人类在其发展过程中倾注了大量的人力、物力、财力建设基础设施 ,希图构筑理想生存环境。但基础设施为人类带来了什么 ?对人类的发展产生了何种影响 ?如何认识基础设施在人类生存环境演化中的作用 ?本文从积极角度阐述了基础设施与人类生存环境之关系 ,透视了基础设施在活动空间扩展、资源共享和生存环境优化方面的作用与意义。

Infrastructure is a system which supports the activity of human beings. In order to improve their living environment, human beings always expend huge capital to construct infrastructure. Without doubt, infrastructure has been playing important roles in improving human living conditions, and human activity more and more depends on infrastructure and infrastructure service. However, there is little research to appraise the influence of infrastructure to human activity. In this paper, the relations between infrastructure and human living environment are studied systematically. The paper points out that the roles of infrastructure in improving human living environment concentrate in three aspects: firstly, as a basic condition, infrastructure supports the expansion of living space. Due to the development of modern infrastructure, personal daily activity space has been expanded over 20 times. The travel time from Beijing to Shanghai, for instance, has been reduced to less 2 hours by air at present from 150 hours in the middle of nineteen century. Infrastructure leads to rational and efficient utility of living space and changes the concepts of relation between time and space of human beings. Secondly, infrastructure promotes the share of resources around the world. Statistics show that there are several billion tons of goods exchanged among countries due to the support of railway and maritime infrastructure. Infrastructure has increased human capacity and promoted efficiency in resources sharing. Thirdly, infrastructure has roles to optimize living environment. A lot of non productive infrastructures have been given more important attention to improve natural environment.