Civil engineering is more than just construction, it is an important discipline that synthesizes knowledge from various fields such as geotechnical, structural, and hydraulic engineering to design and manage infrastructure. It ensures the safety and efficiency of infrastructure and is essential for sustainable social development.
In fact, the Department of Construction and Environmental Engineering is a civil engineering department. When people think of civil engineering, they tend to think of shovels, and that’s because, as everyone knows, civil engineering is the department that studies construction. But it’s not just construction. It’s the sum of the disciplines that help us build complex, organized structures and manage and operate them. Civil engineering is divided into three branches that are directly concerned with the construction of the infrastructure itself, which is the infrastructure that humans need to live in, and five branches that are designed to make it easier to use, safer to manage, and operate.
The first is shoveling, and the related field is geotechnical engineering. Geotechnical engineering is literally the study of the ground and is responsible for preparing the ground where infrastructure will be built. It involves surveying the ground beforehand and, if necessary, compacting it to increase the strength of the ground to prevent future subsidence. Once the ground is prepared for the infrastructure, the next step is to raise the building. This can be a bridge or a large building, but either way, it needs to be designed and constructed so that it doesn’t collapse at minimal cost. The discipline in charge of this process is structural engineering. Next, when construction encounters water instead of land, the main characteristic of water is its flow, and the effects on buildings are investigated. The last discipline that deals with the management of the resource itself is hydrology. These three fields are called the three main branches of civil engineering.
It“s important to emphasize that they”re not just theoretical disciplines, but practical ones that have real-world applications. The results of civil engineering research must go beyond the laboratory and be applied in the field, where the effects are immediate. For example, experimental results in geotechnical engineering are applied directly to construction sites to stabilize the ground. Calculations in structural engineering are immediately transferred to design drawings and become the skeleton of a building. In hydraulic engineering, the data studied is implemented into the actual equipment and systems needed to regulate the flow of water. In this way, civil engineering is a field where academic research and practical application are closely linked, where theory and practice complement each other.
Other disciplines include environmental engineering, urban engineering, spatial information, transportation engineering, and construction management. Environmental engineering deals with soil pollution water pollution air pollution caused by human activities and helps to operate and manage the above three fields more efficiently, while urban engineering designs and plans optimal urban models with population and installed infrastructure and plans new infrastructure installations. Geospatial information engineering is a discipline that uses advanced surveying technology to establish optimal infrastructure locations and make it easier to use and manage infrastructure. Transportation engineering is the study of managing transportation and movement to make infrastructure easier to use. Construction management is a discipline that has been developed to make old infrastructure safer and longer lasting. All of these branches of civil engineering are used to design infrastructure and manage construction.
For example, the water we drink comes into our homes and requires almost every discipline in civil engineering. In order to get good quality water, we need a water source that contains a sufficient amount of water, which requires the construction of a dam. To build a dam, you need a foundation that can support the load of the dam, which requires knowledge of geotechnical engineering. Solving geotechnical problems requires knowledge of hydraulics to calculate how much water will be collected by the dam, what the load will be on it, and how the flow of water will be unchanged. Structural engineering knowledge is essential to build a dam that can support the calculated water load in the optimal shape at the lowest cost.
The water source from the dam needs to be purified and sent to each household, which requires knowledge of transportation engineering to determine the route and operation of pipes to various households. Environmental engineering is also essential to ensure that the pipes do not corrode due to soil contamination or contaminate the water source. If a buried pipe is old and needs to be replaced, spatial information knowledge is needed to locate it, and construction management is needed to ensure that the dam remains safe for longer.
All of these civil engineering disciplines are needed to design, build, manage, and operate a piece of infrastructure. These eight seemingly unrelated disciplines are actually cogs in the wheel. Civil engineering is the study and research of shoveling, or construction, as we said earlier. However, it uses a combination of knowledge from geotechnical, structural, and hydraulic engineering to build a structure, and then uses knowledge from environmental, transportation, urban spatial information, and construction management to operate and manage it effectively and safely. As such, civil engineering is a collection of disciplines that are necessary for planning, constructing, managing, and operating social infrastructure to improve people’s living environment.
The importance of civil engineering is not limited to solving technical problems. It also entails social responsibility and aims for sustainable development. Social values such as environmental protection, resource conservation, and disaster prevention are at the heart of civil engineering. The increasing number of natural disasters and the expansion of densely populated areas, especially due to climate change, have made it necessary for civil engineering to solve more complex and diverse problems. In doing so, civil engineers must not only possess technical skills, but also ethical judgment and a sense of social responsibility.
So far, we’ve covered what civil engineering is, what its disciplines are, and how they are integrated and used in real life. Civil engineering is never a single discipline. Therefore, if you are a civil engineering student who wants to go deeper into the field, you need to learn the basics of all the disciplines. Once you have a solid foundation, you will become an engineering talent who can build on it, knowing how it relates to your major field. The stronger your foundation in each field, the more creative and effective solutions you will be able to come up with when faced with new problems. This will be an important factor in becoming a professional who goes beyond mere academic achievement and makes a positive impact on society as a whole.
