Urban underground space is a valuable resource, a space for placing structures and infrastructure, as well as a source of groundwater and geothermal energy. Development of urban underground space has been accelerating rapidly in many major cities. Pressures of a changing global environment, including climate and increasingly limited land availability, place urban underground space on the top of the advanced urban development agenda. Intensive urban subsurface use has led to some confusion and conflicts of interests among its users, and gradual realization that subsurface is a good, or resource, that could have its limits of use and degree of renewability. These challenges to subsurface use are very much in line with the ones explored in a concept of ecosystem services, which philosophy is to quantify and put value on goods, benefits, services, provided to humans by nature in order to enable more rational and frugal use of natural resources. In this paper we, likewise, will be arguing for better understating of the importance and value of subsurface in order to encourage rational urban underground space planning.