life and maintainable services at a defensible cost.
The next measurement
Unresolved dependencies, maintenance task access and performance of the chosen component test.
Build the means to deliver.
Useful capabilities and resources
- Geotechnical and building expertise
- Human-factors and accessibility advisers
- Integrated service modelling
A possible business model
Component design, simulation or maintenance planning may create practical enterprises before any city-scale project is justified.
A leadership decision to practise
Decide which human needs are non-negotiable and give prospective residents authority over the definition of an acceptable environment.
People, consequences and decisions.
- Interdependent systems can fail together.
- Construction images can conceal missing life-support assumptions.
- Long-term upkeep may be underfunded.
If equality were being designed now...
- What would women want to control about daylight, private space, care and leaving an underground environment?
- Are women maintaining the services involved in deciding repair access and acceptable working conditions?
Begin with women's own experiences across bodies, ages, cultures and places. Invite disagreement and choose a practical change together.
Create a women-led design brief →Build your learning council.
Build alongside these ideas.
Subterranean citiesDrilling, Tunnelling, Lateral Mining
Develop useful excavation tools by selecting one measurable problem in a qualified engineering setting.
Engineering development
Subterranean citiesEternal Maintenance
Make long-term maintenance visible, funded and possible for the people who must do it.
Practical pilot
Subterranean citiesEternal Human Life Support
Study resilient life-support services without claiming that an engineered habitat can sustain people forever.
Speculative concept
Subterranean citiesResurface & Expansion Planning
Plan how a settlement could adapt, return to the surface or expand without trapping people in the original design.
Speculative concept
Follow existing public concept work.
Connected public conceptGrain by Grain
A documentary concept connects everyday life with long-term resilience, existential threats and a seven-generation civilisation story.
Connected public conceptFuture of Life 2045
Explore possible futures for relationships, living systems, intelligence, movement, science and culture.
Connected public conceptMinjerribah Living Twin
A browser simulation explores connections between island ecology, services, movement and everyday life.
From the original suggestion to a working brief.
Original concept from 500 Queens VC NEW Long, slide 15; current context from the September 2026 planning document. This expanded brief and pilot are proposed development, not evidence of an operating enterprise or confirmed partnership.
Original title: Subterranean City Building. The pilot, business model and learning connections on this page are proposed developments of that original idea.