The Influence of Culture Value of Civil Engineering Projects on Their Life-Span

Abstract

Abstract Civil engineering projects play a very important role in human’s life. They provide material basis for human’s life, promote economic development,and, carry on culture and history. However, the last culture function is often ignored by people. Therefore, short-sighted behaviors on the engineering projects often happen in China. The direct consequence is short life of projects. The average life of civil engineering projects in China is just 25-30 years. Most research shows poor quality of projects is the reason resulted in the short life. However, the authors found that people’s sloppy and mercenary attitude towards engineering projects also accounts for the short life after analyzing short-lived project cases. Therefore, the authors assume that Engineering Culture View (ECV) also plays an important role in improving life span of projects. To verify this assumption, this paper starts from analyzing engineering projects’ functions, then raise the argument whether engineering culture influence projects’ lifespan. To answer this question, both longevous and short-lived projects are selected to do comparison study to explore the reasons which influence the lifespan of projects from both perspectives of quality and culture values. The core conclusion in this paper is that quality of engineering projects is fundamentally important to life of projects. Moreover, attractive cultural features endow projects with infinite vitality and can also prolong their life.