Sybil Derrible | Seeing Cities through the Lens of Urban Engineering

Over the past sixty years, the field of urban planning has changed dramatically, and we can now differentiate—more or less—‘good’ versus ‘bad’ urban planning practices. In urban engineering, this transformation is just starting. All infrastructure systems (e.g., transport, water, wastewater, electricity, gas, solid waste, and telecom infrastructure systems) will have to be redefined in this century to become more sustainable and more resilient, and the field of urban engineering can help toward this goal. In this seminar, I will first define urban engineering as a discipline that studies and designs urban infrastructure as integrated and co-dependent systems. I will also discuss how each infrastructure system will have to change. The field is by nature inter-disciplinary, including elements of urban planning, urban metabolism, computer science, and civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering. Moreover, urban engineering leverages recent advances in data science, and I will discuss how machine learning can help better understand how people ‘use’ infrastructure, with applications to transport, water, and electricity and gas consumption. Finally, I will offer a four-step urban infrastructure design process that can be applied to any infrastructure project and that focuses on infrastructure integration and decentralization, ultimately contributing toward making cities smarter, more sustainable, and more resilient. 

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