My Fave Pods: 99% Invisible talks Social Infrastructure with Eric Klinenberg
Every now and then I come across a podcast episode I want to put in my pocket and keep forever like a preciiiousssssss. This is one of them. I’ve been listening to 99% Invisible for about 5 years so I have a growing cabbage patch of delightful episodes I really enjoy that I water with attention every now and then but this one is particularly important to me, important enough that as soon as I listened to it I went and read the book it was about.
In this interview 99Pi’s amazing host Roman Mars interviews social scientist Eric Klinenberg about his book - Palaces for the People - How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life. The episode explores some of my favourite things - community, public services, civic engagement and best of all - libraries!
I love a good story and Eric had some powerful ones, like his experience as a researcher in Chicago, looking at disparities in how different communities fared through a heatwave. As you would expect the data generally showed that well-off communities did better than poorer communities but unexpectedly, there were also similar communities in terms of socioeconomic backgrounds of residents and access to resources that had very different outcomes. What made the difference? Social Infrastructure.
“Social infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although it’s often harder to see. But Eric Klinenberg says that when we invest in social infrastructures such as libraries, parks, or schools, we reap all kinds of benefits. ”
From community organizations and churches to grocery stores and community services - social infrastructure is all the things that facilitate what we often call community spirit - the quality of being more than neighbours but rather stakeholders in the development and maintenance of our shared space.
Living in a community where this exist in small doses despite the lack of investment social infrastructure, I’ve always had a deep fascination with this concept. I wish we had a community library, parks and more options for accessing healthy food. I wish we felt safer going for walks and that there were more activities we could do as a community. I’ve lived here more than ten years and yet I really interact with the people who live next door. The deeper connections are simply to difficult to build without more interaction and because of that we miss out on the economies of scale - the things we could do as a collective, that we can’t really get done individually.
When I first listened to the episode in 2019 I figured that in our fast-paced, isolated modern world these things might not matter to us anymore but Eric’s example, (and life during the Covid-19 pandemic) remind us that there may come a time when we do need each other. We might need to seek shelter, to ask for help and to offer it to those who need it. We need our communities.
To me social Infrastructure is about quality of life. Eric best explores this idea through the magic of libraries. Libraries can create stimulating environments for early childhood education which is so important especially in places where families and schools can’t afford books.
They can provide safe, supervised spaces for young people after school and facilitate community engagement through designing and hosting community programmes and events. They can be an oasis for vulnerable and marginalized community members such as the formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants and houseless, for example - Eric gives the example of libraries offering online courses especially in English as a second language, CV workshops and even renting out professional clothes for job interviews. They can even, and I don’t know why but this blew my mind - offer seeds. WOW.
For older residents he shares the amazing story of a library that hosts a virtual bowling league where seniors form bowling teams complete with their specially designed jerseys and compete against other library teams, because not all seniors are bookish - some want to be physical and active.
Imagine if that approach to caring for people was embedded into all the structures and systems we interact with daily. Imagine someone wanting to make everything useful, accessible, inclusive and pleasurable for you, from childhood through your silver years? Wouldn’t that make life more pleasant?
I know I’ve been painting a rosy picture so far but Eric and Roman also explore one of the dark roots of social infrastructure - the broken windows theory by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Basically, they noticed that communities with nice lawns and well-kept streets seemed to have less crime than communities with litter, empty lots with wild grass and junk and of course abandoned buildings with broken windows.
This observation led to decades of terrorizing low income communities with over policing and policy that encouraged gentrification which caused Eric to ask, why, instead of all of that didn’t they just FIX THE DANG WINDOWS. Meaning, if broken windows signal to criminals that nobody is responsible for the community so anything goes, naturally, investing in the community and showing that someone is responsible should address that problem no?
The episode doesn’t really delve into this, but I grew up in and live in a rural, underserved community. It’s my view that when governments disregard community and culture there is a cost to the same community spirit that keeps us all connected and safer. Especially in the Caribbean, a region that has been so strategically underdeveloped, where foreign aid often REQUIRES cuts to social infrastructure, we have to fight to keep these resources alive.
I’ve been going on and on about this podcast episode and what it means to me, but I genuinely encourage you to go check it out, give it a listen and see what it sparks for you. Also read Eric’s book for more ideas about how we can practice community together and how as changemakers we can also influence policy to make these community dreams a reality. What’s your vision for your community and/or how are you currently making that vision a reality?
Listen here: Palaces for the People by 99% Invisible
Ideagredients:
Quick tips:
Look for and support efforts at organizing in your community
Consider a special skill you have that could be useful to other residents e.g tutoring, agriculture
Create a personal vision for the development of your community and bring it up in conversation with your neighbours to see if they have similar interests
Look for examples of community programmes and social infrastructure in other communities that you’d like to have locally and think about how you could
Find out what the budget is for development in your parish and how much is spent on social infrastructure then consider influencing your elected officials to spend some of it on social infrastructure
Make social infrastructure a part of your community-based advocacy/activism efforts - e.g what’s the importance of social infrastructure on climate action or gender? Maybe your community needs a women’s shelter and to do some disaster risk management mapping and training?
To read
Eric Klinenberg - Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life
POEM: Warsan Shire - Home
To watch