The Principal

It is my great pleasure to be the first principal of an institution that will offer complete technical course programs in Urban Planning, Modelling and Designs. The School for Integrated Urban Planning (SIUP)  welcomes you, to your new life as a college student for Urban Planning.

SIUP is a new institution, and you join us at a time when Uganda, The East and Central African region is facing enormous structural and social changes. The urban population is growing rapidly and adding not only new demands on; trading centres, towns, and cities but new urgency to create habitable and sustainable urban regions.

SIUP has four departments in Urban and Rural Planning; Environmental Sciences, Transport Modelling, Logistics and Design; Architecture, Civil Works Engineering and Surveying.  One of the  great things about joining our institution, is the opportunity to truly build something new, and to do so with relatively few constraints.  You as students will be partners as we build a great institution together.

As students going to SIUP, you know that building basic skills in geography, statistics, geometry and other sciences will be key as you learn how to perform technical work for the good of society, through the design and implementation of urban planning designs, projects, and systems.

• Planners are creative and inventive
• Planners serve humanity through their work
• Planners apply knowledge, requiring them not only to know but to use

The technical skills needed to participate in these activities are pretty clear, and will be a focus in your entire academic period at SIUP.   There is much more to being a planner than what meets the eye.

Real-urban issues usually have more than one solution. Implementation of those solutions at times can be a daunting task.  Planners need to compromise between competing constraints; rigidity of sciences as it demands us to operate, funding sources, technical requirements, and desires of the urban dweller to be left in her predicament because of fear to seeking no alternative or the future being too gloomy to achieve a solution. It will therefore require the urban planning student:

• to be a multidisciplinary individual, social in his working relationship and at the same time be leaders where others follow.
• To have an ability to bring competing ideologies together and that implies
• To have an ability to communicate technical work even to the least concerned
• To be ethical and incorporate social, economic and environmental needs in your work thus generating public trust.

Planners need to succeed and not only to be technical, to appreciate the limits of a modern society: you will need interpersonal skills, the ability to communicate, the ability to think critically, and to provide leadership.

SIUP is dedicated to helping you attain these skills and competences.   So much of the coursework in the curriculum focuses on practical work and not theoretical exertion. As the program develops, more streamlining will be made to seek out the most important and where hard sciences converge with soft sciences. You will be exposed in your studies, topics which urban planning practioneers in the same field have experienced.

The work will be harder and requiring more of your time, than schoolwork that you have done at secondary school level or other institutions.  This will be a combination of your ability, to organise and generate your own academic and skills potential.

As you begin your studies at SIUP, invest yourself fully in becoming a professional Urban Planner.  Urban planning is having pleasurable time, and being a students one has a unique social world to participate into; in both social and academic activities that make up life at SIUP more fun, and also something to remember.

With best wishes, and looking forward to meeting you!