ANTONIA CORNARO | INTERVIEW


s with so many of the people we have interviewed for T&T, tunnelling was a coincidence (or calling?) in the career of


Antonia Cornaro. “I am an urban planner by training” she says. “I studied at New York University and my first job was for the Department of City Planning’s transportation division. “I had had an international childhood. I


have lived in so many different cities, from Brussels to Cairo to Tehran to Paris to New York. But what I sensed in each city is this pulsating vibe of what makes them tick, the urban metabolism. In the end, it’s the street life and it’s the availability of great spaces, and great cultural facilities, and inviting open air activities as well, places where people can congregate – parks or a nice waterfront or places for outdoor concerts, bars, and restaurants. “New York was just one of the city-


stations in my life but it was a formative one in my educational and professional path. That first job was working on master- planning a bicycle network and Master Plan for the city (mapping everything in GIS and scouting for the best routes on bike), and I came more and more to appreciate the public realm and what previous planners had done for spatial development in cities. Being in the transportation arm we always had overlaps with the transportation authorities and departments, which included of course the metro system: there was not only ‘how do you get passengers safely and rapidly from A to B by subway’ but also ‘how do you get them into and out of the subway station.’ You have these very congested points at rush hour in New York. “Entrances are narrow, steps are steep,


these interfaces are not planned in a way that can be manoeuvred safely or efficiently – or even pleasantly. “And this was early in my career, and it


gave me a lot of insight into how mobility in a city works and doesn’t work, and how you really need to focus on intermodality in transportation: on getting people seamlessly from a tram into a train station, or from a train station into a bus, or from a bus into a subway station and so on. “For me there became more and more of


a focus. After my stint in New York, I had the opportunity to move to London, to work for an interdisciplinary engineering consulting firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff. It was one of the oldest US engineering consulting firms with over 100 years of existence; now it is part of WSP.


“The company has a speciality in


intermodal transportation schemes: we had assignments with the World Bank, with public authorities, but also with city departments and even private clients. A big topic was infrastructure privatisation, airports and access to airports, which often included mass transport systems, so we worked on several studies like that. “But, really, my work up to that time


was about moving people and creating pleasant or decent spaces for them, not necessarily moving them underground. The underground part is a sort of byproduct of moving people. Often the most efficient systems for moving them were underground or at least in dedicated rapid rail corridors. “Fast forward a few years, and I was


working on regional master planning for local authorities and economic development schemes. After moving on to Zurich I first worked in an interdisciplinary engineering consulting firm where I again increasingly got involved with underground infrastructure: I was in the planning and transport division which often had overlaps with the tunnelling division. Again I got very interested in this interface between the surface and subsurface and the opportunities the subsurface actually held for cities: I wanted to know more about that and to get more involved in it. “And, at Amber Engineering, which is


the company I work for now – I have been 12 years with them – we are really a firm that is purely focused on underground infrastructure planning, design and project management. I find it to this day fascinating what the subsurface holds in terms of opportunities and challenges. “In Zurich, I also began to work for the


ITA, specifically ITACUS, the ITA Committee on Underground Space. It is a permanent committee that is tasked to create awareness of the subsurface as an asset for cities. They were mainly tunnellers and they really wanted to have an urban planner on board, so I came in at a perfect time. It was a really good team under the chair of Han Admiraal and I worked myself up the committee ranks. “Indeed, I wrote a book with Han. We


gave a presentation at an ICE conference in London, and it was a bit different from most of the presentations because it involved the whole city rather than merely tunnelling. It was about the wider implications of tunnelling and the benefits created to society and to the city overall, and we had some very exotic examples that


tunnelling conferences don’t see every day: we included tunnel art, and environmental features that make tunnels pleasant places to be in. And, because it was so innovative and so different from the standard tunnelling presentations, ICE asked if we would write a book. “We were both rather startled – it was


quite an amazing request – but we said yes. We knew we wanted it to be not a purely technical tunnelling book, and to be read not just by tunnelling engineers but by anyone interested in the built environment, in cities and their future and how they work, and of course the role of the underground in all of that. So that was a two-year project.” One quote from the books says: ‘The


future is out there and a large part of that is below the surface.’ A lot of the book is about cities of the


future, and what they should be like. “They should be green,” she says. “Green


in the sense of having open spaces and parks, but also in the sense that the bits that are built upon should also be green and friendly and have trees and vegetation. “We need more and more trees. We need them to absorb CO2. We need to counteract


climate change and the urban heat island effect, which has been a huge problem in cities and which climate change will make worse. “More and more cities are realising this;


now we are going back to recreating sponge cities, where the soils can soak up water. They can act as a reservoir, and also give very interesting dual purposes: playgrounds or parks that can also absorb water, for example in heavy rains to reduce flooding. We need cities to become more resilient, against the effects of climate change and natural disasters like more frequent storms and heat waves and droughts and wildfires; we need to feel better prepared, able to bounce back more quickly after these events occur. “The underground can help us shape


all this. Underground can be coupled with green spaces – we can for instance have green roofs on top of a wastewater treatment facility that is underground, or on a big parking facility or bus terminal or a train station. So many of the infrastructures that serve our citizens can be underground and coupled with pleasant and accessible spaces on top. This also gives us the opportunity to couple it with energy production and generation, by using the excess heat for the generation of heating of warm water on top for instance.”


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