Evaluating Disaster Prevention Benefits of Underground Space from the Perspective of Urban Resilience

Abstract Urban underground space (UUS) is such a crucial constituent part of a city that contributes to urban sustainability via various external benefits. Disaster prevention benefits, as one of these benefits, were simply taken as responses to catastrophes such as earthquakes or wars in the process of cost-benefit analysis. The rough analysis can improve people’s overall understanding of UUS, but can hardly cover and reveal the benefits that underground facilities may produce in response to certain types of disasters. Urban resilience, a concept that has been widely discussed in recent years, requires cities to be prepared for whatever impacts caused by natural disasters or human actions. With the help of this concept, the disaster prevention services and benefits of UUS will be re-recognized by analyzing the relationships between underground facilities and urban resilience. This paper intends to establish the linkages between UUS and urban resilience, reveal the various disaster prevention services that underground facilities can provide, and set up a monetary valuation framework to the benefits of these services. The results show that UUS has a close connection with infrastructure resilience, an important domain of urban resilience, and can generate huge benefits when confronted with disasters. It is anticipated that this study will deepen people’s understanding of the disaster prevention value of UUS and promote the integrated planning of UUS in the construction of resilient cities.