Significant Events in Municipal Engineering

You haven't given any examples of the things you're searching for that are supposedly turning up dead ends, so I'll assume that you don't know what municipal engineering is:

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.

Look at how cities respond after natural disasters. The water drought in California is a pretty huge deal. How are they dealing with it currently? How do they plan on dealing with it in the future? What does future projections indicate? Look at how cities respond to things like failing sewage/ water/ gas/ electricity etc lines. There are plenty of instances where municipal systems fail. Look at failures by aging, misuse, natural events and how the cities responded to them... Look at advances in municipal sanitation. Look at advances in roadway construction, recycling, construction automation... Look at advances in how energy from a power grid might be distributed throughout a day in a big city and how such a system was implemented...

/r/AskEngineers Thread