In February 2017, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a six-thousand-word open letter on the site he created. It’s addressed “To our community,” and within a few sentences Zuckerberg asks his company’s two billion or so users a straightforward question: “Are we building the world we all want?”1
The answer was self-evident.
If there’s a core principle in Zuckerberg’s worldview, it’s that human beings make progress when we break down social and geographic divisions and form larger, more expansive moral communities. “History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers—from tribes to cities to nations,” he claims. “At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.”
As CEO of one of the world’s most profitable and fastest-growing corporations, Zuckerberg is generally cautious about making explicitly partisan statements. But in the 2016 campaign he had denounced the “fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others,” and a few weeks before posting his letter, he condemned Trump’s executive order to ban immigrants from selected Middle Eastern nations: “We should … keep our doors open to refugees and those who need help. That’s who we are.”2 Zuckerberg’s letter, released during this unusually public conflict with the new president, was meant to be Facebook’s new mission statement as well as its blueprint for how to rebuild society in a tumultuous, potentially authoritarian age.
“In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” he explained. Facebook, as Zuckerberg sees it, is uniquely capable of bridging our social divisions. He recognizes that, where they remain popular, churches, sports teams, unions, and other civic groups deliver the social benefits that he wants Facebook to generate: “They provide all of us with a sense of purpose and hope; moral validation that we are needed and part of something bigger than ourselves; comfort that we are not alone and a community is looking out for us; men-torship, guidance and personal development; a safety net; values, cultural norms and accountability; social gatherings, rituals and a way to meet new people; and a way to pass time.” Yet he also argues that, in these dark times marked by the “striking decline” of group membership since the 1970s, “online communities are a bright spot.” At Facebook, Zuckerberg writes, “our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”
Zuckerberg’s first promise is to develop better algorithms for predicting which kinds of “very meaningful” Facebook communities (those that “quickly become the most important part of our social network experience”) would benefit its users, and to “help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.” His second promise is to “expand groups to support sub-communities,” people who care about the same sports teams, television shows, video games, and the like. His third is to “reinforce our physical communities by bringing us together in person to support each other.”
Zuckerberg tells readers how Facebook’s social infrastructure will promote health and safety, and again it involves getting people to do more things online. Using artificial intelligence, the company will “help our community identify problems before they happen.” He says that Facebook has “built infrastructure to show Amber Alerts,” that it has “built infrastructure to work with public safety organizations,” and “built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we’re safe and check on friends who might be affected by an attack or natural disaster.”
Zuckerberg wants to reinvigorate democracy. He sees Facebook as a tool for helping people vote, speak out, and organize. He envisions it generating new ways for people around the world to participate in collective governance, new ways to achieve openness, transparency, and, more ambitiously, a renewed commitment to the common good.
Zuckerberg’s rhetoric is as grandiose as we’d expect from a man whose company has billions of active users and a market value around $500 billion. But the vision of social infrastructure that he endorses is flimsy. Social media, for all their powers, cannot give us what we get from churches, unions, athletic clubs, and welfare states. They are neither a safety net nor a gathering place. In fact, insider accounts from Silicon Valley tech companies establish that keeping people on their screens, rather than in the world of face-to-face interaction, is a key priority of designers and engineers. Facebook can, and occasionally does, help us find people with whom we build relationships in real life, and perhaps someday it will improve. In early 2018, Zuckerberg posted an acknowledgment that Facebook “is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other,” and he pledged to change the site even if it meant that “the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down.”3 But no matter how the site’s designers tweak Facebook content, the human connections we need to escape danger, establish trust, and rebuild society require recurrent social interaction in physical places, not pokes and likes with “friends” online.
It was disingenuous for Zuckerberg to claim that Facebook, like the social organizations that he sees declining, promotes the kinds of values, cultural norms, and systems of accountability that democracy requires. Because when Zuckerberg wrote his open letter he already knew what Facebook would not acknowledge until the US Congress effectively forced a confession: During the most divisive and consequential presidential election in recent history, Russian propagandists had used Zuckerberg’s so-called social infrastructure to buy more than three thousand fake news ads that reached at least ten million people. Thanks to Facebook’s technology, the Russians—as well as alt-right organizations intent on spreading misinformation inside the United States—could target their campaign to swing-state voters. The organizations behind these ads did not merely want to manipulate citizens and suppress turnout in communities likely to support the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. They also aimed to sow social divisions that would undermine Americans’ faith in democracy, and they made similar efforts to wreak havoc in open societies around the world. Facebook, whose algorithms amplify extreme, emotional messages that stoke polarization and downplay more nuanced, deliberative posts, was ideally suited for the job.
Since the 2016 election, Facebook and other tech companies have made major investments in a lobbying campaign to stave off regulations that would require them to disclose who is purchasing political advertising. Zuckerberg’s team has portrayed the Russians’ ability to manipulate social media for their political project as a technical problem that can be fixed with engineering. More fundamentally, however, the election and the subsequent congressional hearings with high-tech leaders revealed that the companies that manage large-scale, for-profit communications infrastructures are set up to prioritize generating revenue above delivering public goods. Publicly traded corporations, including Facebook, are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and while some CEOs define value expansively, most focus on the bottom line.
Zuckerberg surely didn’t want his company to facilitate malevolent intervention into the democratic process; and yet, as investigative reporters discovered, Facebook’s advertising salespeople and engineers made great efforts to help domestic political advocacy groups, including the anti-Clinton, anti-Islam organization Secure America Now, reach their targeted audiences.4 No matter their political preferences, Facebook employees had a simple reason for doing this: Winning advertisers is their job. Promoting democracy isn’t. During the 2016 campaign, Facebook made a negligible profit from accepting paid political ads from groups associated with the Russian government and the alt-right. American democracy, and the global community that Zuckerberg says he is committed to building, suffered a devastating loss.
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.5 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.
Some companies have made modest efforts to improve the surrounding social infrastructure. Google, for instance, built new soccer fields, gardens, and bike paths around its headquarters in Mountain View, and Sergey Brin, a cofounder, subsidizes leases for proprietors of small shops that cater to families in properties he owns nearby. In July 2017, Facebook, facing pressure from employees who were exhausted from long commutes and from neighbors in East Menlo Park who’d grown fed up with congestion around its growing campus, proposed developing a campus extension. The “village,” designed by star architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA New York, would link new offices with housing, retail outlets, parkland, and, crucially, a grocery store for an area that, despite Facebook’s massive presence, remains a food desert.6 Zuckerberg hopes to open the extension by 2021, but—if the comments they’ve made in public forums and news articles are any indication—residents of East Menlo Park would prefer that the municipal government slow down and address their concerns first. Why, they ask, should the city approve Facebook’s expansion without securing funds to renovate their dilapidated schools, parks, and fields? How will the city mitigate the traffic and pollution that seem certain to increase as thousands more employees come into the area? What can Facebook do to make sure that its plans are good for the community, and not just the company? Does Facebook really care?
Facebook’s attempt to win over local support for its new developments has been unsuccessful in part because the company has done so little to improve the local social infrastructure since it moved into Menlo Park. Although people who purchased houses before the tech companies arrived would surely profit if they wanted to sell and move out of the region, rising real estate prices don’t do anything to improve the lives of residents and workers. For them, the biggest daily impact of being close to corporations like Facebook is being stuck in traffic, often behind the private buses that shuttle workers to and from campus. The buses, perhaps more than Facebook’s famous blue and white logo, have become the most potent symbol of what tech leaders are doing all over the Bay Area: building private social infrastructures that help their companies prosper on top of public ones that urgently need repair, and telling everyone in “the community” to trust that it’s for the common good.
It’s not surprising that Silicon Valley titans are so intent on persuading the public that the things they do to advance their corporate interests are actually meant to make the world more peaceful, just, and humane. The executives who run oil, finance, and auto-mobile companies have said the same kinds of things for decades. But it’s off-putting to see Zuckerberg doing it so brazenly, since he built Facebook on the idea that social media require openness and transparency. At this point, we all know what the game is, and it’s insulting to be told that each new revenue-generating Facebook product—the messaging app for children under age thirteen, for instance—is really on offer because the company wants society to flourish.
I don’t doubt that, in addition to his interest in accumulating more wealth and power, Zuckerberg has good intentions. He has championed experiments that provide a “universal basic income” in communities where decent-paying jobs are becoming scarce. In 2015, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (a limited liability company rather than a traditional foundation, which requires owners to give away 5 percent of the endowment every year and cannot invest in profit-seeking ventures). The couple has pledged to donate 99 percent of their shares in Facebook to the charity; at the time of the announcement, analysts estimated the value of these shares at $45 billion over their life span. Chan and Zuckerberg have also pledged to give $3 billion in the next decade to a project that aims to “cure all disease” by the end of the twenty-first century. They’ve already opened the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub, a research center in San Francisco where engineers, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, and other scientists from Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, are collaborating on a variety of health-related projects. They’ve given $24 million to a start-up that trains software developers in Africa and made a $50 million investment in a learning app designed to help children in India.
These are admirable projects, and together they may well save or improve millions of lives. But today, as Zuckerberg’s open letter to Facebook users acknowledges, there are urgent problems in the world—from isolation and polarization to runaway inequality in health, education, and the capacity to deal with climate change—and many of them are visible in Silicon Valley’s own backyard. It’s naive to claim that better algorithms and meaningful Facebook community groups will help us make any real advances on these issues. Despite—or maybe precisely because of—the fact that we spend so much time on screens and the Internet, we desperately need common places where people can come together, participate in civil society, and build stronger social bonds. Unless we invest in real social infrastructures, the answer to Zuckerberg’s question—“Are we building the world we all want?”—will remain decidedly no.
Neither Zuckerberg nor any other twenty-first-century corporate leader bears individual responsibility for the sorry state of our social infrastructure. But it’s worth noting that in earlier historical moments, when a small number of business leaders made enormous fortunes while much of society struggled to satisfy basic human needs, great philanthropists used their wealth and power to build places that created opportunities for everyone and that didn’t double as profit-seeking ventures. Consider the railway and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. He was a true “robber baron,” who allowed managers to hire hundreds of armed Pinkerton detectives and violently suppress unionized workers during the Homestead strike, and lobbied fiercely against the income tax and other government efforts to address inequality. Yet Carnegie gave away so much of his fortune that the Philanthropy Roundtable, the leading network of charitable donors in the United States, says he “may be the most influential philanthropist in American history.” His contributions, they write, are “without peer.”7
Entrepreneurs have amassed vast fortunes in the new information economy, and yet no one has come close to doing what Carnegie did between 1883 and 1929, when he funded construction of 2,811 lending libraries, 1,679 of which are in the United States. Today, the Carnegie libraries are set in ordinary residential neighborhoods throughout the world, and they continue to be powerful sources of uplift. Carnegie’s extraordinary commitment to American cities and communities is worth recalling, as are the principles that motivated him. An immigrant himself, Carnegie believed that anyone who had access to culture and education could achieve success in the United States. He knew firsthand that not everyone could be a student here. As a child in Pittsburgh, he had no choice but to work instead of going to school. But a local merchant who lent books to children in his neighborhood changed his life. “It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it, as the founding of a public library in a community,” Carnegie wrote. He funded libraries to provide books, courses, social activities, and relief from the pressures of daily life. He also wanted them to inspire people, which is why so many of the original Carnegie libraries have high windows, vaulted ceilings, and ornate designs. Building libraries “is but a slight tribute,” Carnegie explained, “and gives only a faint idea of the depth of gratitude which I feel.”8
I appreciate the appeal of “moon shots,” the projects with goals like space colonization and immortality that today’s leading philanthropists, particularly those in the tech industry, pursue with such passion. But too many of these initiatives seem motivated by hubris and narcissism rather than concern for “boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it.” It’s hard to find Carnegie’s sense of goodwill and civic-mindedness in today’s Silicon Valley, where the entire industry depends on a technology developed by the government—the Internet—and a publicly funded communications infrastructure. Like Zuckerberg, corporate leaders are always happy to experiment with projects that promote the common good while raising their market capitalization. But there are limits to how much they can accomplish by giving while taking. How much more wealth do they need to accumulate before they are ready to help?
It’s particularly puzzling that so few corporate leaders from the information economy, including those in technology and finance, have supported the library, the primary institution promoting literacy and providing Internet access to those who would otherwise have no way to get online. There are exceptions. In the 1990s, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, which stands out for its investments in schools, health centers, and other vital social infrastructures, donated $400 million to help libraries across the United States establish Internet connections.9 In 2008, Stephen Schwarzman, the Wall Street financier and CEO of the Blackstone Group, gave $100 million to the New York Public Library, which in turn named its landmark building on Fifth Avenue after him. And in 2017, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation gave $55 million to renovate Manhattan’s major circulating library, just across from the Schwarzman building. These are extraordinary contributions, but they’re just a drop in the bucket compared with what cities around the world need in order to rebuild the woefully outdated branch libraries that, despite their old age, still uphold neighborhoods and communities, helping those who aspire to a better life or just need companionship to get through the day.10
Today, as cities and suburbs reinvent themselves, and as cynics claim that government has nothing good to contribute to that process, it’s important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. After all, the root of the word “library,” liber, means both “book” and “free.” Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that—even in an age of atomization and inequality—serve as bedrocks of civil society. Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture. They are the kinds of places where the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.
Not everyone believes this. In recent decades, political leaders driven by the logic of the market have proclaimed that institutions like the library don’t work any longer, that we’d be better off investing in new technologies and trusting our fate to the invisible hand.
The influence of these arguments is reflected in the way we treat what was once a sacred public institution. Today, libraries in most places are starved for resources. Across the country, branch libraries have reduced their hours and days of operation despite rising attendance and circulation, leaving those with weekday obligations like work and school with fewer opportunities to visit. They’ve downsized staff, cutting back on librarians as well as on basic services like sanitation and information technology. They’ve decreased the budget for new books, periodicals, and films.
In most municipalities, neighborhood libraries are in old, worn-down facilities that don’t meet twentieth-century standards, let alone twenty-first-century needs. In some cities, including affluent ones like Denver, the situation is so dire that local governments have been shutting down entire branches. In San Jose, just down the road from Facebook, Google, and Apple, the public library budget is so tight that system leaders recently prohibited users with overdue fees above $10 from borrowing books or using computers. When the fees reach $50, the library sends the case to a debt collection agency. Instead of lifting up patrons, the library becomes yet another institution that’s holding them down.
In New York City, global epicenter of culture and finance, the fight over what to do with branch libraries has much higher stakes. The current battle pits the library’s executive leadership, which is anxious about the system’s declining fortunes, against local patrons who fear they’ll lose neighborhood branches and specialized services if the system consolidates.
They have good reason to fear. According to the Center for an Urban Future, the New York Public Library system has more than $1.5 billion in construction needs—just for repairs and maintenance on existing facilities.11 In Manhattan, the city sold land and air rights to the beloved Donnell Library, across from the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-Third Street, in 2007, for $59 million, promising to open a new facility within the new luxury hotel and condo building there by 2011. It opened in summer 2016, and while some appreciated its twenty-first-century design, both users and critics complained that it felt soulless, more like an Apple Store than a community hub.
In Brooklyn, where estimates for repairing the borough’s sixty branch buildings top $300 million, the public library board tried to sell the historic, heavily used Pacific Library branch in Boerum Hill to real estate developers, only to withdraw the offer because of fierce neighborhood protests. Soon after, the board voted to sell the land rights to the Brooklyn Heights Library for $52 million, so that another developer could build a thirty-six-story, mixed-use tower that, as in Manhattan, would include a new library, considerably smaller than the current one. Once again, neighbors protested, but this time for naught. The Brooklyn Borough Board approved the sale in early 2016.
The fiscal crisis in the New York Public Library has had more immediate consequences too. Between 2008 and 2013, New York City cut the library system’s operating funds by $68 million, resulting in a 24 percent drop in staff hours.12 A century ago, most branch libraries were open seven days a week; today, most are closed on Sundays, which have always been popular days for immigrants, blue-collar workers, and families to visit. No other institution can fill the void.
Sometimes the market provides partial substitutes. In the Bronx, for instance, the Baychester Barnes & Noble long served as the borough’s only bookstore, open seven days and eighty-eight hours a week (from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday), with ample time for working parents who could come only on evenings and children who could come only on weekends. The store opened in 1999 and immediately began to operate as a crucial social infrastructure, a place where people were welcome to linger and enjoy one another’s company even if they didn’t make a purchase.
Bookstores, large and small, have always been more than just retailers. For centuries—and in the United States, since 1745, when the Moravian Book Shop opened in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—they’ve served as vital gathering places where we can reliably find other people who love good stories and new ideas, as well as shop owners or clerks who delight in helping patrons find literature that they’ll love. They often provide special programs for children and families, sponsor reading groups for grown-ups, host author lectures and signings, and get involved in all variety of civic affairs. They facilitate conversations among strangers, not only by providing safe places but also by giving us so much to discuss.
As a professor and onetime graduate student, I surely rank among the most dedicated bookstore customers. Yet I know people in a variety of professions with fond and vivid memories of the time they spent in local bookshops, and I’m hardly the only one who can track the course of my life through the bookstores that I visited regularly. In Chicago, my parents and I spent countless hours reading children’s books together at Barbara’s Bookstore on Wells Street, and when I got old enough I went there solo, seeking books (like Judy Blume’s adult fiction) that they might not have approved. In Berkeley, where I went for graduate school in sociology, I filled entire afternoons reading my way through the musty used books stacks on the second and third floors of Moe’s on Telegraph Avenue. I was never alone, either. A small world of students congregated there, using the books as conversation starters, just as they do in small bookshops in Hyde Park, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and college towns around the world. Fortunately, my girlfriend, and now wife, shared my passion for extended browsing, and since she had enough income to buy new books, we spent plenty of nights up the block at Cody’s as well.
We moved to New York City around the time my first book was published, and I’ll never forget the pleasure of seeing it on the shelves of the Barnes & Noble stores that saturated our neighborhood: the chain operated four shops within a half mile of us, two on Avenue of the Americas, one on Union Square, and the flagship, on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. We were somehow regulars in all of them, and at the time my wife told everyone that she could tell that, after so many years of graduate student wages, I finally felt some financial security, because it was the first time she’d seen me buy hardcover books. When our children were little we made a habit of taking them to a place in the Flatiron District called Books of Wonder, which, for good or ill, sold cupcakes and coffee along with every picture book we wanted. As they got older we took them on outings to places where they couldn’t help but notice that the world is full of people who love books—and bookshops—as much as we do: the Strand in Greenwich Village, McNally Jackson in SoHo, Kepler’s during our sabbatical year in Menlo Park. The visits could be expensive, but there aren’t many more worthwhile ways of spending what we have.
These days, of course, there are cheaper and more efficient ways to buy books (and everything else), and my family is hardly immune to their appeal. No matter how much we love bookshops, we often opt to make purchases on the Internet when we’re in a hurry or looking for a better price. But inevitably, as ever more people choose online vendors over brick-and-mortar establishments, bookshops close and social infrastructures disappear. It happened in our neighborhood, when both of the Barnes & Noble shops on Avenue of the Americas closed within a few years of each other. One building became a chain grocery, but the other, on Eighth Street, quickly went from being a vibrant community center to the site of a homicidal hate crime, which took place in front of the shuttered building just months after it closed. In late 2016, Barnes & Noble, facing a steep rent increase, announced that it would close its Baychester operation too, to be replaced by a Saks Off 5th discount outlet. The change left 1.5 million people, in a borough whose former residents include the celebrated writers Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Cynthia Ozick, and Richard Price, without a social infrastructure that the community had enjoyed for as long as anyone can remember. A Barnes & Noble executive pledged that the company was “committed to working diligently with local officials to reopen a store in the Bronx in the future.”13 I very much hope they do.
In an era characterized by urgent social needs and gridlock stemming from political polarization, it is tempting to give up on government and reach almost desperately for new solutions—many in our time techdriven, experimental, and privatized, based on faith that the market will deliver what we want and need. For communities without grocery stores, there’s Amazon and Fresh-Direct. For communities without enough corner stores, two former Google employees have created Bodega, pantry boxes stocked to meet local demand and programmed so that customers can make all their purchases with a smartphone. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary,” says Paul McDonald, a cofounder, “because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”14 This kind of ambition helped McDonald and his business partner, Ashwath Rajan, secure angel investors at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox, as well as venture funding from some of Silicon Valley’s leading firms. It’s not yet clear how many Bodegas will ultimately open, but no matter the number, it’s worth noting that their proposal did not merely offend Latinos and threaten the ethnic entrepreneurs whose industry they hope to “disrupt”; it also sparked a backlash in communities throughout the United States, because most people enjoy living near a small shop run by human beings who can engage in occasional interaction or, when we’re in a hurry, just smile and hand over our change.
Today, as our unending interactions with screens threaten to eclipse the moments we share with other real people, communities everywhere are voicing frustration with the limits of life online. Across the planet, people are gaining a new appreciation for the physical places where they gather, and it’s instructive to see the extraordinary things that can happen when coalitions of citizens and philanthropic agencies commit to rebuilding the kinds of social infrastructure that meet our contemporary needs.
Consider Columbus, Ohio, an emerging model for cities that are using the library to help bridge social divisions and reanimate civic life. As the state capital and home to the flagship Ohio State University, Columbus is a fairly liberal city surrounded by conservative counties. Although it has high levels of income and education overall, there are also pockets of deep poverty. One recent study found that about 35 percent of preschoolers in the city were “unready for kindergarten,” because they didn’t have age-appropriate literacy skills, and another showed that 20 percent of households lacked Internet access.15
When the Great Recession of 2008 hit, Ohio state legislators cut spending so deeply that Columbus city leaders feared their library system was in jeopardy. Local branches reduced their hours and eliminated some programs. They introduced a referendum and gave voters the chance to decide whether to issue a property tax levy that would add $56 million per year to the library’s budget. There aren’t many things that American voters like less than property taxes, but the citizens of Columbus had become passionate about their libraries. Nearly two hundred volunteers canvassed the city to rally support for the initiative, leading town hall meetings, running phone banks, and visiting civic groups. As it turned out, Columbus voters didn’t need to be persuaded. By a two-to-one margin, they opted to raise their own taxes. Soon after, the city restored full service in the main building and all the local branches.16
In 2016, the city renovated several branch libraries and the main library as well, adding a wall of windows that looks over its seven-acre Topiary Park, building new children’s rooms, improving the restroom facilities, and creating better connections between the library and the park. That year, as prosperous cities like San Jose cracked down on users with late fees, Columbus took the opposite approach. As of January 1, 2017, the metropolitan library stopped issuing fines for overdue books. “Removing barriers to get more materials into the hands of more customers brings us closer to achieving our vision of a thriving community where wisdom prevails,” said Patrick Losinski, the library system’s CEO.17 So too do the library’s numbers for circulation and in-person visits, which remain among the highest in the nation per capita. The fact that the library recorded ninety-five thousand visits to its homework help centers and nearly sixty thousand participants in its summer reading groups is equally impressive.18 The people of Columbus pay a price to get such strong social infrastructure, about $86 per year for a $100,000 home. But their behavior, at the ballot box and in their libraries, shows how much they value what they get in return.
Libraries are only one form of vital social infrastructure. As we’ve seen, many other public places and institutions play a pivotal role in the daily lives of our neighborhoods and communities. On good days, they can determine how many opportunities we have for meaningful social interactions. On bad days, especially during crises, they can mean the difference between life and death.
Although some important social infrastructures—the church, the café, the bookstore, and the barbershop, among others—arise from the nonprofit sector or the market, most of the vital places and institutions that we need to rebuild are either funded or administered by the state. For decades, antitax ideology has whittled down the public funds we need to build and maintain all kinds of critical infrastructures. Generations ago, Americans took great pride in the power and resilience of our ultramodern systems: majestic dams and bridges, sprawling railways, reliable electric grids, clean waterworks, verdant parklands from coast to coast. Today, these public goods are in shambles. Instead of lifting us to reach for something greater, infrastructure is now a source of shame and embarrassment. Our roads are crumbling. Our trains are slow. Our airports, President Trump says, are “like third world countries.” Dozens of cities, including Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, were recently caught cheating on water-quality tests to conceal potential contaminants.19 Other cities, such as Flint, Michigan, have water so poisonous that its dangers proved impossible to deny or conceal. Countless cities and suburbs have social infrastructures that are comparably toxic, and although the problems they generate unfold in slow motion, they put the entire body politic at risk.
Debates about infrastructure innovation to better protect the public tend to focus exclusively on technology, but designers throughout the world are also innovating at a more fundamental level, transforming the key concepts and building typologies that have long dictated what we develop. Take, for instance, the “Polis Station,” the architect Jeanne Gang’s attempt to transform the police station, a potent site and symbol of the racially divisive security state, into an inclusive social infrastructure that fosters interaction across group lines.20 Gang, who lives in Chicago and has deep ties to the city, had observed fierce conflicts and rising distrust between the Chicago Police Department and the minority communities they patrol so aggressively. Her firm, Studio Gang, began conducting one-on-one and group interviews with civic leaders and local officials in the neighborhoods where residents and police were most estranged, and over time they organized gatherings where youths, neighbors, community groups, and police officers could share their concerns and desires. The process wasn’t easy. For more than two decades, the police department had targeted, abused, and, as the city formally acknowledged in 2015, secretly tortured suspects from the neighborhoods where Gang was working. Officers were not the only ones with blood on their hands. Although the city was hardly a war zone, violent crime remained a major problem in many of its poor and segregated neighborhoods. All of this made bringing the police and the people together a difficult, sensitive task.
When the different sides came together, however, they expressed more sympathy for each other’s predicament than Gang had expected, and more interest in fixing things too. No one harbored fantasies that designing a new building would solve the underlying problems of gun violence and racist police abuse in Chicago, but there were other, more practical ways to improve conditions on the streets. All of them involved enhancing the social infrastructure. In neighborhood after neighborhood, both community leaders and the police complained that there weren’t enough safe places where teenagers and adolescents could play after school. The result was that too many young people spent their afternoons milling around the sidewalks, and though they usually weren’t causing trouble, the police had a hard time figuring out how to maintain order and keep things safe. Gang and her collaborators had been brainstorming design ideas that could help heal the fractured social body, and in one of the gatherings they pitched something novel: What if the police station became a community center, with recreational facilities that young people could use without fear?
The concept was mind-bending: the station house has always been a space of detention, inquisition, and intimidation—all the more so in Chicago, where the threat of violence suffused the criminal justice system. But Gang, a MacArthur “genius” whose accomplishments include building the world’s tallest skyscraper designed by a woman (Aqua Tower, in Chicago), was known for big, ambitious ideas. She’s also something of a local celebrity, with a good relationship with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, for his part, was eager to signal his commitment to police reform, and officers were hoping to get residents involved in community engagement. With interests aligned, they decided to build a prototype. As it happens, the site they selected is in North Lawndale, whose social infrastructure had not improved much since I spent time there studying the effects of the heat wave, and where so many frail and vulnerable people remained at risk of being isolated at home.
By the time Gang got approval to work in North Lawndale she’d already developed the Polis Station concept, both in her practice and in her architecture studios for students. In her grand vision, the Polis Station would include many of the social infrastructures whose benefits we’ve seen in previous chapters: a barbershop, a café and restaurant, a well-groomed park and playground, a community garden, a gymnasium, and a communal lounge with free Wi-Fi, all of which would be open to police officers and citizens alike. In places with more land available, Gang’s designs include police housing, libraries and computer labs, counseling centers, and places of worship as well. The scope of the pilot project in North Lawndale was far more limited. Gang had only a portion of a parking lot to play with, and after listening to the people who lived in the area, she and her team decided to transform it into a basketball court, set off from the street by a line of trees and a handsome black metal fence. It’s a modest but successful project. The court, painted green with an orange key, is well maintained, with features like a smooth surface and an intact net that are hard to find on the dangerous and dilapidated playgrounds nearby.
The station house basketball court is far from the most popular hangout in North Lawndale, but it’s a place that local youths use often, and each time they visit, the officers who work there become a little more familiar, a little less threatening. Hopefully, the proximity will have the same effect on police officers too. Chicago has not yet committed to developing any larger Polis Station projects, yet other cities, including Baltimore, where Gang redesigned the aquarium, are interested in experimenting with a more expansive version of the concept, and New York City is discussing ways to do something similar with fire stations. As in Chicago, civic leaders in these municipalities recognize that architecture alone will not resolve the roiling conflicts between the police and people of color. But it’s hard not to believe that turning station houses into social infrastructures would be a productive first step.
The president of the United States has pledged to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and he’s left no question about his preferred first step: a wall. There’s no simpler design idea, nothing easier to erect. But a wall is both symbol and agent of the very divisiveness that weakens us. And, as many of the political officials who are deeply concerned about illegal border migration argue, it doesn’t even work.
Building walls is as unwise for climate policy as it is for immigration, but unfortunately, the recent spike in deadly and expensive megastorms like Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria has inspired calls for crude coastal defenses that aim to keep the water out. It’s true that, in some places, the irreversible threat of rising seas and towering storm surges requires protecting vulnerable people and places from inundation. But walls, as Kate Orff and the team that designed Living Breakwaters for Staten Island understood, can generate just as many problems as they prevent. They create a false sense of security among those who live beyond them, and when they fail—as the levees did in Hurricane Katrina, and the storm walls did in Superstorm Sandy—few are ready for the deluge. Worse, sea gates and barriers are limited tools that cannot be deployed in every area threatened by global warming. They’re prohibitively expensive in most places, and often futile. No matter how much we invest in efforts to block out the sea and its tributaries, we will, inevitably, leave most of humanity exposed to the elements.
In the densely populated, richly developed places where walls are necessary—including cities like London, New Orleans, Rotterdam, and Venice—policy makers and engineers are beginning to understand that they’re by no means sufficient for climate resilience. That’s why Bjarke Ingels and the group that proposed the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project for Lower Manhattan rejected conventional designs for riverfront barriers and invented “bridging berms” and parklands that bring people together as effectively as they keep the water out. Like the Polis Station, it’s a radical concept: a wall that includes rather than excludes, by inviting diverse communities into a shared social space. Ingels’s design is an infrastructure that is at once hard and soft, social and physical, meant to improve life for everyone, every day, and also to protect against the deluge that all of us fear.
Unfortunately, building hard and social infrastructure for climate security is extraordinarily expensive, and most of the people and places that are already being threatened by global warming lack the resources that cities like New York, London, and Rotterdam have at their disposal. Without substantial financial assistance from the wealthy nations whose consumption has induced climate change, far more than they agreed to give under the landmark Paris Agreement of 2016, poor and developing societies will remain vulnerable to the lethal storms on the way. Today, this degree of financial investment seems unlikely, but if it doesn’t happen soon environmental inequalities will grow deeper and more consequential. The injustice will spark anger and outrage that, like the changing climate and treacherous weather, may well prove impossible to contain.
For now, at least, we can still control our destiny, and the infrastructure we build will help determine how long that power lasts. Infrastructures, as the eminent Princeton engineer David Billington writes, have a way of symbolizing historic periods and expressing dominant ideas about how to organize economy and society.21 Our railroads, highways, parks, and power grids reveal who we were and what we aspired to become at the time that we built them. The systems we build in coming years will tell future generations who we are and how we see the world today. If we fail to bridge our gaping social divisions, they may even determine whether that “we” continues to exist.
Today, nations around the world are poised to spend trillions of dollars on vital infrastructure projects that we need to get through the twenty-first century and beyond. In the coming decades, as the systems we rely on to support modern life become outdated and dysfunctional, the United States will have no choice but to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new projects. In the decades after, it will spend even more. Before we lift the next shovel, we should know what we want to improve, what we need to protect, and, more important, what kind of society we want to create.
Political officials often claim that infrastructure projects are too technical for citizens and civic groups to understand, let alone debate meaningfully in a democratic forum. They ask that we trust engineers and experts to manage things, which ultimately means letting authority flow from the top down. But no president or cabinet member should have the power to make unilateral decisions about how to rebuild the critical systems that sustain us, and history shows that when this happens people rarely get what they want. What we need, now more than ever, is an inclusive conversation about the kinds of infrastructure—physical as well as social—that would best serve, sustain, and protect us. We need a democratic process that, like Rebuild by Design, solicits the active participation of people and communities whose lives will be affected by the projects our public dollars will support, one that respects local knowledge and wisdom as well as technical expertise.
Rebuilding the infrastructure that can help solve the wicked problems unfolding before us requires harnessing all kinds of collective intelligence about the emerging vulnerabilities and possibilities in different cities and regions. We need smart civil engineering to fix the critical networks that are failing, no doubt, but we also need to engineer civility in societies—including our own—that are at risk of breaking apart. It’s an enormous under-taking, and, given our current conflicts and fissures, it’s going to be a long-term project. But we cannot put it off any longer. The question is when and where we will begin.