Urban was appointed by A. W. Eichler to run the Berlin Botanical Garden and supervised its move to Dahlem.

In 1884 Urban began working with Leopold Krug on his Puerto Rican collections, a collaboration would later produce the nine-volume Symbolae Antillanae, one of his most important contributions, and his 30-part Sertum Antillanum.

Urban was born in Warburg, Province of Westphalia, in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1848 as the son of a prosperous brewer.

Eichler appointed Urban as assistant head of the Berlin Botanical Garden, and in 1883 he was promoted to the position of curator.

[1] Urban worked as Eichler's assistant in the production of the Flora Brasiliensis,[1] which had been initiated by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Stephan Endlicher in 1840.

Together with his friend Domingo Bello y Espinosa, Krug had accumulated a large collection of plants and had done a series of illustrations and plates.

This became especially important after his original collections, estimated to consist of 80,000 sheets or more, were destroyed when the Berlin Herbarium was bombed in 1943, during World War II.