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The true (full) cost of a utility strike incident is rarely known. Generally, only the direct costs are used to measure the impact of utility strikes; the wider indirect and social costs are rarely quantified in monetary terms. Moreover, no established methodology exists to address this gap in knowledge, while access to fully documented records often presents the greatest challenge. This paper presents research that for the first time has been given access to 16 fully detailed utility strike case studies in UK urban areas. The research has identified and assessed the impacts of these utility strikes and provided an objective estimation of their associated (total) costs. These costs consist of those paid directly by the utility owner (direct costs), those borne by third parties in the contractual agreement (indirect costs) and those borne by other parties not engaged in the contractual agreement (social costs). Although the richness lies in the detailed case studies, the aggregated findings from all 16 utility strike case studies indicate that the total cost ratio – the ratio of indirect and social costs to the direct cost of repair – is 29:1. Thus there is a very substantial impact, which to date has been largely neglected.

This paper reviews the key issues relating to the increased future use of underground space where geoscientific information will be indispensable as a decision support tool for the sustainable development of underground space. A clear understanding of what is in the underground space (geology, utilities etc.) and its properties are required in order to form a correct grasp of the potential assets and challenges of underground space as a resource. To inform urban developmental choices, regions having geological units which lend themselves to development or expansion of underground space use in the future, will be given precedence over those with adverse geological conditions. Such information needs to be included into decision support systems for conventional types of underground construction. This paper establishes that there is a strong need to adopt computational visualization approaches in the form of GIS based Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA); these provide a platform to enable the testing of underground space through a virtual experimental set-up of different uses, using a broad range of different yet divergent future scenarios to ensure that the core objectives of sustainable development are met.

This paper examines the role for pipe deterioration prediction approaches for optimising maintenance, repair and rehabilitation of buried water supply, wastewater collection and drainage networks.It is appreciated that there are other ancillary assets within water supply and wastewater collection and drainage networks, but these were not considered in this paper. Currently there are a range of asset condition assessment frameworks, mainly based on asset defect location, identification and characterisation. These are Manuscript 2 infrequently applied in practice, mainly due to the restricted availability of asset defect inspection data. The paper reviews current deterioration modelling approaches and highlights the crucial need for broader, richer data sets (including both asset and surrounding environment data) to inform the development and application of such approaches. The paper describes what could be considered as an expanded "ideal" data set for deterioration modelling at a network and individual asset scale and indicates emerging new inspection technologies that should be capable of meeting the enhanced data needs.