Course overview
Cities must expand housing, mobility, water, waste and public services while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, air pollution and exposure to heat, flooding and energy-price volatility. Infrastructure decisions made today can lock in fuel use, operating costs and land-use patterns for decades. Public agencies, utilities, developers and financiers need plans that connect renewable energy, efficient buildings, low-carbon transport, circular resource systems and climate resilience with credible delivery and investment routes.
This course examines how to plan, assess and deliver sustainable urban infrastructure programmes. Participants work through urban energy baselining, demand forecasting, renewable resource screening, distributed energy design, building retrofit prioritisation, electric mobility, district energy, green infrastructure and waste-to-resource options. The course also addresses project economics, greenhouse-gas accounting, procurement, stakeholder engagement, environmental and social risk, and performance monitoring. Participants learn to compare interventions using lifecycle cost, marginal abatement cost, resilience and equity criteria rather than assessing technologies in isolation.
Teaching combines concise technical briefings with municipal, utility and developer cases, group analysis, scenario simulations and structured application planning. Participants progressively build an urban infrastructure transition package for a selected city, district or development area, using data assumptions suited to their own work context. The final deliverable is a prioritised investment and implementation plan containing an emissions baseline, intervention portfolio, financing approach, delivery roadmap, risk register and performance dashboard.
The course suits professionals responsible for city planning, infrastructure investment, energy programmes, real-estate portfolios, public utilities and climate action delivery. It is particularly relevant where teams must turn climate commitments into funded, buildable projects with measurable service, cost and emissions outcomes.
