Infrastructure

Infrastructure refers to structures, systems, and facilities serving the economy of a business, industry, country, city, town, or area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function.

It is typically a term to characterize the existence or condition of costly 'technical structures' such as roads, bridges, tunnels, or other constructed facilities such as loading docks, cold storage chambers, electrical capacity, fuel tanks, cranes, overhead clearances, or components of water supplies, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, and so forth. Infrastructure thus consists of improvements with significant cost to develop or install that return an important value over time.

Infrastructure can be defined as "the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions." the word infrastructure has been used in English since at least 1887 and in French since at least 1875, originally meaning "The installations that form the basis for any operation or system".

The word was imported from French, where it means subgrade, the native material underneath a constructed pavement or railway. The word is a combination of the Latin prefix "infra", meaning "below", and "structure". The military use of the term achieved currency in the United States after the formation of NATO in the 1940s, and was then adopted by urban planners in its modern civilian sense by 1970.

The term came to prominence in the United States in the 1980s following the publication of America in Ruins, 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. This crisis discussion has contributed to the increase in infrastructure asset management and maintenance planning in the US.

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