Town and country planning for underground land

Abstract

The paper begins by offering a general cataloguing of types of architecture found underground throughout the
world running from the ancient and trogloditic on in to demonstrate how often such subterranean options have
been adopted . It next moves on to a consideration of the major solutions and the serious problems concomitant
upon them that great modern underground commercial or productive complexes are posing in the eyes of
various autonomous international congresses and research projects . A third part of the work then suggests an
integrating explicative model to legally define space as to town and country planning, that, grounding
itself upon the thesis that the public domain is anterior to any acquired property rights, can thus meet the
historical conundrum now faced by positing the notion of a «floating» volume and this in terms of either a space
or environment considered as being integrally within the public domain .Thus, the height or depth which any
built up property might attain as against its ground plan would ever be subject to such acts and particular town
planning requirements as might be in force in the area .To further clarify this proposal, a dual system of
symmetry for all domains (ground plan, section and mutual obligations) is established . This notion of the
floating character of property is seen as fitting in with the terms of the public domain that surrounds it only if
property is not understood to naturally extend itself everywhere that public precedence does not limit it, coerce
it or, in any way «ad extra», set at term on its spread . Here the paper holds that such an expansion could only
arise where public control of public space explicitly inhibits itself to the end of furthering that social purpose it
was established to promote and only then if such a Concession be protected by a halo of security or fixed
ambitus as to such an exception .