AsRTC6 : Urban Geoengineering
(Asian Region Technical Committee)

AsRTC6 (Asian Region Technical Committee), previously ATC-6, named “Urban GeoEngineering” is established and hosted by the Chinese Taipei Geotechnical Society (CTGS) in 2014. It is aware that now there are 30 so called Mega cities (the city with more 10.000.000 populations) in the world and among them, 18 are located in Asia. It is thus anticipated that activities related to urban development are very important to Asia region.

​

Activities in urban area shall be concerned and attentions shall be paid and addressed to urban related geotechnical engineering in Asia herein. Design and construction of underground works, such as deep excavations and basement and foundation connected to urban development thus play important role in this modern society and can’t be ignored.

  

Further, in order to ease traffic in urban area of the city, metro system is expected to be an effective option. Metro of course have become very important infrastructure and critical element in most of major cities in Asia. Due to difficult surface and underground conditions, high- level risks are recognized for construction of metro works and it is thus that accidents caused by metro construction can thus lead severely financial loss and casualty. It is thus indicated that geotechnical engineering related to design and construction of metro works (or named “metro geotechnics”) shall be further studied in order to reduce risk so sustainable urban environment can thus be developed and protected. Again the whole life cycle value and asset management shall be concerned during the design and construction of an underground project in the city.

 

Considering reasons stated above, topics which will be further examined and studied here are:

(1) Deep excavation;

(2) Metro geotechnics; and

(3) Urban renovation Geotechnics

 

In order to further discuss topics listed above, a new Asian Technical Committee (ATC) named “Urban GeoEngineering” is thus called to be established. Key driven personnel include Professor Chang–Yu Ou of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Professor Yung- Show Fang, President of Chinese Taipei Geotechnical Society (CTGS) and Professor Der-Wen Chang, International Secretary of CTGS. The proposal of this new ATC was first submitted to Professor Ikuo Towhata, Vice President in Asian region of ISSMGE in July 2013 and then Professor Ou and Professor Fang made a face-to-face discussion with Professor Towhata by the chance of attending IS- Seoul 2014 TC204 International Symposium of Underground Structure in Soft Soil. After carefully discussion and examination, Professor Towhata has finally approved this new ATC and gave the number of “6” to this new ATC in September 2014.

 

For the time being, the chair of ATC-6 “Urban Geotechnical Engineering” is Professor Chang-Yu Ou and Dr. Benson Hsiung is requested to act as secretary of the ATC to assist Professor Ou to be responsible for matters of ATC-6. In January 1st, 2023, Prof. Benson Hsiung took over the position of AsRTC-6 Chairman and Professor Fu-Chen Teng of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology was invited to act as secretary of AsRTC6.

 

Currently AsRTC-6 has approximately 30 members from various member societies of ISSMGE, such as Chinese Taipei, Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, India and Kazakhstan and more corresponding members may be invited to join AsRTC.

 

The 1st ATC-6 event has to be decided to be organized in September 2015, at the same time together with 15th Asian regional conference in Kyushu, Japan and it is expected that up to 6 academic papers in related topic will be presented.