Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

The preliminaries

• Social infrastructure: the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact.
  • This isn’t “social capital,” which is used to measure people’s relationships and interpersonal networks–instead, it’s the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops.
  • When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, support, and collaboration; when it isn’t, it inhibits social activity, leaving people to fend for themselves.
  • Social infrastructure is crucial, because local, face-to-face interactions are the building blocks of public life.
  • Epidemiologists have firmly established the relationship between social connections, health, and longevity.
• What counts as social infrastructure?
  • Public institutions, such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools, are vital.
  • So are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm.
  • Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established place where people can assemble.
  • Commercial establishments, where people can congregate and linger regardless of what they’ve purchased (like cafes, diners, barbershops, and bookstores).

Social infrastructure generally

• Social infrastructure plays a critical but underappreciated role.
  • It influences seemingly boring things that actually have big consequences, from the way we move through our cities to the opportunities we have to casually interact with strangers. 
  • It is especially important for children, the elderly, and others who are more bound to the places where they live.
• When social infrastructure gets degraded, the consequences are dire.
  • People spend less time in public, and social networks weaken.
  • Crime rises, and the elderly and sick grow more isolated.
  • Younger people get addicted to drugs.
• The US faces profound challenges–including climate change, an aging population, inequality, and ethnic divisions–that we can address only if we establish stronger bonds and develop shared interests. 
• After all, in a deeply divided society, each group fends for itself above all others.
  • To rebuild, there’s of course economic development, creating physical systems that enhance security, and civic (promoting voluntary associations).
  • But these are incomplete. Social infrastructure is the missing piece of the puzzle: building places where all kinds of people can gather is the best way to repair the fractured societies we live in today.
  • Although social cohesion can develop from a principled commitment to abstract values, it thrives through repeated human interaction in shared projects.

A place to gather

Libraries

• Libraries are among the most critical forms of social infrastructure.
• Branch libraries offer something for everyone, but the extra services and programming that they provide for older people are especially important.
  • As of 2016, more than 12 million Americans aged 65+ live by themselves.
• These days, the problem libraries face is that so many people use them, for so many purposes, that library systems and employees are overwhelmed.
• Yet, political officials often view them as luxuries, not necessities. When hard times come, their budgets get trimmed first.
  • Why have so many leaders failed to recognize the value of libraries?
  • Perhaps it’s because the principle behind it–that everyone deserves free, open access to information–is out-of-sync with the market logic that dominates our time.
  • Libraries help children and teenagers feel responsible, to themselves and to their communities, by teaching them what it means to borrow and take care of something public, and to return it so others can have it too.

Schools and young people

• Young people spend so much of their social time online because adults, from helicopter parents to school administrators and security guards–give them few other options.
• Teens in prior generations had more freedom to roam around local public spaces than today’s youth.
• Often, online forums are the only “public” spaces where teens can easily congregate with large groups of their peers.
• Spending time in public social infrastructures, particularly for children, is so important because it requires learning to deal with differences in a civil manner.

Safe spaces

• When criminologists examine the factors that lead to high levels of lawlessness, they typically consider “background” factors like a person’s race, gender, income, and education level.
  • But the situation can be more complex. For instance, take the Pruitt-Igoe housing project of 33 eleven-story buildings in St. Louis, built in the 1950s. Although praised for its modern architecture, it was soon strewn with graffiti and garbage, and residents complained of prostitution, drug dealing, and violent crime.
    • Notably, the housing complex across the street, which was older and smaller, was fully occupied and trouble-free.
      • At that complex, there were more “eyes on the street”–due to how the semi-private gardens and public areas were designed, families felt safe and comfortable. 
      • Everyone shared a compact entryway and outdoor area, making it easy to establish standards for using and maintaining the space.
    • In Pruitt-Igoe, there were too many people in the same public areas, and no one could manage or maintain them, or encourage a code of conduct.
    • Building and landscape design play an important role in reducing crime and in assisting in controlling behavior in housing environments.
      • Larger, shared spaces do not evoke feelings of identity or control.
• In Philadelphia, two researchers and the local horticultural society speculated that fixing up empty lots and buildings could lower the crime rates in the city’s poor neighborhoods.
  • Specifically, they thought that places themselves create opportunities for gun violence. 
  • After abandoned buildings had been remediated, there was a 39% reduction in gun violence. And there was a 5% reduction in gun violence in and around remediated vacant lots.
  • This suggests that place-based interventions are more likely to succeed than people-based projects.
    • There are tens of millions of vacant and abandoned properties in the US.
    • These programs impose few demands on local residents, and appear to pay for themselves.
      • For every dollar invested, simple treatments can return $5 – $26 in net benefits to taxpayers and $79 – $333 to society at large.
      • So, it’s not only more dangerous to leave the properties untended; it’s also more expensive.
• Vegetation also has the extraordinary power to reduce crime in a high-poverty residential development.
  • Researchers found that the greener the immediate surroundings of a building, the lower the rate of total crime. This held for both violent crimes and property crimes.
  • When the green spaces were well-maintained, residents used them often, which meant that there were more eyes on the street and greater feelings of ownership.
  • Those surrounded by vegetation also felt less aggression and mental fatigue.
• The shortage of affordable housing is a national crisis, and violent crime is rising again in some places. Public investment is inevitable, but that has often come in the form of building prisons, and the social costs have been as great as the economic expense. We’d be better off building social infrastructure instead.
  • The main point is that a built environment can help determine local crime levels.
  • Yet, most policies that aim to reduce crime focus on punishing people rather than improving places.
  • We invest little in housing and far less in safe sidewalks and things like libraries, senior centers, and community gardens, which draw people into the public realm.
  • We spend even less to address criminal “hot spots,” such as empty lots and abandoned buildings, that foster illegal activity.

Learning together

• Schools usually work best with small classrooms as settings for safe, searching, and honest debates.
  • That’s how the most prestigious private schools operate; so, why shouldn’t public schools do that, too?
  • Reducing a school’s physical size doesn’t solve all of its problems, but it’s proven to make a tremendous impact on student achievement, as well as teacher satisfaction and positive feelings about the school.
• As for college campuses, time spent there can shape what we want to do and who we want to become. It changes our social networks and work opportunities, and it breaks down divisions.
  • The architects of America’s universities designed them to be social places, where knowledge from all fields would circulate freely and social ties would grow.
• Yet, many schools have highlighted their exclusive admissions standards with elaborate physical systems that separate students and faculty from neighboring communities.
  • Universities that cut themselves off from their surroundings also hurt students, giving them a false sense of superiority and depriving them of opportunities to learn from their neighbors and develop the civic skills that they urgently need.

Healthy bonds

Opioids

• There’s growing evidence that an important and overlooked factor of the opioid crisis is the loss of social cohesion and social support.
• Taking synthetic opioids can soothe physical pain and psychological anguish–unfortunately, they are a good analog for social connection.
  • In a 2017 study, researchers found that communities with strong social capital (measured by things like the amount of civic organizations and the rates at which citizens vote) were more likely to be insulated from the opioid crisis.
• In the 1970s, Switzerland saw an alarming number of its citizens become addicted to heroin. Please note that Switzerland is not a very progressive country.
  • But what was killing people was using heroin alone, unsafely.
  • The government decided that the best way to protect users was to give them the drug in clinics, with pharmaceutical-grade heroin.
  • Once users didn’t have to worry about how they’d get their drug, addicts were able to tackle the larger problems that led to their addiction in the first place.
  • These safe zones were also social infrastructures: places where addicts, counselors, and medical providers interacted regularly.
  • Overdose deaths dropped by 50%, and fewer people chose to take heroin. HIV rates plummeted, and heroin-related property crimes dropped by 90%.

Selling healthy food

• In many poor and segregated neighborhoods, the absence of basic goods and services, like healthy food, causes the most urgent problems.
• The US Department of Agriculture uses “food desert” to describe urban areas where people have limited access to supermarkets or large grocery stores.
  • About 13% of low-income census areas are food deserts, and the absence of healthy food can be just as dangerous as gangs and guns.
  • Living in a food desert is associated with obesity and chronic, diet-related diseases. It makes people more likely to drink soda and eat processed foods that are high in salt, sugar, and preservatives.
• Community gardens
  • These not only provide fresh produce for people to eat, but also provide shade and reduce the temperature in overheated urban environments. 
  • And, they foster interactions within and across generations, resulting in less isolation and more neighborhood attachment, as well as reduce stress levels.
  • Community gardens should be considered a primary and permanent open space option as part of master planning efforts.
• In one study, when residents walked by a vacant lot, their heart rates increased by 9.5 beats per minute, even though the sites had been there a long time and the participants were familiar with them.
  • It suggests that living near blighted urban spaces generates repeated stress and, with them, inflammatory changes and negative effects on cardiovascular, neurological, and endocrine systems.
  • The effects were reversed when people walked by green spaces.
• Children’s need for open-air play spaces are particularly important.
  • Not being able to access open-air play spaces can result in higher levels of child obesity and stress, and diminished skills for participating in civic life.
  • The concern about the loss of civic skills may be surprising, but children can learn behavior that most parents treat as secondary:
    • How does a child decide when it’s time to give up a swing or slide so that another can have a turn?
    • What happens when the wait feels too long?
    • When do kids include strangers in their games and projects?
    • How do they manage disagreement and conflict?
  • Social dynamics among children change when they explore new places and encounter different people.

Common ground

• Even in diverse societies, most people seek out people who are like them. 
• Segregated neighborhoods and workplaces are breeding grounds for stereotypes and suspicion.
  • But, for instance, in industrial South Chicago decades ago, laborers developed face-to-face, sometimes heated but often jovial, relationships with one another.
  • Sociologists have thoroughly documented how deindustrialization devastated neighborhoods, making cities and suburbs even more segregated.
  • We are only now understanding how much damage deindustrialization and the decline of blue-collar communities did, and how fractured we have become.
• While we have a connection with people like us, which is called “bonding social capacity,” we have little to none of the “bridging social capital” we need to live together.
  • Today, almost every attitude or identification has a political tint.
  • Americans have always disagreed about politics, but today our beliefs have hardened, as have our negative views of those with whom we disagree.
  • And, while more people are more likely to marry someone of a different ethnicity, they are also more likely to marry someone from the same social class.
• It is critical that social infrastructures serve as safe spaces for excluded groups, as oppressed communities often endure extreme pressures that inhibit the formation of stable, enduring relationships.
• In general, creating these social infrastructures generally does not require massive funding.
  • For example, athletic facilities attract people of different backgrounds into a shared social space, allowing for fun, competitive activity, and creating relationships that would never have been formed off the field or court.

Ahead of the storm

• Today, cities and nations are starting to seriously face global warming challenges: rising seas, storms, hotter heat waves, droughts, migration, and conflicts over basic resources.
  • But no investment in hard infrastructure will be sufficient to “climate-proof” densely populated cities and suburbs.
  • Social infrastructure is always critical during and after disasters–people check in on each other and help one another.
  • Social infrastructure can also be built into traditional megaprojects, so that expensive systems like seawalls and water basins can also be parks or public plazas where people regularly congregate and develop the informal support networks that we need during crises.
• Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City, was a landmark storm because not only did it reveal the surprisingly fragile physical and social infrastructure of one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but it also directly affected the US elite.
  • The fossil fuel industry has been incredibly successful at promoting climate change denial, but Sandy forced many of America’s most powerful institutions to begin reckoning with global warming.

Before we lift the next shovel

• Social media, though useful, cannot give us what we get from places like churches, unions, and athletic clubs. They are neither a safety net nor a gathering place. To move forward meaningfully, we need to know what to aim for.
• Consider Columbus, Ohio, an emerging model for cities that use the library to help bridge social divisions and rejuvenate civic life.
  • After the 2008 recession, Ohio state legislators cut spending so deeply that Columbus city leaders feared their library system was in jeopardy.
  • They introduced a referendum, and voters approved, choosing to issue a property tax levy that would add $56 million per year to the library’s budget.
  • In 2016, the city renovated several branch libraries, and then stopped issuing fines for overdue books.
    • The library system’s CEO said that removing barriers to get more materials to more customers would bring them closer to achieving the vision of a thriving community where wisdom prevails.
    • The Columbus library system’s circulation and in-person visits are among the highest in the nation per capita.
    • There were also 95,000 visits to its homework help centers and nearly 60,000 participants in its summer reading groups.
    • The people of Columbus pay a price to get such strong social infrastructure, about $86 per year for a $100,000 home. But based on their behavior, at the ballot box and in their libraries, they value what they get in return.
• So, before we move forward with more projects, we should know what we want to improve and protect, and what kind of society we want to create.
  • Political officials often claim that infrastructure projects are too technical for citizens and civic groups to understand.
  • They ask that we trust engineers and experts, which ultimately means letting authority flow from the top down.
  • But no official should have the power to make unilateral decisions about how to build or rebuild the critical systems that sustain us. We need a democratic process that involves the active participation of the communities whose lives will be affected by these projects.

• Why online universities so often fail to develop
• How social infrastructure can help the elderly maintain their health and vitality
• How access to nature and outdoor play areas varies by social class, and how the impact of environmental deprivation on health was disproportionate detrimental in low-income neighborhoods
• How Iceland’s large swimming areas, and its diversity of users, are tied to Icelanders’ remarkable life-satisfaction; conversely, how US municipalities created segregated pools that sowed racial divisions
• The negative effects of gated communities, and the unclear effects of gentrification