Construction site environmental impact in civil engineering education

The environmental impact of construction activity has gained increasing importance in the last few years and become a key subject for civil engineering education. A survey of Portuguese higher education institutions shows that concern with this topic is mostly directed at the impact of large construction projects and especially focused on their operational stage. The impact of construction sites of smaller projects in urban areas tends to merit less attention, despite their importance for citizens and other economic activities taking place in the neighbourhood. Typical negative impacts include noise and dust production, traffic increase, shortage of parking space, visual impacts, etc. Site management is a typical course in most Portuguese undergraduate curricula for civil engineering, the syllabus of which should cater for the above concerns. This paper reports a survey on negative impacts of construction sites in urban areas and presents a set of related subjects that should be considered in civil engineering curricula.