Urban engineering

Municipal or urban engineering applies the tools of science, art and engineering in an urban environment.

Municipal engineering is concerned with municipal infrastructure. This involves specifying, designing, constructing, and maintaining streets, sidewalks, water supply networks, sewers, street lighting, municipal solid waste management and disposal, storage depots for various bulk materials used for maintenance and public works (salt, sand, etc.), public parks and cycling infrastructure. In the case of underground utility networks, it may also include the civil portion (conduits and access chambers) of the local distribution networks of electrical and telecommunications services. It can also include the optimizing of garbage collection and bus service networks. Some of these disciplines overlap with other civil engineering specialties, however municipal engineering focuses on the coordination of these infrastructure networks and services, as they are often built simultaneously (for a given street or development project), and managed by the same municipal authority.

Modern municipal engineering finds its origins in the 19th-century United Kingdom, following the Industrial Revolution and the growth of large industrial cities. The threat to urban populations from epidemics of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhus lead to the development of a profession devoted to "sanitary science" that later became "municipal engineering".

A key figure of the so-called "public health movement" was Edwin Chadwick, author of the parliamentary report "The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population", published in 1842.

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