Urban areas project high demand for urban spaces to accommodate a wider range of functions associated with social, economic, and physical development, given the rising rate of urbanization and over two-thirds of the human population projected to be urban dwellers by the year 2050. Consequently, cities are rapidly developing into complex and sprawling infrastructure reservoirs, limiting the capacity of vital natural ecosystem services. Development projects face several time-based constraints to find space for public access. In recent decades, brownfield development has directed its focus towards the subsurface, with the onset of initiatives like “net zero land take by 2050” set by the European Union. Expanding the public realm in cities through brownfield underground development can help close the gap between demand and supply of habitable land within cities, especially in urban areas housing contextual heritage.

There are various socio-cultural agents to be accounted for, which influence the experience of the subsurface. With appropriate structuring of documentation and design methods, underground built environments can potentially link diverse uses like transit, work, recreation, and more. The lack of development strategy inclusive of underground spaces poses risk of exploitation by private sector eventually resulting in super-basements that are value-centric. Underground spaces need a strategic spatial vision where the subsurface ecology is considered and developed in coherence with public life, integrating it with existing infrastructure networks.

The Thesis explores the subsurface uses and their potential to supplement demand of public/mobility space from surface in the city of Amsterdam. The applicability of urban underground functions in a delicate Dutch Landscape presents an opportunity to test and benchmark the suitability of subsurface realm for a range of functions. This is done by generating a guiding methodology for context-specific design interventions, followed by their integration with existing underground resources to form a holistic subsurface network that supplements the surface. The research considers the current technological and urban transitions to utilize them tools for developing underground spaces as collective, feasible, and transformative spaces. Research-by-design approach is used to investigate essential parameters of subsurface design at different scales to contextualize prototypical interventions for Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is inextricably linked to a network of water, polders, and dykes. Recent climatic and anthropogenic transitions pose several threats to destabilize this balance including the rise in sea level, extreme weather, and floods which could drastically change the landscape of South Holland as we know it by 2100. With this potentially unstable future in context, the demand for space and houses in the Netherlands rises consistently.
However, the combination of these issues presents an opportunity to restore the balance and linkages of Dutch ways with water. The future of the Maritime manufacturing industry can act as an adhesive to sustain these links by drawing on transitions around water at a global as well as local scale. Hence, the project intends to investigate the changes in the role of water systems in 2100 and how the Maritime manufacturing sector can steer it to address future spatial and climatic adversities.
In 2100, we envision the Maritime Manufacturing industry to expand its role to facilitate the adaptivity of the natural, social and technological landscape of South Holland, using water as the primary medium. We intend to introduce a radical transition by planning for diversified spaces on and for water, serving both an economic prospect as well as increasing consciousness of its role within society.
The vision addresses 3 major transitioning landscapes (wet peatlands, salt marshes, and water bodies) to develop systemic strategies and plan spaces by making optimum use of products by the Maritime industry. The vision opens up several areas of investigation around the 2100 ‘Portscape’ including the scope of circularity in the shipbuilding/ship-recycling industry, rethinking material-flows, and transitions in socio-economic structure in context to new social environments.