Assessment of the future resilience of sustainable urban sub-surface environments

This paper presents the development of a new sustainable underground use resilience evaluation (SUURE) framework that will allow the quantification of both spatial and temporal impacts of today's underground urban (re)development solutions, in light of future economic, environmental and social changes. The framework uses a broad range of plausible, yet divergent future scenarios in order to ensure core objectives of sustainability and resilience are met. Within this paper it is used to evaluate the utilisation of Multi-Utility-Tunnels - MUT's (i.e. flush-fitting, shallow and deep) in Birmingham Eastside, UK, as an alternative utility placement technique to traditional (open-cut) trenching. The flush-fitting MUT was found to be having the highest overall baseline (i.e. present-day) performance with a resilience index ratio of 0.739 (mean value), the shallow MUT came second at 0.656, and the deep MUT came last at 0.212.