Urban development presents the international community with any number of complex problems. Among the most critical factors to effectiveness are the following:

• integrated development: urban development is perhaps best described as what the World Bank would call a cross-cutting issue (similar to gender issues, social impact or environment) since it involves a large number of traditional disciplines and sectors: engineering of all kinds, capacity building, education and health, water, shelter and so on;  this interdependence means that each individual aspect is more complex than it would otherwise be; it also means that advances in one sector or dimension of urban development may well be undermined or constrained by failure to address other key sectors

•  primacy of management: in the end urban development is about management; tackling urban problems requires municipal institutions which have appropriate legal authority, have a secure revenue base, are well structured and directed and are inhabited at all levels by staff with the necessary skills and experience; institutional failure is arguably the biggest single threat to the resolution of virtually all urban development problems

• importance of scale: the global debate on urban development tends to focus in large part on the growing problems of the world’s megacities; these are certainly pressing and extremely dramatic, but from the perspective of both management and poverty reduction it may well be that this emphasis is in part misplaced; vast urban conglomerates face massive problems, but they also have access significant resources in terms of finance, expertise and political will with which to tackle these problems; it may well be that the problems of medium-sized cities will turn out to be the most intractable because comparable resources are simply not available

• skills development: urban management is one of the last professions based almost entirely on learning on the job; it is rare to find educational programs aimed at equipping urban managers with the wider range of skills they need to tackle multi-faceted problems; there needs to be some effort to create new kinds of training programs which combine analysis of the underlying principles of urban planning and economics with case studies of diverse urban situations and secondment to municipal authorities to gain practical experience; models for this kind of development education do exist, but there is an urgent need for their adaptation to meet the training needs of urban managers in both developed and developing countries 

• mobilising new technologies: there is a growing polarisation in the technologies deployed in urban development; at one pole there are highly sophisticated electronic systems for traffic control or the detection of infrastructure breakdowns; these forms of innovation tend to spread rapidly around the world and constraints to their adoption is primarily financial; at the other pole the situation of low cost, community based technologies is quite different; low cost housing is a case in point; since the pioneering work of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in the 1950s and 1960s there have been many innovations in housing which require only basic construction skills, use local materials and provide adequate shelter; yet  the mechanisms for evaluating such innovations, disseminating information to potential beneficiaries, securing necessary planning approvals and financing demonstration projects are nowhere near effective enough