Establishing a Comprehensive Land Subsidence Risk Assessment for Economic Resilient Metro-Led Underground Space Spatial Planning Model in Coastal Megacities of Shanghai and Jakarta by 2035 BaU: Brief COVID-19 Analysis

In ensuring megacities’ sustainable growth, stakeholders are opting for underground space (UUS) utilisation and development. However, further challenges emerge in coastal megacities with soft soil nature and are prone to continuous land subsidence. Thus, future development shall be resiliently planned. This paper presents efforts made towards establishing a model that comprehensively assesses the cause-effect of the uncertain multi-mechanisms revolving around coastal megacities by making attempt to comprehensively assess them via mixed statistical and spatial methods encompassing structural equation modelling (SEM) or regression, spatiotemporal, scenario spatial modelling with the minor comparison between developed and developing megacities. Data collated secondarily from multiple sources. The situation in the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020–2021 is also analysed. Preliminary findings include (1) the spatiotemporal patterns between Shanghai and Jakarta growing in parallel, (2) the projected spatial growth pattern by 2035 BaU is in line with the 1990–2020 spatiotemporal pattern, (3) Tunnels and UUS construction are surprisingly in continuous manner with stagnant progress of leakage and subsidence during COVID-19 period, and (4) Further research input is proposed to better the model. These attempts of comprehensive monitoring and planning methods by understanding the complex cause-effect relation in large coastal megacities via spatial forecasting and big data can be further replicated and improved with complete experts’ validations and data input to potentially being referred by related stakeholders, e.g. urban planners and civil engineers in both developed and developing megacities.