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How “Civilized” is Civil Engineering?
This is a blog about a section of my paper Street-Level Urban Gravity: A Quantum System Approach to Human-Centered Urban Space Design | Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation. It is a theoretical paper and dive into some philosophical questions about how we model walkability and urban area in a city in general. The section 2 of the paper is my argument on the evolution of civil engineering. Anyone in the same field as me, Architecture, Urban Design, Philosophy, etc. and wish to cite my take, please cite the published paper instead.
Civil engineering, a discipline that has been instrumental in shaping the built environment, has evolved significantly over the centuries. Its roots can be traced back to the 14th century when the term “engineer” was associated with military-related activities1. However, it was during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries that civil engineering began to emerge as a distinct discipline, serving civilians rather than the military.
The first institution for teaching civil engineering was established in France in 1747, marking the formal recognition and specialization of the field. Engineers such as John Smeaton and Thomas Telford played vital roles in establishing civil engineering as a separate profession. In 1818, the Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in London, with Thomas Telford becoming its first president in 1820. The institution received a Royal charter in 1828, formally recognizing civil engineering as a profession.
In recent years, as civilization advances and populations continue to grow, the role of civil engineering in shaping and sustaining urban areas has become increasingly important. The scope of civil engineering has expanded to encompass a much wider range of infrastructure, consider the interdependencies between infrastructure systems, and place front and center consideration for the goods and people that flow over and use infrastructure, as well as the services that infrastructure provides.
If you have read Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Klinenberg), you might be familiar with the concept of social infrastructure, which refers to physical…
