Infrastructures

Infrastructure refers to the fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function. It typically characterises technical structures such as roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, and so forth, and can be defined as "the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions."

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word infrastructure has been used in English since 1887 and in French since 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 by 1970 was adopted by urban planners in its modern civilian sense .

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 contributed to an increase in infrastructure asset management and maintenance planning in the US. Public-policy discussions have been hampered by lack of a precise definition for infrastructure.

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