According to the urban planning expert, the challenges that people face when building a new city include finding the right placement for the infrastructure, from large roads and power lines to power plants, water treatment plants, and more. The expert pointed out that it's all a balancing game where you have to place the infrastructure close enough to residential areas to increase the service reach, yet also keep it as far away as possible to reduce pollution, noise, and other factors that can cause health risks.

"The challenges associated with developing infrastructure for an existing city are similar yet even more complicated because an agreement is necessary with already-established residents. With all the aforementioned health factors, naturally, no one would be happy about hosting a facility nearby," the expert told Bored Panda.

"Technical problems, such as the quality of the soil and urban density of an area, are always challenging for laying pipes and cables required for services such as electricity, fiber optic internet, heating, sewerage, water, etc. Developing infrastructure often poses a challenge of balancing the installment and laying cost against the longevity and life cycle cost."

The Swedish urban planning expert highlighted to Bored Panda a couple of examples of what badly-designed infrastructure looks like: freeways and stroads (no, no, that's not a typo! Stroads are roads that are too wide and fast to be safe for pedestrian safety and too narrow and slow for efficient car movement). "It’s a widely accepted fact that the late 20th-century approach to mobility, mostly realized in North America, roads being catered to cars and not people, has been a great failure," she said.

"It is completely detrimental to the vibrancy of city life, as wide and sidewalk-less freeways, and so-called stroads, make walking impossible as a means of travel from A to B around the urban area," she pointed out that this also negatively affects other modes of transportation like biking or using public transport. What's more, this leads to the overuse of private vehicles and increases safety risks.

Anthropologist Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a thighbone that had healed after being broken. That's because it shows that somebody stayed together with the person who broke their femur and helped them recover. In Mead's opinion, civilization starts there because it shows the contrast between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom which lives by the law of the jungle where it's survival of the fittest all the way through.

That's not to say that animals aren't compassionate toward each other (they are), but it takes around six weeks of rest for a femur to heal without modern medicine and that's a very long time to spend with a wounded member of the pack who can't feed itself, contribute to the group, or protect itself from predators.

The ‘Infrastructure’ subreddit, founded way back in 2011, is exclusively dedicated to (yup, you guessed it) pictures of infrastructure. From paved roads and other public transit to agriculture, freight, waste management, and water systems. And far more!

You’ve got bridges and tunnels! Sewers and electrical grids! Telecommunications and all the other physical interconnected systems that improve our lives.

Infrastructure encompasses all the marvels of human ingenuity and engineering that make living life far easier and all the things that we really don’t want to do without. Infrastructure is what keeps us worrying about first-world problems instead of how we’ll get water today when the local spring is ten miles away and goes through a pitch-black forest full of hungry wolves.

The more you think about it, the more the term ‘infrastructure’ seems to touch. So while we’ve got hard infrastructure that we can touch and physically use like roads, we’ve also got soft infrastructure that isn’t as tangible but is still vital to the health and welfare of any local community.

Some examples of soft infrastructure can include our network of institutions that are responsible for our economy, public health, social order, and cultural standards. From law enforcement and emergency services to educational programs and even… parks and recreational facilities! These might be far harder to take a photo of, but they’re still essential to civilization. After all, roads and streets mean nothing if you don’t have people working to help each other in whatever way they can best apply their particular set of skills.