Technical Committee 204: “Underground Construction in Soft Ground” of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE) was first established as TC28 in 1989 to provide a forum for interchange of ideas and discussion amongst representatives from different countries with an active interest in tunnelling and deep excavations in the urban environment. In 1994, under the Chairmanship of Prof. Keiichi Fujita, TC28 organised its first symposium as a satellite event to the ISSMGE International Conference in New Delhi.

Underground metalliferous mining in Australia began in the mid-1840s at the copper and silver–lead mines in and around Kapunda and Burra in South Australia. Mining in the Victorian goldfields following the discovery of gold and the Gold Rush of 1851 was initially alluvial but soon evolved into the underground mining of deep leads and then quartz veins.

The Italian Conference of Researchers in Geotechnical Engineering—CNRIG— reached this year its seventh edition, three years after the successful conference held in Bologna in 2016. The conference was promoted by the National Group of Geotechnical Engineering (GNIG; http://www.gnig.it/) and hosted by Politecnico di Milano (https://www.polimi.it/) at the campus in Lecco (Polo Territoriale di Lecco, http://www.polo-lecco.polimi.it/en). The conference provides an important opportunity to share scientific advances, innovation, and application in geotechnical engineering and is becoming a traditional event for the Italian geotechnical community. <...>

The foundations will affect how the other elements of a building perform and so can be a major factor in determining whether or not the building achieves its intended purpose with satisfactory long-term performance. However, decisions concerning the foundations for low-rise buildings are often made by people involved in planning and other aspects of the building development who have little formal training in geotechnical engineering. This book has been written for the benefit of such people and their non-specialist professional advisors; these include architects, surveyors, loss adjusters, planners, insurance underwriters and property developers, most of whom are likely to have only a limited understanding of the engineering of the ground. The book brings together a large quantity of material relevant to building foundations published by BRE over many years. This introductory chapter defines the scope of the book.  <...>