Urban Engineering: Concepts and Challenges

4. The challenges
Practitioners of urban engineering are currently faced by the highly complex situation
outlined above. Cities of different sizes and social/political weight are crying out for
specialized and competent engineers possessing broad managerial expertise combined with
a systemic approach to the tasks in hand. Cities are complicated environments requiring the
involvement of fully qualified professional staff capable of confronting the many challenges,
particularly in the cities of the developing world.

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Methods and Techniques in Urban Engineering
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as the infrastructure needed to keep abreast of developments in these specialist areas. It is
equally difficult to describe this transport specialist an ‘urban engineer’.
Both the above examples point to the need to identify a more precise definition of the ‘urban
technical systems’ mentioned by Martinard, given that there is no clear distinction made in
current day-to-day practice between specialist civil engineering fields and those specifically
associated with ‘urban engineering’.
A further definition of the term is provided by EIVP, the École des Ingénieurs de la Ville de
Paris (City of Paris Engineering School, http://www.eivp-paris.fr/), founded in 1959, which
runs an undergraduate course in urban engineering. For the EIPV urban engineering deals
with the ‘conception, construction and management of cities’, while simultaneously playing
close attention to the need for ‘sustainable development’.
In Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United
States, the term “municipal engineering” has a similar meaning to "urban engineering".
Municipal engineering includes all the civil and environmental engineering services related
to the complex problems generated by infrastructural and environmental problems and land
use 
that 
confront 
municipal 
governments 
on 
a 
daily 
basis 
(see
http://www.nlja.com/municipal.html). In our view, this more precise definition gives a
clearer idea of the practical scope of urban engineering and of the activities undertaken by
urban engineers.
Based on this definition, urban engineering can more properly be described as the branch of
engineering that covers all the civil and environmental engineering services related to the
range of complex problems associated with infrastructure, services, buildings,
environmental and land-use issues generally encountered in urban areas.