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Planning for underground spaces has become an effective way to use central areas in cities given the steady economic growth in China. The development of underground spaces in mountainous cities has satisfied the needs of the diversification of the city commercial areas and pedestrian movement. Safety issues exist because these underground spaces were originally used for civil air defense. This study was based on the underground commercial street in Chongqing, which is a typical mountainous city. Based on the results of combined fieldwork and survey, this paper summarized current safety issues, which include the not-fully-open exit, the imbalanced exit location, blocked evacuation routes, and the poor awareness of the potential safety issues. This paper proposed a framework of the safety factors for the underground space and synopsized prevention strategies that are specific to potential disasters in the underground environment. The framework comprises ensuring that the exits are fully open, the underground corridors are kept unblocked, the open space on the street is increased for disaster prevention, and equipment security is maintained and managed. At last, This paper summarized disaster prevention strategies, which include ensuring unimpeded exits, balancing the locations of the exits, avoiding blocks, increasing the disaster prevention square area in the underground space, maintaining and managing the security of the equipment.

Due to land resource scarcity, sustainable urban development in high-density cities has long been challenging. As such, many cities are formulating plans to “dig deep”, resulting in more citizens working and/or staying underground for longer periods of time. However, owing to the particularities of underground space, the factors involved in the creation of a healthy environment are different from those involved in aboveground developments. This study thus aims to investigate the influences of various underground environment factors on users' health through a holistic approach.

To achieve this aim, 12 underground sites and 12 corresponding aboveground sites are selected for a large-scale questionnaire survey, resulting in 651 survey samples. The survey covers post-occupancy evaluation of health (physical and psychosocial), underground environmental quality (visual, thermal, acoustic comfort, indoor air quality and ventilation), space design and greenery. Independent-sample T-test, Pearson correlation, multiple regression modelling and structural equation modelling are used to investigate whether significant differences exist between health of underground and aboveground users, and to develop an underground environment-health model for unveiling the significant associations between underground environment factors and users' health. To cross validate the results, an objective field measurement study is further conducted on six underground sites. The objective measurement results are used to cross validate the survey results.

The questionnaire results provide the following evidence: (1) health of underground users is significantly poorer than that of their aboveground counterparts; (2) underground development users' health is significantly affected by space design, greenery and environmental quality in terms of thermal comfort, indoor air quality, ventilation and acoustic comfort but not visual comfort; and (3) amongst the various identified factors, space design has the strongest predicting effects on human health. The field study echoes the survey findings and further unveils the relationships between different environmental factors and human health.

The results shed light on the importance of distinguishing between underground developments and aboveground ones in various guidelines and standards, especially those related to space management.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between public spending, budget imbalance and underground economy. In addition, this paper investigates how budget imbalance moderates the public spending–underground nexus.

By utilizing a data set spanning from 1995 to 2017 of 35 OECD countries, the study has employed Dynamic Common Correlated Effects (DCCE) approach. The study is also extended to consider the marginal effects of public spending on the underground economy at different degrees of budget imbalance.

The results indicate that an increase in public spending and budget imbalance contributes to the expansion of underground economy. Interestingly, the effects of public spending on the underground economy will enhance and intensify with a higher budget imbalance level. The results are robust to various specifications and their broader implications are discussed.

Governments should carefully implement a fiscal policy with a clear understanding that increasing public spending leads to the expansion of informality. Besides, policymakers should enforce supportive policies to boost economic growth, cooperation and cross-border trade to control the size of the underground economy.

This study stresses the role of public spending, budget imbalance on the underground economy in OECD nations. To the best of the author's knowledge, this study pioneers to explore the moderating effect of budget imbalance in the public spending–undergrround nexus.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2022-0645.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the underground levels of a city to explore how vernacular and historic underground urban facilities help traditional cities to be sustainable. Therefore, the authors look at how culture, climate and economy affect those facilities.

The paper focuses on vernacular and local underground urban facilities in historic cities to find more sustainable processes of urban development that integrate cultural, climatic and economical concerns into design planning. The paper is based on a case study of the underground infrastructure of Dezful, Iran.

There are several vernacular building styles around the world, especially in Iran, with different shapes, materials, arrangements and concepts. Building construction has significant impacts on the environment and natural resources. Dezful is a city in Iran with a lot of potential in terms of its architecture. Vernacular cities possess infrastructure that helped them thrive in harsh climates. For instance, Dezful takes advantage of a systematic infrastructure termed the “Underground City.”

The traditional architecture of Dezful plays an important role in creating underground spaces, especially urban and architectural elements with thermal isolation properties that can be used as housing and as food storage. In this century, building construction could adopt these environmental properties, which could lead to low energy consumption in urban environments. Considering traditional and contextual elements in urban planning and design could revive sustainable community practices in urban environments.

This paper seeks to extend the literature on property damage assessment by incorporating the right of exclusion as a compensable component to damages. The paper aims to go on to illustrate methodologies to estimate as a rent this damage component.

The authors develop a conceptual framework from which to examine the value of underground storage space with special reference to situations in which migrating contamination from commercial operations have invaded private real property. Specifically they view this invasion as a compensable violation of the right of exclusion. This underground storage analysis uses the three approaches common to traditional appraisal (income, sales and cost) to estimate the value of underground storage caused by migrating contamination.

Conceptually the paper finds that underground storage can be easily valued with existing appraisal methods. Using contamination scenarios paired with actual market data from the South‐Eastern USA, the paper shows an example of each of the three methods for valuation. It concludes by reconciling the estimated values and supply additional issues to consider when valuing underground storage.

Contaminated properties analysis and damages have focused on the right of transfer when estimating damages to real property. Other portions of the bundle of rights also require examination.

This is the first discussion of underground trespass in relation to contaminated property coupled with an empirical example to address the right of exclusion and estimated rents due for use of adjacent properties as a storage facility.

To measure the size of underground economy and the amount of tax evasion in Cyprus by employing monetary and non‐monetary approaches over the period 1960‐2003 and to compare the Cyprus figures with some European experience existing in the literature.

Annual data covering the 1960‐2003 period were applied to several approaches for measuring the size of underground economy and the amount of tax evasion in Cyprus. These approaches are: employment discrepancy; simple currency ratio; transaction and currency demand.

On the basis of the results obtained from this study: firstly, in Cyprus the average ratio of the underground economy and tax evasion to official GDP is estimated at 9.41 and 0.31 percent of GDP respectively for the study period, and secondly, in the two time intervals where Cypriots figures are internationally comparable with the often quoted EU underground economy figures, the figures for Cyprus are estimated as 5.96 percent of GDP in 1994‐95 and 5.67 percent of GDP in 1996‐97 whereas the figures for some European Union (EU) members are 18.05 percent of GDP in 1994‐95 and 18.76 percent of GDP in 1996‐97.

Findings of this study suggest that the issue of the underground economy is still in need of further investigation, firstly, to reach reliable results since each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses and yield different results, secondly, to find out the best method selection on a well‐established theory, and finally, to employ reliable data estimating measurement.

Both EU and Cypriot authorities can utilize this study to analyse the extent of Cypriot underground economy with respect to the other EU members. Such attempts can be useful in developing policies and implementing actions and measures to eliminate underground economy activities.

This study is the first of its kind with recent data to measure the size of underground economy and tax evasion for the Cypriot economy by employing various approaches.

Underground logistics system (ULS) is recognized as sustainable alleviator to road-dominated urban logistics infrastructure with various social and environmental benefits. The purpose of this study is to propose effective modeling and optimization method for planning a hub-and-spoke ULS network in urban region.

Underground freight tunnels and the last-mile ground delivery were organized as a hierarchical network. A mixed-integer programming model (MIP) with minimum system cost was developed. Then a two-phase optimization schema combining Genetic-based fuzzy C-means algorithm (GA-FCM), Depth-first-search FCM (DFS-FCM) algorithm and Dijkstra algorithm (DA), etc. was designed to optimize the location-allocation of ULS facilities and customer clusters. Finally, a real-world simulation was conducted for validation.

The multistage strategy and hybrid algorithms could efficiently yield hub-and-spoke network configurations at the lowest objective cost. GA-FCM performed better than K-means in customer-node clustering. The combination of DFS-FCM and DA achieved superior network configuration than that of combining K-means and minimum spanning tree technique. The results also provided some management insights: (1) greater scale economies effect in underground freight movement could reduce system budget, (2) changes in transportation cost would not have obvious impact on ULS network layout and (3) over 90% of transportation process in ULS network took place underground, giving remarkable alleviation to road freight traffic.

Demand pairs among customers were not considered due to lacking data. Heterogeneity of facilities capacity parameters was omitted.

This study has used an innovative hybrid optimization technique to address the two-phase network planning of urban ULS. The novel design and solution approaches offer insights for urban ULS development and management.

Most people in Western countries are more likely to associate the term underground banking with an automatic teller machine in a subway station, than with complex infrastructures of financial remittance that may be utilised either to by‐pass completely conventional banking facilities and processes, or else to connect with those same conventional banking facilities and processes only at selected points, at selected times and selected places. However, the low public profile of underground banking is in contrast to the increasingly high priority that governments, financial regulators and law enforcement agencies are giving to efforts to counter the facilitative role that underground banking can play in the activities of money launderers, organised crime, terrorist groups and tax evaders. Underground banking systems are playing an increasingly important role in the burgeoning tide of laundered money that is projected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to be equivalent to 2–5 per cent of global GDP with organised crime groups estimated to be grossing more than US$1.5trn a year. However, there is significant variation regarding guesstimates of the scale of the activities of organised crime and money laundering in general. For example, Walker applies a ‘crime‐economic model’ upon data collated from international databases and his model estimates a global money laundering total of $2.85trn per year, with these flows heavily concentrated in North America and Europe. These types of disparity in assessment are inevitable until a great deal more data is generated regarding money laundering and other sectors of alternative and/or illegal economies. Walker stresses that his results are very much interim, but they suggest some interesting patterns. For example: of totals of money laundered globally, the USA was the origin of more than 46 per cent and the destination of more than 18 per cent; and on a matrix of attractiveness of jurisdictions to money launderers Luxembourg ranked first with a score of 686, followed by the USA (634) and Switzerland (617), with the traditional homes of underground banking systems such as Pakistan (Hawala system) and China (Fei Chien) ranking in the lowest category (0–9). The methodological problems of measurement are especially acute regarding underground banking systems due to their intrinsically low levels of public visibility. Indeed, many of the dilemmas associated with underground banking are reproduced in other issues of conventional banking, financial regulation, law enforcement and economic governance. It is these dilemmas that are the core focus of this paper.

This paper aims to investigate the rules and rituals for joining and operating within underground music file sharing communities as well as the members' motivations for joining.

Actor‐network theory is combined with an ethnographic methodology to explore the structure, technology and rules of these communities from an actor‐oriented, member perspective. Empirical data include in‐depth interviews with three file sharers, and participant‐observations for 120 days within an online community.

The paper provides an increased understanding of the structured and orderly nature of underground music file sharing communities and the perceived importance of strong rules and rituals for membership. Many communities use the same open‐source software.

Only a small number of file sharers (three) were interviewed. However they provide rich insights into this under‐researched topic.

An understanding of these sophisticated underground file sharing communities assists the further development of legitimate online music systems to appeal to the large number of individuals involved in music file sharing communities.

This paper provides an understanding of the practices within a subculture that is currently regarded as deviant and illegal, and contributes to the discussion and policy formulation on file sharing.

This study is the only known ethnography investigating underground music file sharing communities. These communities have not been systematically studied previously and the paper addresses this lack of research literature. This study is also novel as it applies actor‐network theory to a context to which it has not previously been applied.

Up to now a country-specific study on Qatar with respect to underground economy, illegal money and tax evasion has not been undertaken. This paper aims to contribute by separately estimating the magnitude of the underground economy in Qatar from 1980 to 2010 using adjusted currency demand function.

The study uses the Zivot–Andrews unit root test for the stationarity analysis and applies the Gregory and Hansen long run cointegrating technique for estimating the underground economy based on the latest form of the currency demand function model. While the general to specific technique is used to estimate the short run error correction model.

The results show that the average size of the underground economy in Qatar is about 17.03 per cent of the official gross domestic products (GDPs). The average level of tax evasion as a per cent of the total non-oil tax revenues is estimated at around 16.50 per cent and is about 2.12 per cent of the official GDP. The average level of illegal money to the total money from banking sector is estimated at 26.70 per cent.

This study is the first to separately estimate the extent of the underground economy, illegal currency and tax evasion in Qatar. It overcomes the methodological errors and spurious estimation problems encountered in the previous studies that included Qatar with other countries based on cross-country data without taking into consideration the economic differences between countries. The authors believe that the findings may help the government of Qatar to re-formulate its economic policies, thus, enabling it to curb the growing underground economic activities.