Palaces for the People: How To Build a More Equal and United Society

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In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides. Public libraries are largely funded by local tax revenues; their operations are overseen by a publicly-appointed board. There is considerable variation in the level and type of state tax support. Federal support is small in terms of dollars, but is strategically important for the development of tech-based processing networks and distribution of information. Public libraries are a public expense accepted by the large majority of American taxpayers, Republican and Democrat. Klinenberg’s research discovered that it was these neighborhoods’ healthy social infrastructures that contributed to their survival. In these places, things like libraries and community centers provided safety nets and social hubs where neighbors could coordinate ways to help their neighbors. In many poor neighborhoods where such social infrastructure didn’t exist, many people---the elderly especially---died alone in their homes because neighbors did not think to look in on them. Wow. A comprehensive, entertaining, and compelling argument for how rebuilding social infrastructure can help heal divisions in our society and move us forward. I can’t wait for people in my ideological bubble to ignore it!” Sociologist and best-selling author Eric Klinenberg introduces a transformative and powerfully uplifting new idea for health, happiness, safety and healing our divided, unequal society.

Harvard Kennedy School Social Capital Toolkit,” (tiny.cc/socialcapitaltoolkit): A resource providing information about social capital and how it encourages development in communities. As a career public librarian, I often had this thought. Traditional conservatism of the kind that favored localism over centralization has morphed into an antipathy to government at all levels. This radical anti-civic ideology is what the "Reagan revolution" accomplished: spreading the belief that "government can do no good" at any level whatsoever. Too often we take for granted and neglect our libraries, parks, markets, schools, playgrounds, gardens and communal spaces, but decades of research now shows that these places can have an extraordinary effect on our personal and collective wellbeing. Why? Because wherever people cross paths and linger, wherever we gather informally, strike up a conversation and get to know one another, relationships blossom and communities emerge – and where communities are strong, people are safer and healthier, crime drops and commerce thrives, and peace, tolerance and stability take root. Few modern social infrastructures are natural, however, and in densely populated areas even beaches and forests require careful engineering and management to meet human needs. This means that all social infrastructure requires investment, whether for de­velopment or upkeep, and when we fail to build and maintain it, the material foundations of our social and civic life erode. Place-based interventions are far more likely to succeed than people-based ones. What if vacant property received the attention that, for decades, has been showered on petty crime?

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Klinenberg is a professor of sociology and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He coined the term “social infrastructure” to describe the libraries, day-care centers, bookstores, coffee shops, and community gardens that shape our face-to-face interactions, and he has been exploring it for decades—ever since his landmark study of Chicago during the 1995 heat wave. He was the research director for the Obama administration’s Rebuild by Design project, where he worked to integrate social infrastructure into post–Hurricane Sandy rebuilding plans. In PALACES FOR THE PEOPLE, he applies this deep knowledge, stemming from years of both research and application, to diverse communities and challenges around the globe—from Singapore to Brazil and from East New York to Silicon Valley—to show how interactive physical spaces are combating some of the most profound problems of our time. If, on the other hand, you’re not like me, and you already know what social infrastructure is, then I commend you. Congratulations on being that much smarter than me, you smarty-pants...) In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides.

A great example of research made accessible to non-experts… Klinenberg draws on loads of published scholarship as well as his own, weaving it together into a powerful argument…. What Klinenberg advocates is not luxury along the lines of grand train stations of the past but decency and thoughtfulness in designing the spaces we live in.” — Inside Higher Ed In Palaces for the People, Klinenberg draws on extensive research spanning his academic career to highlight the importance of social infrastructure—“physical places or organizations that shape the way people interact” (5). Further, he contends that as “societies around the world are becoming more fragmented, divided, and conflicted” (8), social infrastructure, which is often overlooked in favor of spending initiatives on “critical infrastructure” (transit, communications, electrical systems, etc.), could play a crucial role in repairing our ever-widening divisions. No, my post was simply about how excited I was that our small community would be receiving a new library. One would think, however, based on some of the remarks, that I was advocating for the mass raping of household pets.

Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg

Public institutions, such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools are all vital parts of social infrastructure. So are churches and synagogues, flea markets, and corner diners. Places where people can gather and linger encourage the formation of social bonds and promote interaction across group lines, and if our democracy is going to thrive, we need more of them. Investing in social infrastructure is just as urgent as investing in conventional hard infrastructure like bridges, levees, and airports. Often, we can strengthen both simultaneously, establishing vital social arteries that are also “palaces for the people,” to borrow the phrase Andrew Carnegie used to describe the 2,500 grand libraries that he built around the world.

He talks about the importance of school gates as places where parents can get to know one another and the loss of that opportunity in schools with drive-through drop-offs. He looks at what happens in catastrophes, as when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, and churches helped flood-hit families to save and reorganise themselves. He draws on his own experiences, when he was appointed research director to the rebuilding programme after Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012. Klinenberg describes the impacts that the tech giants in California have on surrounding areas, writing, “There is another community that has suffered devastating losses since Facebook and other big tech companies began setting up shop in the Bay Area: poor, working-class, and middle-class residents of the region, who have been steadily priced and crowded out” (213). What responsibility do large companies have as they expand into preexisting neighborhoods and communities? How and for what should they be held accountable? Contrasting the philanthropy of today’s business owners with that of the tycoons of the past, Klinenberg explains,“Entrepreneurs have amassed vast fortunes in the new information economy, and yet no one has come close to doing what Carnegie did between 1883 and 1929, when he funded construction of 2,811 lending libraries, 1,679 of which are in the United States” (218). Is it the responsibility of wealthy individuals to contribute to social infrastructure? Why or why not? Does the fact that the entire tech industry “depends on a technology developed by the government—the Internet—and a publicly funded communications infrastructure” (219) play a role in their degree of accountability to the public? One of my favorite books of 2018… Klinenberg is echoing what librarians and library patrons have been saying for years: that libraries are equalizers and absolutely universal.”— Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress All of which set me off and made me make comments which I immediately regretted and turned me into that thing I never wanted to see myself become: a troll. This is neither here nor there, however, and completely beside the point. He provides an example of how Englewood, a Chicago neighborhood that was a food desert, created farms to grow local produce with the help of an organization called Growing Home.

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Fine reading for community activists seeking to expand the social infrastructure of their own home places.” An engaging, readable argument for why we should build more “social infrastructure” like libraries, community gardens, parks, sports facilities, etc – but with a curiously meandering structure that flits between ideas and subjects. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

Looking for a good book, album, movie or TV show? We’re happy to recommend them to you! Use this Personalized Recommendations form to send us some information about what you like and we’ll curate a list just for you. This is a book with which few Observer readers will disagree. It champions “social infrastructure”, meaning libraries, urban farms, playgrounds, sports grounds and all the other shared spaces that allow people to make connections, form networks and find ways to know and help one another. It doesn’t like Trump, racial segregation or climate change denial. Its theme is important and timely, but it leaves you wanting more. The aim of this sweeping work is to popularize the notion of ‘social infrastructure'—the ‘physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact'. . . . Here, drawing on research in urban planning, behavioral economics, and environmental psychology, as well as on his own fieldwork from around the world, [Eric Klinenberg] posits that a community’s resilience correlates strongly with the robustness of its social infrastructure. The numerous case studies add up to a plea for more investment in the spaces and institutions (parks, libraries, childcare centers) that foster mutual support in civic life.” — The New Yorker An American Summer* is a powerful indictment of a city and a nation that have failed to protect their most vulnerable residents, or to register the depth of their pain. It is also a case study in the constraints of a purely narrative approach to the problems of inequality and social suffering.Palaces for the People— the title is taken from the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s description of the hundreds of libraries he funded—is essentially a calm, lucid exposition of a centuries-old idea, which is really a furious call to action.” — New Statesman