In some places, particularly cities designed around cars (i.e. the last 100 years). Other cities just need things to be upgraded. E.g. I recently moved to Pittsburgh. It's pretty dense in terms of housing and infrastructure--not suburban with big lawns. That's partly because it's hilly. Around here the investment needs to be in fixing bridges and roads, adding some trams (they used to have them!), and maybe tunnels. Also, burying the power lines wouldn't be a bad idea.
On most days I like the idea of razing things to the ground, but probably not around here. We need to actually look to the past in some areas and add the appropriate future, as opposed to nuking and paving.
Fixing requires people to assess and evaluate the specific needs of a situation, engineer and design solutions, and then deploy them. That drives an engineering and problem-solving, educated populace full of professionals, rather than a machine that cranks out endless, throwaway garbage. America has strayed from engineering and fixing towards "scale"--but mostly scaling the last part, the deployment. It's short-term thinking. It's a pervasive baseline mindset shift that has happened because of bad accounting centered around dollar costs and not societal costs.
Isn't this the city that gave a few hundred million away from it's earmarked infrastructure and maintenance budge to the police department over the past half decade?
The problem is that "infrastructure" doesn't just mean roads. It's where houses are. Where schools are. Where food is transported. It's where water and electrical service runs. It's how property is zoned. It's how police, fire, and hospitals are located. It's how municipalities design snow removal and garbage pickup. It's where shops and services are.
In many ways, fixing the infrastructure problem in the US means razing the whole continent and starting over.