Infrastructure, Development and Civilization

1.1 INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 INFRASTRUCTURE, DEVELOPMENT AND CIVILIZATION 1.1 INTRODUCTION It is believed that Karl Marx first used the term ’infrastructure;’ referring to it as ’civilization’s founda- tion.’ Wheeler [1] also links infrastructure and civilization in his interpretation of civilization. He suggests a definition consisting of the ’the two inherent elements of civilization’: (1) A settled community of size sufficient to support specialists outside the normal range of food production (2) Public works or infrastructure implying an organized and durable administration. It is apparent that both of these scholars thought that ’civilization’ implied infrastructure and vice versa. Wheeler also equates both to cities. This concern with definitions has not been merely a matter of sematics: implicit in the definition suggested is the concern with process. That is to say: how did ’civilization’ emerge, 1-1 CHAPTER 1: INFRASTRUCTURE, DEVELOPMENT AND CIVILIZATION how did ’cities’ develop, and how did ’infrastructure’ manifest itself in the process and what roles did it play? Infrastructure is a collection and organization of available technologies into artifacts or systems. Tech- nology deals with how things are done or made. It appears to be the catalyst that relates engineering effort to social change. The history of technology is intimately related to the history of civilization. It is important for a civil engineer who is seeking to identify his role in modern society to understand how the influences which have determined the intellectual climate of a period have had their effect on technology and, on the other hand, how technology has influenced ’culture’ -- a recognizable way of life of a group of people including their mo- res, laws, arts, religion, ideas, and artifacts. To a historian, a culture becomes a civilization when it develops most of the following elements: infrastructure, writing, agriculture, urban areas, arts, science and a formal political organization. Civilization is the manifestation of complex society, one containing physical infrastructure and socioeconomic organization. History is commonly divided, for convenience’s sake, into three great periods: ancient, medieval, and modern. Ancient history begins in an unknown antiquity and is characterized by a very considerable progress of civilization followed by a loss of vitality of the ancient races. Medieval history begins with a far lower stage of civilization than antiquity had reached, accompanied with much ignorance and anarchy. Modern history, again, is characterized by the most rapid and successful advance along a great variety of lines, all parts of a common world civilization [2]. The study of infrastructure should, first of all, include the study of those activities that are directed to the satisfaction of human needs and which produce alterations in the material world. Secondly, in the interest of intelligibility, it is desirable to relate those human activities to ordinary political and economic history. To try to accomplish these two goals, this chapter is organized so as to consider: (1) time (three well-known chrono- logical periods in history); (2) space (geographical or political areas such as river valleys in the case of ancient civilizations, empires as the case of the medieval civilizations, and, in more recent history, countries); and (3) important activity sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, cities, transport, construction, and energy [3]. 1.2 ANTIQUITY Prehistory. It is essential if we are to comprehend the present that we appreciate the fact that for the most part, the experience of mankind has been that of a predator. Less than ten generations have experienced the modern industrial society and hardly more than a few hundred the rewards of farming. And, yet, for per- haps two million years humans roamed the earth learning how to cope with the environments they inhabited. Our knowledge of the economy practiced by homo erectus coming from excavations in northern Tanzania shows the regular eating of meat, including that of prey as large or larger than these early humans, themselves. The hunting of large mammals depended on social as well as technological factors. It involved among other things an organized system of cooperation among the hunters who were male and the females who remained close to the home-base nourishing, tending, and bringing up the young. Guarding the home base and looking after the family did not exclude women from the food quest, however, since domestic duties could readily be combined with foraging for plant food and small animal products. Once established this system was self-reg- ulating and long enduring [2]. It was only with the emergence of different variants of the large-brained homo-sapiens some 35,000 years ago that the first noteworthy advances of conceptual life, technology and economy can be detected in archae- 1-2 1.2 ANTIQUITY ological records. The most notable development in the conceptual field was the practice of careful burial with the implication this carries of a personal awareness of death. Rich insights into the aesthetic awareness of the early representatives of modern man is provided by the works of art displayed on the walls and ceilings of caves [4]. Another achievement was breaking out of the frost-free zone to which pervious human populations had been confined and initiating the process by which recent man extended his domain over the rest of the world. Human beings have always been migratory. Sometime between 100,000 and 400,000 years ago man’s prede- cessor, Home erectus, had spread from China and Java to Britain and southern Africa. Later, Neanderthal types spanned Europe, North America and the Near East; modern Home sapiens, originating probably in Africa reached Sarawak at least 40,000 years ago, Australia some 30,000 years ago and North and South America some 20,000 years ago [5]. Whatever the specific factors, the worldwide dispersion of early man had significant consequences. By enlarging the resource base it enabled the human population to expand to a size otherwise impossible. Migra- tion also stimulated sociocultural evolution by making environmental adjustments necessary and by diffusing innovations. It is believed that the process of domestication (sheep and goats) and agriculture (barley and wheat) began in the Near East about 12,000 years ago and gradually spread across Europe as the climate mod- ified. Irrigation Towns. Water supply, irrigation and drainage dominated early civilization in which the surplus of the farm was used to feed the town. Without the fertile silt deposited on the farmlands by the annual river floods, the soil would soon have been depleted and agriculture would not have been possible. The prehistoric farming population, which had slowly migrated into the river valleys, had through cooperative efforts drained the originally swampy banks along the rivers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. Only by cooperation could the dikes be built and maintained, the muddy waters directed over the fields during the inundation, and finally drained off downstream. The practice of farming made it possible to obtain all that was needed within a narrow radius of a perma- nent home base, which increased the density of population and the potential size of groups living in close prox- imity. Another dynamic outcome was the way domestication increased productivity through its impact on the genetic composition of favored animals and plants. This process unfolded in territories with widely different ecologies giving rise to a diversity of human civilizations, each resting on the cultivation of a wide variety of species within the constraints of growing season, land fertility, topography, rainfall and other factors. Urbanization and State Formation. Man’s transition from a food-gatherer to a food-producer was a necessary, but not sufficient condition, for the achievement of civilization. Farming permitted and, indeed, re- quired the regular production of a social surplus. This surplus was available to support full-time specialists who themselves grew no food. This gave rise to urbanization and state formation. The basis for urbanization and state formation is the presence of functional specialization under the following limiting conditions [6]: (1) a surplus of food production with which to feed the class of specialists whose activities are now withdrawn from agriculture; (2) a small group of people who are able to exercise some power to ensure stable and peaceful conditions in which both the food producers and the specialists can produce at their best; and (3) there must be a class of traders and merchants so that the work of the specialists can be facilitated and their needs for raw materials satisfied. The need to account for production and taxes led to the development of conventional signs -- writing. The invention of writing may be taken as the final step in the transition from barbarism, or food-production, to civilization. This conjunction of circumstances -- agriculture, irrigation, urbanization and writing -- is believed to have occurred in half-a-dozen places around 4000 1-3 CHAPTER 1: INFRASTRUCTURE, DEVELOPMENT AND CIVILIZATION B.C.: the Tigris-Euphrates delta, the Nile valley, the Indus basin, the valley of the Huang-Ho River in China, in Central America, and in the Mekong River valley in Southeast Asia [7]. If the first civilizing revolution was agricultural, the rise of cities represented the second great "revolution" in human culture. Urbanization was pre-eminently a social process, an expression more of changes in man’s interaction with his fellow man than in his interaction with the environment. Every high civilization ultimately produced cities and in most civilizations urbanization began early. There is little doubt that this was the case for the oldest civilization and the earliest cities: those of ancient Mesopotamia. By 5500 B.C., it appears that the village-farming community had fully matured in Southwestern Asia. In the next to millenia some of the small agricultural communities on the allievial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers not only increased greatly in size but changed significantly in structure.

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