Social Infrastructure for Common Ground

“What kind of infrastructure is needed for people to make sense of the complexities of reality? …We need spaces with which to acknowledge that we’re living in extraordinarily precarious times, and they have effects on us spiritually and emotionally. And we need ways to make sense of them and heal around them.” — Kenny Bailey

On the most recent episode of The Move podcast, Kenny Bailey of Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si) discussed the need for spaces where individuals and diverse publics can come together to grapple with life and democracy’s most difficult struggles and to build relationships and common ground. These spaces, including neighborhood coffee shops, libraries, and churches, serve as the venues of our shared experiences, and are more important than ever in healing a divided democracy.

Yet when our democracy needs these “third spaces” most, public funding for libraries, cultural institutions, and parks is declining and threatens to weaken some of the most essential elements of this infrastructure.

Eric Klinenberg, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, has made his career in advocating for these sorts of spaces, what he calls “social infrastructure,” and draws our attention to this critical crisis in his newly released book, Palaces for People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality.

Social infrastructure for Klinenberg consists of the same shared spaces described by Kenny Bailey. Klinenberg’s book takes us through a wealth of these spaces — from churches helping folks recover after Hurricane Harvey in Houston, to senior citizens and young adults forming bonds in libraries in Brooklyn, and even to teenagers finding community in virtual spaces.

In all of these cases, the possibility of long-term and recurring interaction is essential to building a cooperative public and a lasting social infrastructure. The ability to linger and sustain interaction with new people in these spaces allows not only for the building of relationships, but as Klinenberg states in a recent article in The Atlantic, “learning to deal with…differences in a civil manner.”

Through both digital and physical platforms, social infrastructure can foster the collaboration, problem-solving skills, and mutual understanding needed in an empathetic community, and in a resilient democracy. These are the qualities that Klinenberg believes are as important — if not more important — to our democracy as the physical infrastructures in our cities.

In developing social infrastructure, Klinenberg challenges us to rethink some of our societal values. For one, our society’s fascination with efficiency runs against the lingering and prolonged social interactions that build collaboration and community over time.

In addition, developing social infrastructure means overcoming the exclusionary policies and politics that keep folks from making meaningful progress in shared spaces. In this vein, Klinenberg reminds us of the incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, where employees called the police on African American men sitting and waiting for a friend.

It is not enough, then, Klinenberg says, to merely design a physical or commercial setting as social infrastructure, as one must address the potential for exclusion and isolation of marginalized folks in the public realm. This highlights the importance of being intentional in providing inclusive and nurturing spaces. How can planners, designers, activists and community members, then, come together to preserve and expand these spaces for all?

Klinenberg writes, that we need places like libraries, “…the kinds of places where people with different backgrounds, passions and interests can take part in a living democratic culture.” As our society continues to grow ever more diverse and yet ever more stratified, the places in which we are confronted with meaningful differences will only continue to grow in importance.

Photo credit: Benjamin Ashton.

Originally published at themove.mit.edu on October 4, 2018.