Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 471

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life," by Eric Klinenberg.

Epidemiologists have firmly established the relationship between social connections, health, and longevity. In the past few decades, leading health journals have published dozens of articles documenting the physical and mental benefits of social ties. But there’s a prior question that scientists have not explored as thoroughly: What conditions in the places we inhabit make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships, and what conditions make it more likely that people will grow isolated and alone? 

After the heat wave, prominent Chicago officials publicly declared that the socially isolated people who died had effectively chosen their own fate, and that the communities they lived in had sealed that fate. The mayor, Richard M. Daley, criticized people for not looking after their neighbors, and the human services commissioner, Daniel Alvarez, complained to the press about “people that die because they neglect themselves.” But when I spent time in Chicago’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, I observed something different. Those who lived there expressed the same values endorsed by residents of more resilient places, and they made genuine efforts to help one another, in both ordinary and difficult times. The difference was not cultural. It was not about how much people cared about one another or their community. It was that in places like Englewood, the shoddy social infrastructure discouraged interaction and impeded mutual support, whereas in places like Auburn Gresham the social infrastructure encouraged those things.

Different kinds of social infrastructure play different roles in the local environment, and support different kinds of social ties. Some places, such as libraries, YMCAs, and schools, provide space for recurring interaction, often programmed, and tend to encourage more durable relationships. Others, such as playgrounds and street markets, tend to support looser connections—but of course these ties can, and sometimes do, grow more substantial if the interactions become more frequent or the parties establish a deeper bond. Countless close friendships between mothers, and then entire families, begin because two toddlers visit the same swing set. Basketball players who participate in regular pickup games often befriend people with different political preferences, or with a different ethnic, religious, or class status, and wind up exposed to ideas they wouldn’t likely encounter off the court. 

Social infrastructures that promote efficiency tend to discourage interaction and the formation of strong ties. One recent study, for instance, shows that a day care center that encourages caregivers and parents to walk in and wait for their children, often inside the classroom and generally at the same time, fosters more social connections and supportive relationships than one where managers allow parents to come in on their own schedules and hurry through drop-off and pickup so they can quickly return to their private lives. Because much of our hard infrastructure—highways, airports, food supply chains, and the like—is designed to promote efficient circulation of people or vital resources, it can accelerate the trend of social atomization. Think, for example, about the contrast between a village where everyone gets their water from the same well and a city where everyone gets their water from faucets in their private homes.

Not all hard infrastructure leads to isolation. A recent ethnographic study of the New York City subway system, for instance, shows that people forge “transient communities” as they ride through the metropolis. The daily experience of spending time on crowded train cars rarely leads to long-term relationships, but it helps passengers learn to deal with difference, density, diversity, and other people’s needs. It fosters cooperation and trust. It exposes people to unexpected behavior and challenges stereotypes about group identity. The subway is not only New York City’s main social artery but also its largest and most heterogeneous public space.

By the 1950s, swimming pools had become flash points for racial segregation, and occasionally outright violence, throughout the North. (There were hardly any swimming pools for blacks in the South, and those that existed were formally segregated with official police enforcement.) Wiltse recounts the story of a Little League Baseball team in Youngstown, Ohio, that celebrated its city championship in 1951 at a beautiful municipal pool in South Side Park. The team had one African American player, Al Bright, and lifeguards refused to let him past the perimeter fence while the other players swam. When several parents protested, the supervisor agreed to let Al “enter” the pool for a few minutes, but only if everyone else got out and Al agreed to sit inside a rubber raft. While everyone watched, a lifeguard pushed Al around the pool, shouting, “whatever you do, don’t touch the water!” 

This was not an isolated incident, nor was it restricted to certain parts of the United States. Two years later, in 1953, the great African American film star Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toes in the swimming pool at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, which welcomed her as a performer but banned her, and all other blacks, from the water. The hotel responded by draining the entire pool.

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. Gentrification hardly seems like a strong enough word to describe what’s happened in the Bay Area during the historic tech boom. Housing costs in San Francisco are so outrageously high that few members of the middle class can afford to live there. Research by the University of California’s Urban Displacement Project shows that 47 percent of all the region’s census tracts, and 60 percent of low-income households, are in neighborhoods at risk of or already experiencing displacement or gentrification pressures. San Francisco’s African American population is declining sharply, while low-income and middle-class families are moving farther from urban centers and spending ever more time on long commutes. The impact is apparent everywhere. There’s heavy traffic on local roads and freeways, insufficient parking on city streets and at malls. A few decades ago, Silicon Valley was full of pristine suburbs that provided a high quality of life; today it is terribly congested and on the brink of being overrun. 

For all their emphasis on software engineering, there’s no question that companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple appreciate the value of real social infrastructure: the physical places that shape our interactions. Their campuses are stunning, with verdant gardens, juice bars and gourmet restaurants, manicured athletic fields and exercise facilities, hair salons, day care centers, theaters, libraries, cafés, and ample space for social gatherings, both indoors and out. These are private social infrastructures, there for the pleasure and convenience of first-tier staff members whose color-coded badges grant them access, but, crucially, not for the low-level temps and contractors who cook and clean in the same organization, and not for neighboring residents or visitors. These expensive, carefully designed social infrastructures work so well for high-level tech employees that they have little reason to patronize small local businesses—coffee shops, gyms, restaurants, and the like—that might otherwise benefit far more from the presence of a large employer.