Japan's underground frontier
Underground. The world brings many unsavory adjectives to mind: dark, dank, clandestine, illegal. But in Japan the 'underground' is becoming the new frontier and the base hope for solving one of the country's most intractable problems. With a population nearly half the size of the U.S.'s squeezed into an area no bigger than Montana, Japan has virtually no room left in its teeming cities. Developers have built towering skyscrapers and even artificial islands in the sea, but the space crunch keeps getting worse. Now some of Japan's largest construction companies think they have the answer: huge developments beneath the earth's surface where millions of people could work, shop and, perhaps eventually, make their homes. 'An underground city is no longer a dream. We expect it to actually materialize in the early part of the next century,' says Tetsuya Hanamura, the chief of Taisei Corp.'s proposed development.
Taisei calls its project Alice City after Lewis Carroll's heroine who went underground by way of a rabbit hole. The company, which has drawn up elaborate plans, envisions two huge concrete 'infrastructure' cylinders, each 197 ft. tall and with a diameter of 262 ft., that would be built as much as 500 ft. below ground. They would house facilities for power generation, air conditioning and waste processing. Each cylinder would be connected by passages to a series of spheres, which would accommodate stores, theaters, sports facilities, offices and hotels. Taisei's initial $4.2 billion design could support 100,000 people.
Time (AmE)
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