Infrastructure

Our infrastructure provides the functional foundation of our society. Infrastructure determines how our communities develop and grow, how we obtain goods and services (and what we pay for them), and even affects our international reputation.

Darrin Grimsey and Mervyn K. Lewis tried to define the characteristics of infrastructure through how basic/key/crucial[vi] it is to the economy and whether it is publicly owned and decided neither of those measures fit well. Definitions of "key", and "crucial", change over time, and not all structures such as roads, bridges, and schools are publicly owned. Grimsey and Lewis then developed a rubric to look at those elements that had once been (or are currently) considered as vital as to be publicly owned. The rubric sorted those items into "hard", or "soft", and "economic", or "social", as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Types of Infrastructure

Economic infrastructure provides key intermediate services to business and industry; its principal function is to enhance productivity and innovation initiatives. Social infrastructure provides basic services to households.

Grimsey and Lewis impose the distinctions between types of infrastructure for the sake of clarity. In reality, there is considerable overlap between types with improvements in economic infrastructure leading to gains on the social side and vice versa.

As "hard", infrastructure is of the most interest to professional services firms- particularly architecture, engineering and construction (A/E/C) firms-that forms the basis for "infrastructure", as used in this paper.