Short answers, pulled from the story.
Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area and that enable its economy, households, and firms to function. It includes roads, railways, bridges, airports, public transit, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunications, including Internet connectivity and broadband access.
Hard infrastructure is the physical plant and networks needed for a modern industrial society, such as utilities, waste management, transport facilities, and telecom networks. Soft infrastructure is the institutions that maintain economic, health, social, environmental, and cultural standards, including educational programs, official statistics, parks, law enforcement, and emergency services.
The United States received a rating of D-plus on its infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The organization grades sixteen categories every two to four years and attributes the aging condition to governmental neglect and inadequate funding.
From the 1930s to 2019, the United States went from spending 4.2 percent of GDP to 2.5 percent of GDP on infrastructure. Compared to global GDP percentages it is tied for second-to-last place, with an average of 2.4 percent, and state and local governments account for roughly seventy-five percent of public infrastructure spending.
Concrete production contributes up to eight percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and uses a tenth of the world's industrial water. Concrete is the most common infrastructure material, used at twice the volume of all other building materials combined, yet it only lasts fifty to one hundred years.
Masdar City is a proposed zero emission smart city to be built in the United Arab Emirates. It will feature sustainable infrastructure including solar energy, innovative water collection from sources such as groundwater and seawater, waste conversion into fertilizer, and a car-free design built around a bike lane network.
Infrastructure investments average thirty to forty percent returns for telecommunications, over forty percent for electricity generation, and eighty percent for roads. Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute consider the lack of infrastructure one of the most significant limitations on economic growth in many developing countries.