Underground and beyond: The road to resilience

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Abstract

One of the major megatrends driving global economic growth is urbanization. Cities currently house more than half of the world's population, and by 2050, this number is expected to rise dramatically. With increasing urbanization, cities face significant challenges, including the need for suficient and appropriate infrastructure, particularly transportation infrastructure. Projects involving urban mobility are extremely complicated since they attract, impact, and, as a result, engage a wide range of stakeholders. Tunnelling in an urban environment presents many unique challenges such as complex ground conditions, a potential low cover of ground, sensitive buildings, significant roadways, existing or abandoned foundations, and buried structures. In addition, space constraints in urban areas amplify the challenge of designing underground structures to minimize the impacts on existing structures, surface trafic, and the everyday life of its residents. In addition to these technical aspects, public owners are taking the environmental impact of their projects more and more seriously. As a result, designers and contractors need to be creative and find solutions to improve the global CO2 balance of their projects. Key design aspects related to geotechnics, site logistic, excavation works and sustainability will be elaborated.

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Short Curriculum

Patricia Lamas is a Civil Engineer , MSc in Structures and Geotechnics by the Polytechnic University of Madrid .She’s passionate for major infrastructure projects, and she’s specialist in underground infrastructure namely tunnels. She currently works as a Project Manager for Amberg Engineering and she has been involved in numerous international projects such as Grand Paris, metro Brussels , Sao Paulo metro or Porto’s Rubi Line, building her expertisealong her working experiencesin Panama , France, Spain and Belgium. Patricia has a BIM Manager diploma and lately , seeking to broaden her understanding of business in an international context, she completed an MBA master’s degree in international trade and business management. She believes in Civil Engineering as a very powerful society developer. She’s driven to commit to projects that can impact and eventually change our nowadays reality, aiming to make our world a more sustainable place.