Underground Urbanism

Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the streets of your city? Do you picture, in isolation, a series of train tunnels and pipes? Or perhaps the foundations of tall buildings that lie scattered, like icebergs, beneath the surface? As our cities grow up, out, and down, it is time we better understood how the different layers of these complex urban environments relate to one another. Underground Urbanism seeks to provide a new perspective on our cities, and consider how this might be used to engage more positively with them. So, tip your cities upside down to have a closer look, and let us rethink them from (below) the ground, up.

Elizabeth Reynolds is a Chartered Urban Planner and Director of Urben, an east London studio focused on planning, design and problem solving for urban environments. Over the past 20 years Elizabeth has worked in multidisciplinary teams on major infrastructure and regeneration projects including the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Crossrail. Urben works from macro scale strategic city plans to detailed street design, with a common theme of making cities creative, productive and resilient places. She is a co-founder of Think Deep UK and has undertaken extensive research into the overlooked but important places beneath our cities.