It’s been more than fifteen years since I moved out of Chicago, but I attribute my interest in social infrastructure to the experience of growing up and, later, doing immersive fieldwork in a great city of neighborhoods. My childhood home in Old Town was directly across the street from the original Menomonee Club, a nonprofit community organization that offered daily after-school programs at virtually no cost. Old Town was gentrifying during the 1970s and 1980s. The neighborhood, which was adjacent to both the opulent Gold Coast and the impoverished Cabrini-Green housing projects, was a site of conflict and occasional violence. I spent several afternoons per week at both the club and the local park where its charismatic director, Basil Kane, taught soccer to a diverse if not especially talented group of city kids. For years I took for granted all the things I learned in this special community center. Now I understand how much it shaped me.
If the ideas for this book come from Chicago, they developed in New York City, and particularly at New York University. Since 2012, I’ve had the great privilege of directing NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, which is as real a community as any I’ve known in the academy, and a rare place where scholars are rewarded for engaging in civic life. I thank Craig Calhoun, IPK’s founding director, for creating such a special environment and en-trusting me with its future; Katy Fleming, the provost, and Cybele Raver, the senior vice provost, for supporting it; and Jessica Coffey, Siera Dissmore, and Gordon Douglas for sustaining it. I’ve also been fortunate to work with a wonderful group of IPK fellows and students, including Hillary Angelo, Max Besbris, Daniel Aldana Cohen, David Grazian, Max Holleran, Liz Koslov, Caitlin Petre, Eyal Press, Alix Rule, Malkit Shosan, and Matthew Wolfe. All of them contributed to this project.
So too did my collaborators in the Rebuild by Design competition. I thank Henk Ovink, our visionary principal; Amy Chester, our indomitable managing director; Tara Eisenberg, Lynn Englum, Juliet Gore, Idan Sasson, and Raka Sen, from the RBD staff; and Judith Rodin, Nancy Kete, and Sam Carter at the Rockefeller Foundation, our major funder. I’m equally grateful to the architects, engineers, scientists, and designers whose brilliant ideas for mitigating and adapting to climate change remain sources of inspiration. Among the many whose work taught me what we can do with infrastructure, and what infrastructure can do for us, are Matthijs Bouw, Pippa Brashear, Bjarke Ingels, Klaus Jacob, Ellen Neises, Kate Orff, Richard Roark, Laura Starr, Marilyn Taylor, David Waggonner, Claire Weisz, and Gena Werth.
I owe a special debt to Carrie Welch and the staff of the New York Public Library, who always kept their doors open and allowed me to camp out in the Seward Park branch far longer than even the most dedicated patron.
I wrote most of this book in one of academia’s sacred spaces: Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. As a social infrastructure, CASBS has just about everything, including private writing studios, seminar rooms, miles of walking paths, bottomless cups of Peet’s Coffee, and dining tables where the conversation has been nourishing important books in the social sciences for more than sixty years. I thank the Hewlett Foundation for helping to support my fellowship; Margaret Levi, the brilliant director who has rebuilt CASBS for the twenty-first century; and her dynamic staff. I’m grateful for the intellectual companionship of the 2016–17 fellows, including Brooke Blower, Ruth Chang, Mark Greif, Andrew Lakoff, Deborah Lawrence, Terry Maroney, Allison Pugh, Jack Rakove, Jesse Ribot, Brenda Stevenson, and Barry Zuckerman. I’m lucky to have spent a year in their presence.
I’m also lucky to have met Julie Sandorf, president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation and a fierce champion of public libraries. In early 2016, Julie came to IPK and pitched a small, collaborative project on the state of New York City’s branch libraries. I raised the bid, and came back to the foundation with a proposal for what ultimately became a wide-ranging project on libraries, social infrastructure, and civic life. Julie and her team have been all in ever since, and I thank them for their tremendous support.
I’m humbled by the generosity of family, friends, and colleagues who took time to read and comment on drafts of this manuscript. Thanks to Gabriel Abend, Sasha Abramsky, Hillary Angelo, Aziz Ansari, Eric Bates, Craig Calhoun, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Andrew Deener, Shamus Khan, Andrew Lakoff, Margaret Levi, Sharon Marcus, Harvey Molotch, Eyal Press, Patrick Sharkey, Rona Talcott, Iddo Tavory, Fred Turner, and Matt Wray.
I owe a special debt to my research assistants from NYU, especially Delaram Takyar, who collaborated on all aspects of this project, and Matt Wolfe, who helped with the sections on social isolation and opioid addiction. After I finished writing, Delaram, who’s now studying law and social science, and Matt, who’s a sociologist as well as a journalist, teamed up to fact-check the entire document. I can’t say I enjoyed that process, but Delaram and Matt saved me from writing things I’d later regret. I hope more social scientists subject their work to such scrutiny; it pays. Kiara Douds, a Houston native, joined Delaram on a trip home immediately after Hurricane Harvey. She connected us with the community at Wilcrest Baptist Church so we could track their emergency relief efforts. Liz Koslov, Xiang Lu, and Katie Donnelly spent countless days observing the social life of neighborhood libraries. I couldn’t have written this book without their hard work.
The same is true of the team at Crown Publishing. Amanda Cook, my ace editor, began helping me see the potential in this book the moment she read the proposal and didn’t stop offering smart, incisive suggestions until the day we went to press. What a privilege it has been to work with her, and what a pleasure it is to collaborate with someone who often understands your ideas better than you do yourself. Zachary Phillips and Emma Berry pitched in with helpful editorial feedback throughout the process. Maureen Clark gave the manuscript a brilliant polish. Molly Stern’s enthusiasm helped me through the final push. I couldn’t ask for more from a publishing group. Thank you.
Tina Bennett and her assistant, Svetlana Katz, have always delivered more than I could ask for from literary agents. They’re the best in the business, and I’m lucky they’re in my corner, wherever I go.
It’s a good thing that my parents, Rona Talcott and Edward Klinenberg, their spouses, Owen Deutsch and Anne McCune, and my mother-in-law, Carolyn Grey, love spending time with their grandchildren. I’m grateful for the endless support they offered while I worked on this book project. And I know that, now that it’s finished, the kids will still rather hang out with them.
Kate Zaloom somehow manages to make time for all of us, and to help me think through all things worth discussing, including each idea in this book. Kate has always had a dazzling mind, but since she launched Public Books a few years ago, she’s also developed a brilliant editor’s eye. Spending my life with Kate makes everything I do better.
So too does spending time with my children, Lila and Cyrus, for whom my love knows no limits. I dedicate this book to them. They deserve a better world, and there’s nothing I want more than to help them build one.
We can only do it together.