The rapidly growing complexity of today's world brings about an ever-increasing number of challenges for municipal engineering. The co-existence of multiple, interacting players and infrastructure systems in the urban environment reinforces the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of Municipal Engineering, and this is reflected on issue 2 of volume 172, whose content is as diverse as it is wide-reaching. Nevertheless, within this diversity a connecting theme lays in the background and that is sustainability. Sustainability has risen over the years as a prominent role in various branches of municipal engineering and is therefore no surprise that more research shows up addressing this subject.
This issue of Municipal Engineer contributes to the debate on sustainability at the municipal level starting up with a study by Weaver and Nachabe (2019) to model best practices, low-impact development and green infrastructures in stormwater management. This study, based on a long-term data sample and simulations, provides key parameter values for mitigating surface run-off in the urban environment, which is typically high and potentially troublesome. This subject has had some research attention as of late and a follow-up is expected to come soon (Veról and Miguez, 2019).
Sustainability, however, is far from straightforward to achieve in practice, as Parihar et al. (2019) demonstrate with their case-study of municipal solid waste management in the city of Bhopal, India. These authors identify the shortcomings in facilities, management and funding and discuss their consequences in terms of environmental contamination. They also present a roadmap for achieving sustainable goals, which identified construction of a new engineered landfill as a critical point. This leads to the problem of selecting a site for landfill construction, a problem which was recently approached in the case-study of Ferdowsi et al. (2017) using multicriteria methods and geographic information systems.
Transport is a field where the challenges of achieving sustainability are gargantuan. In the urban environment, modal shifts to public transport or active modes are necessary (Ahern, 2002) and Kazemi et al. (2019) investigated how a particular factor, the cost of on-street parking, can drive this shift in a central business district of the city of Qazvin, Iran. Through the use of multinomial logit models over questionnaire data, these authors found that huge increases of parking cost values, 100-fold or more, would be required to obtain significant shifts towards the use of public transport to access the aforementioned district.
Continuing on the topic of transport, energy harvesting from vehicle braking is the subject of Duarte et al. (2019), who followed up on their previous state-of-the-art review (Duarte and Ferreira, 2016) with field work. These authors developed and installed a working prototype of a road pavement harvesting system and studied its performance in a real street environment. The outcome of this experiment showed that a small but significant amount of energy can be reliably extracted from the system. The authors also suggested suitable locations for the installation of such a system.
The work of Das and Honiball (2019) looked for factors influencing the use of urban parks in South Africa. This survey-based statistical study investigated the relation between park users and accessibility variables; the authors having found that the number of streets leading to a park is a significant determinant of its use, as well as streets having provisions for pedestrians. Accessibility to urban parks was also studied recently by Liang et al. (2017), this time with an emphasis on the walk mode.
In respect to construction, Building Information Modelling (BIM) is now recognised as a tool which can help achieve sustainable construction objectives (Wong and Fan, 2013). Taking up on this prospect, the research of Saldanha (2019) takes the first steps in the discussion on how BIM can be applied for the planning and delivery of rapid transit, a travel mode which itself can help achieve transport sustainability.
The present issue of Municipal Engineer certainly shows that debate of sustainability in municipal engineering is an on going one, bound to bring more ideas into discussion. As urban systems grow in complexity, analytic tools must adapt accordingly. The recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning open up new methodological avenues for approaching problems in municipal engineering, and this is the subject of an upcoming themed issue of this journal. Readers working in the field are encouraged to contribute to this themed issue! Please contact rebecca.rivers@icepublishing.com for more information.
