Civil engineering at the service of society

Needless to say, there are currently major disruptions to social and economic life. The current pandemic has shown in the past six months how vulnerable society is. At the same time, it is also a testament to people's resilience and adaptability when I see how quickly we are suddenly now working from home, embracing video conferencing and webinars.

In the 1980s, I graduated from what was then called the HTS Rotterdam, in civil engineering. We secretly called it civil engineering back then, but that term was reserved for TU Delft. We may have looked up to that with a certain awe, but there was no equality yet based on EU agreements on higher education. I graduated in the development of digital calculation models for calculating drinking water distribution networks. That was quite new, writing the program myself in ALGOL-60, the successor of Fortran and each line on its own punch card. A mainframe computer at TU Delft then went to work and came up with a result. We were on the eve of the digitization of our industry, which continued via the calculator - replacing the slide rule - to the digital drawing and BIM of today. Even that development has actually already become the new normal, and developments such as robotization, 3D printing and especially parametric design, whether or not coupled with artificial intelligence, are the harbinger of things to come.

But there is more to it than that. Surely the great challenges of our time are somewhat different from the challenges of the past. The Netherlands knows better than anyone the battle with the water, the water that tried to reclaim land again and again. The GWW sector grew out of that struggle, the civil engineer as a counterpart to his military colleague, faced with the task of protecting society from a natural
enemy. That is also what has always attracted me to the profession, being at the service of society.

That society now faces successive disruptions. The pandemic, a recession, climate change and the loss of biodiversity. What makes this time different is the fact that humans themselves are now the cause of many of those disruptions. Geologists now speak of the Anthropocene, a new geological era where human activity intervenes in natural processes. This requires GWW not only to respond, but to act differently.

The rationale of the linear economy, the model of growth on which all our business models are based, is under pressure. The answer lies in a circular economy. However, circular economy requires an entirely different way of thinking, of working together. Only through collaboration can the waste from one company's production process become raw material again for another company. Cooperation leads to exchange.

It is that cooperation, that exchange of products and the connectivity that is needed to achieve that, that is central to the vision of BIG in Pipelines, the Flemish-Dutch association of which I am privileged to be president. The world of pipelines is changing. The demand for additional connectivity is increasing, but that demand must also be placed in new developments. How do you lay a pipeline within the circular economy? Is that a private role or is there instead a role for government? Can something like 'Pipeline as a Service' emerge just as we are now seeing the development of 'Mobility as a Service'? How can pipelines, already among the safest form of transportation of hazardous materials, be made even safer? The latter is important to be able to reduce external safety contours to free up more space for necessary housing development. 

The future will be one of collaboration, of interaction between parties and policy fields. It will be a future where traditional roles will shift, contractors become service providers, and architects and structural engineers merge to become parametric designers. Transitions lead to change, to new opportunities. Let us embrace that future and, from the essence of civil engineering, help society in its survival.

Han Admiraal - Chairman BIG in Pipelines
bigleidingen.eu