Towards the Vertical City: psychosocial mechanisms for human-centered underground office spaces

Underground office workspaces (UOW) have emerged as a sustainable option in land-scarce megacities. Yet, the main challenge is to design and manage underground spaces that cater to the psychological needs of occupants. By integrating insights from social psychology, urban studies, and policy making, we identify and provide evidence for a key psychological mechanism underlying the adoption of UOW: "locus of control", a psychological process that reflects whether people feel in control of their environment or see it as shaped by external forces. Study 1 (N = 1093) revealed that individuals who believe external forces strongly impact their lives tend to have more negative attitudes toward working at UOW, perceiving negative aspects of the underground environment (e.g., confinement) as more salient. Study 2 (N = 217) builds on the findings of Study 1 by demonstrating that individuals who feel strongly influenced by external forces actively avoid UOW as their workplace, as evidenced by differences in locus of control between current underground and aboveground office workers. The present findings uncover a key psychological mechanism that can facilitate the adoption of UOW and invites engineers, designers and management to develop UOW environments that promote a sense of control and autonomy, fostering sustainable and occupant-friendly urban infrastructure.