Urban groundwater is a heritage at risk because urban land use practises puts enormous and highly complex pressure on this resource. In this article, we review urban groundwater studies in the context of urban water management, discuss advances in hydrogeological investigation, monitoring and modelling techniques for urban areas and highlight the challenges. We present how techniques on contaminant concentration measurements, water balancing and contaminant load estimation were applied and further developed for the special requirements in urban settings. To fully understand and quantify the complex urban water systems, we need to refine these methods and combine them with sophisticated modelling approaches. Only then we will be able to sustainably manage our water resources in and around our urban areas especially in light of growing cities and global climatic change. We believe that over the next few years much more effort will be devoted to research in urban hydrogeology.