Considering that surface temperatures in many places across the globe will rise significantly in average due to global warming, this little town in Australia’s outback might become something of an enigma for our future cities.
Coober Pedy is a mining village established in 1920 in a region that is so hot that live above ground is difficult. Miners who were spending much of their time underground digging for opal stones found it much easier to move underground all together. Now Coober Pedy has an underground church and several undergound hotels. As wikipedia explains: “A standard three-bedroom cave home with lounge, kitchen, and bathroom can be excavated out of the rock in the hillside for a similar price to building a house on the surface.” That seems like a reasonable deal!
Living underground in the dry and very hot climate of Coober Pedy seems in the long run a much more sustainable solution compared to the ubiquous A/C systems we see in other cities.
The region has been known to the aborginal people of the Western Desert long before white Australians settled or rather dug here. Hence, the name of the town apparently stems from the Kokatha language “kupa piti”, which translates as “white man” and “hole in the ground”, or guba bidi, which simply means “white man’s hole”.
If man made climate change eventually leads to our cities looking like this, I think Guba Didi is an extremely fitting and telling name for our predicament! Climate poetry…
