Industrial Revolution: The Role Of Advancements In Urban Construction

Introduction: Urban infrastructure today has come to mean the system of public works in a city which includes its transit networks, water and waste disposal facilities, power systems, and public buildings and parks and recreation. Before industrial revolution, however, these works were not always responsibilities for cities to fulfill for the public; waste disposal, drinking water, road construction, and other elements of urban infrastructure today were largely individual responsibilities or private works. The shift from individual to public responsibility came with the 19th and 20th centuries, when the rise in urban population made these tasks more labor and cost efficient and sanitary for municipal governments to carry out, rather than individuals.

This did, however, bring to light the need for further education in civil and mechanical engineering, which brought about a growth in interest in engineering by the time of the central city. Advancements in chemical engineering, for example, introduced steel as a building material. While iron as a construction material was a dramatic improvement to bridge technology and cemented the place of metals in urban construction, it lacked the tensile strength of steel, which allowed the construction of larger, longer, and stronger

The boom was followed by massive construction and renovation of vehicle worthy roads in urban city centers, as well as highways connecting city centers to suburban residential areas. The mileage of highways across the United States doubled within one decade. These new transportation networks made the subsequent migration from cities to suburban residential areas possible, as these new residential areas were entirely dependent on automobile transportation. In the post-war era, many returning soldiers took advantage of these transportation systems to settle in suburban neighborhoods, contributing to the expansion of suburban populations, and the dwindling of urban populations. Development in suburban infrastructure included many of the elements in cities, such as paved roads, electricity grids, sewage systems, water delivery systems, and, with advances in telegraphy and telephones, communication systems. All this led to a massive increase in infrastructure, both in scale of construction as well as in the reach of the infrastructure across the