Aims

Urban management is a comprehensive engineering discipline that aims at creating sustainable, safe, and internationally competitive urban systems that can serve as a base for creative human activities.

Human beings have built many prosperous urban civilizations. At the same time, however, modern cities face desperate problems, including global competition, the risk of large-scale disasters, and inadequate living conditions. There are many problems that need to be investigated in relation to such urban activities as habitation, employment, resting, and moving, to ensure that these can be safely and comfortably carried out in harmony with conservation of the global environment. Another urgent issue is the need for people to devise and implement solutions to these problems.

To solve urban problems in modern society it is important to construct sustainable urban systems supported by advanced information and communication technologies, keeping in mind the complex interrelationships that are woven by social and economic activities working with the forces of nature and the natural environment. Numerous issues need to be tackled, like the formation of new amenities in matured societies, and the management of natural, social, and economic risks.

The Department of Urban Management is striving to integrate advanced information communication technology with social infrastructure technology, to realize sustainable, safe, and internationally competitive urban systems that can ensure a high quality of life. For this, the department aims to make advances in social analysis technology utilizing urban engineering, traffic engineering, and environmental system engineering to analyze human activities in cities. It also seeks to make advances in planning technology methods like urban planning and traffic planning, in lifelines to realize safe and sustainable urban systems and in urban infrastructure relating to building foundations and rivers.

By using these engineering technologies as a foundation, the department is working to establish methodologies and engineering techniques for the comprehensive management of urban systems, incorporating assessments of the sustainability of cities, based on cutting-edge research and an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces the social sciences and humanities.

To realize these goals, the department is ambitiously striving to construct state-of-the-art urban systems for advanced information societies, and to cultivate the human resources needed to support them.