Underground Space Utilization in the Urban Land-Use Planning of Casablanca (Morocco)

Abstract

With the rapid rate of population growth and economic development, cities face enormous challenges that require both optimal and integrated solutions to meet the needs of growth and to protect the environment and sustainable development. These urban dynamics, which change over time, extend not only horizontally and upward, but also downward. Thus, underground space has been utilized increasingly to relieve the urban surface and to ensure the exploitation of underground resources. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the possibilities of using this space in Casablanca as part of urban land-use planning and, consequently, to suggest an integrated model of exploitation of this space that is adapted to the specificities of the study area. Thus, an analysis of the use of underground spaces in a set of European cities has been performed. The study of the characteristics of this space in Casablanca has been realized according to the levels of geology and hydrogeology and two underground infrastructure projects. This work has led to the implementation of a prototype model named “Sub-Urban Information Modeling”. The model’s objective is to gather all the data and knowledge related to the relevant underground space in an integrated platform that can be shared and updated in order to facilitate the understanding of this environment and its interaction with the surface and to ensure the rational and efficient use of its resources.

A Review of 3d Spatial Data Models for Surface and Subsurface Integration of Spatial Objects

“…For example, some cities, institutions, and governmental organizations have created 3D city models of surface spatial objects for a variety of uses and applications, with some of these models being documented in studies such as Nottingham in the United Kingdom and Shanghai in China (Girindran et al, 2020), Quebec City, Canada (Lafioune & St-Jacques, 2020), Kalasatama (City of Helsinki, 2019), 3D Geoinformation, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands (Biljecki et al, 2017), Cesme Town of Izmir Province, Turkey (Buyukdemircioglu et al, 2018), port of Rotterdam, (Boates et al, 2018), Shenzhen and the Guangdong-Hong Kong, China (Xie et al, 2021) , Piraeus Metro Station, Greece (Perperidou et al, 2021)Los Angeles, CA, USA (Hill et al, 2021), Celje, Slovenia (Šarlah et al, 2020), Birmingham, UK Netherlands (Zlatanova et al, 2013) amongst others. Additionally, a number of significant research has been carried out in Nanaimo, Canada (Chapman et al, 2020), ETH Zurich (Yan et al, 2019), Tehran, Iran (Shahri et al, 2021), Casablanca, Morocco (Zerhouny et al, 2018), Geneva, Switzerland (Adouane et al, 2021), Delft University of Technology (Fossatti et al, 2020) , Poland (Bieda et al, 2020) etc. The 3D spatial data model to represent objects in reality and the spatial database system to store spatial data are varied (Nguyen-Gia et al, 2017).…”

“…The change in urban dynamics occurs not only horizontally and upward, but also downward. The use of the subsurface to reduce the stress on the increasingly congested urban surface is becoming more common (Zerhouny et al, 2018;von der Tann et al, 2020). In many sectors, including networks (cables, sewage, and drainage), transit (subway, tunnels, and passageways), storage (warehouses, cellars, parking spaces, and thermal energy), as well as shelter and protection locations, subterranean building has entirely taken the place of surface construction (nuclear bunkers, bank vaults, and underpasses) (Mielby et al, 2017).…”

A collaborative approach for urban underground space development toward sustainable development goals: Critical dimensions and future directions

“…As the importance of UUS use in urban sustainable development becomes gradually recognized by academia, researchers argue that UUS should be integrated into urban planning and policy systems [23,120,121]. However, the planning industry rarely handles UUS very delicately.…”

Dynamic simulation and conflict identification analysis of production–living–ecological space in Wuhan, Central China

“…Space conflict is the disharmony between different interest groups in the utilization of space resources in terms of the method and quantity, as well as the contradiction between the utilization of space resources and the environment (Cuong et al, 2021; Liang et al, 2019; Zerhouny et al, 2018). Currently, the PLES conflict has been studied widely by scholars around the world.…”