Infrastructure
Infrastructure typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, wastewater, power grids, flood management systems, communications (internet, phone lines, broadcasting), and so forth. In the past, these systems have typically been owned and managed by local or central governments. These various elements may collectively be termed civil infrastructure, municipal infrastructure, or simply public works, although they may be developed and operated as private-sector or government enterprises. Viewed functionally, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, e.g. roads enable the transport of raw materials to the production plant and distribution of finished products to markets.
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.
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Typical attributes
Infrastructure assets generally have the following attributes:
- They are large networks constructed over generations which are not often replaced as a whole system
- The system or network has a long life because its service capacity is maintained by continual refurbishment or replacement of components as they wear out.
- The system components are interdependent and not usually capable of subdivision or separate disposal, and consequently are not readily disposable within the commercial marketplace.
- The system interdependency may limit a component life to a lesser period than the expected life of the component itself.
- The assets have a high initial cost and a value which is difficult to determine.
Critical 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.
History
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.
See also
- Asset Management Plan
- Critical infrastructure
- Infrastructure Asset Management
- Pseudo-urbanization
- National Spatial Data Infrastructure
References
- ↑ Association of Local Government Engineers New Zealand: "Infrastructure Asset Management Manual", June 1998 - Edition 1.1
- ↑ Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/infrastructure (accessed: April 24, 2008)
- ↑ (Infrastructure for the 21st Century, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1987)