Infrastructure typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, wastewater, power grids, flood management systems, telecommunications (Internet, telephone lines, broadcasting), and so forth. Most of these systems are typically owned and managed by governments or public utility companies. These various elements may collectively be termed civil infrastructure. Viewed functionally, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services; for example, roads enable the transport of raw materials to the production plant and distribution of finished products to markets.
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Engineers and city planners generally limit the use of the term infrastructure to describe physical or real assets that are in the form a large network. Military strategists and developmental economist may use a broader definition that includes public services such as schools and hospitals, emergency services such as police and fire fighting, and basic financial services.
The term public works includes government owned and operated infrastructure as well as public buildings such as schools and court houses. Urban or municipal infrastructure refers to systems generally owned and operated by municipalities, such as streets, water distribution, sewers, etc. Public services include both infrastructure and services generally provided by government. Note that Public works and municipal infrastructure may be developed and operated in the private sector or in public-private partnership in additional to in the public sector.
The term land improvement is a general term that in some contexts may include infrastructure, but in the context of a discussion of infrastructure would refer only to smaller scale systems or works that are not included in infrastructure because they are typically limited to a single parcel of land, and are owned and operated by the land owner. For example, an irrigation canal that serves a region or district would be included with infrastructure, but the private irrigation systems on individual land parcels would be considered land improvements, not infrastructure.
The term critical infrastructure has been widely adopted to distinguish those infrastructure elements that, if significantly damaged or destroyed, would cause serious disruption of the dependent system or organization. Storm, flood, or earthquake damage leading to loss of certain transportation routes in a city (for example, bridges crossing a river), could make it impossible for people to evacuate and for emergency services to operate; these routes would be deemed critical infrastructure. Similarly, an on-line booking system might be critical infrastructure for an airline.
Recent efforts to devise more generic definitions of infrastructure have typically referred to the network aspects of most of the structures and to the accumulated value of investments in the networks as assets. One such effort defines infrastructure as the network of assets "where the system as a whole is intended to be maintained indefinitely at a specified standard of service by the continuing replacement and refurbishment of its components."[1] However, the principles that civil infrastructure is meant to have unlimited service life and always provide some specified minimum standard of service are neither inherent to the concept nor generally accepted by the societies served.
In other applications, the term infrastructure may refer to information technology, informal and formal channels of communication, software development tools, political and social networks, or beliefs held by members of particular groups. Still underlying these more conceptual uses is the idea that infrastructure provides organizing structure and support for the system or organization it serves, whether it is a city, a nation, a corporation, or a collection of people with common interests.
Infrastructure assets generally have the following attributes:
The following list is limited to real capital assets which take the form of a network or of a critical node used by vehicles, or for the transmission of electro-magnetic waves, and which serve the function of conveyance or channelling of people, vehicles, fluids, energy or information. Infrastructure systems include both the physical assets and the control systems and software required to operate, manage and monitor the systems.
Note that certain systems or facilities that are similar to infrastructure are not included in this list because they are essentially services performed by people (commuter bus services, garbage collection services, emergency services) or they are facilities that are not necessarily part of or in the form of a network (parks, sports facilities), or they are essentially privately-owned industrial plants that do not necessarily depend on a fixed distribution network (oil refineries). However solid waste disposal facilities were included because they are often the critical nodal points of a network-like public service (garbage collection), and are usually publicly owned or heavily regulated. Telecommunication systems are included if their function is limited to the conveyance of information (telephone system), but not if their function includes supplying the content of that information (TV or radio networks).
According to etymology online [2], the word infrastructure has been around since 1927 and meant: The installations that form the basis for any operation or system. Other sources, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, trace the word's origins to earlier usage, originally applied in a military sense. The word is a combination of "infra", meaning "below" and "structure".
The term came to prominence in the United States in the 1980s following the publication of America in Ruins (Choate and Walter, 1981), which initiated a public-policy discussion of the nation’s "infrastructure crisis", purported to be caused by decades of inadequate investment and poor maintenance of public works.
That public-policy discussion was hampered by lack of a precise definition for infrastructure. A U.S. National Research Council committee cited Senator Stafford, who commented at hearings before the Subcommittee on Water Resources, Transportation, and Infrastructure; Committee on Environment and Public Works; that "probably the word infrastructure means different things to different people." The NRC panel then sought to clarify the situation by adopting the term "public works infrastructure", referring to "...both specific functional modes - highways, streets, roads, and bridges; mass transit; airports and airways; water supply and water resources; wastewater management; solid-waste treatment and disposal; electric power generation and transmission; telecommunications; and hazardous waste management - and the combined system these modal elements comprise.
A comprehension of infrastructure spans not only these public works facilities, but also the operating procedures, management practices, and development policies that interact together with societal demand and the physical world to facilitate the transport of people and goods, provision of water for drinking and a variety of other uses, safe disposal of society's waste products, provision of energy where it is needed, and transmission of information within and between communities."[3]
In subsequent years, the word has grown in popularity and been applied with increasing generality to suggest the internal framework discernible in any technology system or business organization.
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