Klinenberg is a sociologist who, in Palaces for the People (2018), sets out to popularize his concept of “social infrastructure” — mostly physical places that create the conditions for relationships to form. Libraries, parks, playgrounds, community gardens, but also pubs, or (in the US, and only in certain places specifically) barbershops. The thesis is simple: when these places dwindle, society falls apart and becomes markedly more fragile; when they’re strong, people survive even extreme situations.
The book is at its strongest where Klinenberg draws on his own fieldwork from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Comparing mortality between neighbouring districts that differed essentially only in the density of public places where people mingled is the kind of evidence that sticks with you and makes you think “yes, I really should be going out among people”. That passage alone is worth reading the whole book for.
The weakest part, conversely, is the structural analysis — any broader understanding of why things are the way they are. A textbook example is Carnegie and his 2,509 libraries. They certainly carry some value and it’s great that someone set them up; only Carnegie built his fortune in a way that wasn’t exactly knitting society together, and on top of that he often created a fresh problem: financing buildings, especially in smaller towns, commonly ended with the enthusiastic municipality having the building put up but lacking money for books, librarians, and maintenance. It’s a fine demonstration that building public infrastructure is hard, requires ongoing care and resolve, and that relying on billionaire philanthropy doesn’t really sound like an ideal plan either.
Klinenberg, however, deliberately doesn’t go to this level of context and difficulty — and I think that’s for the best. He works at the level of symptoms and their possible remedies; the diseases and pathologies leading to the absence of social infrastructure are, moreover, very varied depending on location. A focus purely on how to even detect deficits in social infrastructure and how they can be patched in various, relatively cheap ways is, I think, reasonable, and in some way a decent foundation for action.
And the notes on how to make sure an open space stays genuinely open are good. It’s not enough to put up a building: people need to come, new people need to keep coming, and someone has to curate the whole thing. That doesn’t only apply to libraries, but to every community. Though the extent to which communities can differ is only sketched here, and it’s occasionally a little odd where the author sees the boundaries.
In the Czech context the book works fine, too. The potential for places of encounter certainly exists here. Not every library or kulturák will fulfil it, though; and hobby communities, however lively, deal in the overwhelming majority only with the narrow scope of their hobby. But maybe that’s a path too: just like sports grounds. Two people who’d never reach each other in politics meet on a football pitch or at a board-games club, no big deal.
What rubbed me the wrong way in the end, though, was the structure. It’s not really connected, the individual snapshots of life don’t have an entirely clear context, and personally I really don’t need moving, concrete vignettes from people’s lives. Two would do me just fine — great, I get it, we need social infrastructure, now let’s figure out how to get it. Maybe it works for other readers; for me it was mostly tiring.
But if you’re into some basic urbanism and “how people live”, well, heck yes, give it a read, it’s good stuff.