From Urban Concept to Urban Engineering: The Contribution of Distributed Collaborative Design to the Management of Urban Projects

The complexity of urban systems is an increasingly common topic in academic literature. Following in the footsteps of the industrial sector, which has understood this issue for many years, urban engineering must also tackle the challenges created by complex systems. Industrial engineering has provided a number of responses to this challenge, including design technologies, which are notably collaborative. It seems possible, at least in theory, to transfer a number of best practice methods and adapt these to the conceptualization of urban development projects (in the initial phase) in order to encourage their global management (in terms of strategic decision making) and their social acceptability. The challenge is then to formulate new methodological models, as well as to create an environment dedicated to their application.