1 “think cool thoughts”: The quotes here are from Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
2 “We’re overwhelmed”: The quote is from Dirk Johnson, “Heat Wave: The Nation; In Chicago, Week of Swelter Leaves an Overflowing Morgue,” New York Times, July 17, 1995.
3 dozens of articles: James House, Karl Landis, and Debra Umberson, “Social Relationships and Health,” Science 241, no. 4865 (1988): 540–45.
4 they already believe: The quotes in here are from Emanuela Campanella, “We All Live in a Bubble. Here’s Why You Step Out of It, According to Experts,” Global News, February 4, 2017, https://globalnews.ca/news/3225274/we-all-live-in-a-bubble-heres-why-you-step-out-of-it-according-to-experts/; Sreeram Chaulia, “Why India Is So Unhappy, and How It Can Change,” TODAYonline, April 3, 2017, https://www.todayonline.com/commentary/why-india-so-unhappy-and-how-it-can-change; “Class Segregation ‘on the Rise,’” BBC News, September 8, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6984707.stm; Rachel Lu, “China’s New Class Hierarchy: A Guide,” Foreign Policy, April 25, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/25/chinas-new-class-hierarchy-a-guide/; “Private Firms Filling Latin America’s Security Gap,” Associated Press Mail Online, November 24, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-2847721/Private-firms-filling-Latin-Americas-security-gap.htm.
5 soaring urban condominium towers: Martin Filler, “New York: Conspicuous Construction,” New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015.
6 prepare for civilization’s end: Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 30, 2017.
7 “and its home is the neighborly community”: John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; repr., University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 157.
8 “Everything that makes America exceptional”: Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), 12, 22, 283.
9 fairly steady since the 1970s: Peter Marsden, ed., Social Trends in American Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
10 “across persons of all levels of educational attainment”: On the decline of volunteering, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Volunteering in the United States, 2015,” https://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm.
11 alienation from public life: Claude Fischer, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 93.
12 “It is by definition invisible”: Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 380–82.
13 “allows a people to choose their own way”: Ashley Carse, “Keyword: Infrastructure—How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World,” in Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, ed. Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita (London: Routledge, 2016).
14 produce the material foundations for social life: The classic text about how small businesses and commercial operators shape daily social life is Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961). In recent years, the eminent sociologist Elijah Anderson has been writing about what he calls “the cosmopolitan canopy,” places where people from different backgrounds “not only share space but seek out each other’s presence,” and occasionally forge relationships as well. Anderson has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in several exemplary sites of cross-group interaction, including Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market and Rittenhouse Square, as well as in places marked by surveillance, suspicion, and social segregation. See Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
15 “A levee”: Marshall Brain and Robert Lamb, “What Is a Levee?,” https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/levee.htm.
16 quickly return to their private lives: Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
17 largest and most heterogeneous public space: Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum, International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
18 “participator rather than spectator”: MassObservation, The Pub and the People (1943; repr., London: Cresset Library, 1987), 17.
19 people in public can feel like they’re at home: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1989).
20 the air that pedestrians breathe a little cleaner: See Vanessa Quirk, “The 4 Coolest ‘High Line’ Inspired Projects,” ArchDaily, July 16, 2012, https://www.archdaily.com/254447/the-4-coolest-high-line-inspired-projects.
21 an unrelated concern: Several recent books champion infrastructure investment, including Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Move: How to Rebuild and Reinvent America’s Infrastructure (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), Henry Petroski’s The Road Taken (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), and Gretchen Bakke’s The Grid (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); yet none call attention to the value of social infrastructure.
22 “palaces for the people”: Not long after Andrew Carnegie began investing in libraries, Joseph Stalin started his own campaign to build “palaces for the people” in Russia. The most significant legacy of this project is a set of magnificent subway stations in Moscow, each decorated with marble, grand chandeliers, mosaics, and sculptures, as well as a number of housing complexes and social clubs for Soviet workers.
1 strong incentives to stay away: A study by New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation ranks East New York last in Brooklyn for public transit access to jobs within one hour, and among the worst in all of New York City. See Sarah Kaufman, Mitchell Moss, Jorge Hernandez, and Justin Tyndall, “Mobility, Economic Opportunity and New York City Neighborhoods,” November 2015, https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/JobAccessNov2015.pdf.
2 studies of isolation have found as well: See Neal Krause, “Neighborhood Deterioration and Social Isolation in Later Life,” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 36, no. 1 (1993): 9–38.
3 they lack compelling places to go: For the demographic data on aging, see Administration on Aging, A Profile of Older Americans, 2015, https://www.acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/2015-Profile.pdf/; and Renee Stepler, “Smaller Share of Women Ages 65 and Older Are Living Alone,” Pew Research Center, February 18, 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/02/18/smaller-share-of-women-ages-65-and-older-are-living-alone/. On the historic rise of older people who live alone, see Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).
4 health hazards, including obesity and smoking: See Lisa Berk man and Thomas Glass, “Social Integration, Social Networks, Social Support, and Health,” in Social Epidemiology, ed. Lisa Berk man and Ichiro Kawachi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 137–73, and John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
5 social infrastructure that we have: It’s worth noting that Robert Putnam includes a chapter on branch libraries in a coauthored book about people and organizations that are creating social capital. See Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, with Don Cohen, Better Together: Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
6 “major impact on their community”: See John Horrigan, “Libraries 2016,” Pew Research Center, September 9, 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/libraries-2016/.
7 number of hours that people spend in libraries is up too: The data on library usage come from David Giles, Branches of Opportunity, Center for an Urban Future, January 2013, https://nycfuture.org/pdf/Branches_of_Opportunity.pdf. Giles reports that between 2002 and 2011, New York City library program attendance was up 40 percent and program sessions were up 27 percent.
8 San Francisco Public Library: Ibid.
9 “and first responders”: The Pew report is quoted in Wayne Wiegand, Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.
10 “are also spaces for interaction”: Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 115–16.
11 sense of where we belong: On the school as a social institution, see John Dewey, The School and Society (1900; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and The Child and the Curriculum (1902; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Anthony Bryk and Mary Erina, The High School as Community: Contextual Influences and Consequences for Teachers and Students (Madison, WI: National Center of Effective Secondary Schools, 1988).
12 affect child development far more than parents do: See, for instance, Judith Rich Harris, “Where Is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development,” Psychological Review 102, no. 3 (1995): 458–89.
13 search for and find their spouse: John Cacioppo et al., “Marital Satisfaction and Break-ups Differ Across On-line and Off-line Meeting Venues,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 25 (2013): 10135–40.
14 more isolated than ever: In a May 2012 Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Stephen Marche offers an unusually extreme claim about the state of our disunion: “We suffer from unprecedented alienation,” he writes. “We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.”
15 before the Internet existed: Claude Fischer, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).
16 diversity of people’s personal networks: Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions, and Eun Ja Her, “Core Networks, Social Isolation, and New Media,” Information, Communication, and Society 14, no. 1 (2011): 130–55.
17 42 “continue throughout life”: Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 3.
18 “physically stuck at home”: danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 21.
1 American public housing: The classic sociological account of Pruitt-Igoe is Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction, 1970). According to Rainwater, “Pruitt-Igoe condenses into one 57-acre tract all of the problems and difficulties that arise from race and poverty and all of the impotence, indifference and hostility with which our society has so far dealt with these problems” (3).
2 90 percent of all units were occupied: The occupancy rate of 91 percent in 1957 is reported in Roger Montgomery, “Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societal Symptom,” in The Metropolitan Midwest: Policy Problems and Prospects for Change, ed. Barry Checkoway and Carl Patton (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 229–43.
3 “The corridors, lobbies, elevators, and stairs were dangerous”: Oscar Newman, Creating Defensible Space (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research, 1996), 10.
4 occupancy rate was 35 percent: Colin Marshall, “Pruitt-Igoe: The Troubled High-Rise That Came to Define Urban America,” Guardian, April 22, 2015.
5 “Walking through Pruitt-Igoe”: Newman, Creating Defensible Space, 11.
6 “neat and well maintained”: Ibid.
7 “Across the street from Pruitt-Igoe”: Ibid.
8 “eyes on street”: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 35.
9 “With social variables constant”: Newman, Creating Defensible Space, 11.
10 “an accord about acceptable behavior”: Ibid., 25, 11–12.
11 1972 report, Defensible Space: The report was not limited to St. Louis. In New York City, Newman found that residents of a low-rise public housing complex in Brownsville experienced 34 percent fewer overall crimes and 74 percent fewer indoor crimes than their neighbors in the nearby high-rise Van Dyke projects. He attributed this difference solely to architecture, but subsequent research shows that the families who lived in the two projects were not at all identical. The Van Dyke complex had far more single mothers with multiple children, which meant there were more unsupervised young people, an established risk factor for crime. See Fritz Umbach and Alexander Gerould, “Myth #3: Public Housing Breeds Crime,” in Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, ed. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence Vale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 64–90.
12 “is the real and final villain”: Oscar Newman, Defensible Space (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 25.
13 “environment where crimes occur”: C. Ray Jeffery, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 177, 19.
14 “to curb crime”: John MacDonald, “Community Design and Crime: The Impact of the Built Environment,” Crime and Justice 44, no. 1 (2015): 333–383.
15 “That muggings will occur”: James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, “Broken Windows,” Atlantic, March 1982.
16 “the blueprint for community policing”: Quoted in Bernard Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.
17 “If you take care of the little things”: Joseph Goldstein, “Street Stops Still a ‘Basic Tool,’ Bratton Says,” New York Times, March 4, 2014.
18 a work of empirical science: In one fascinating study, a team of Dutch social scientists led by Kees Keizer conducted a series of experiments to test whether adding graffiti and litter to a small urban place would lead to more rule breaking. Although, as they concede, “so far there has not been strong empirical support” for the broken windows theory, signs of disorder did lead to more criminal behavior in their experiments. They have called for more research to test the broken windows effect in other sites, but it’s not easy to get permission to create disorder in real places, and to date we still have only weak evidence that the theory holds. See Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,” Science 322, no. 5908 (2008): 1681–85.
19 61 “the theory is probably not right”: Harcourt, Illusion of Order, 8.
20 with the policies it inspired: See Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’” Social Psychology Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 319–42, and Franklin Zimring, The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
21 “Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers”: Wilson and Kelling, “Broken Windows.”
22 two hundred more are injured: See Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz, “Comparing Gun Deaths by Country: The U.S. Is in a Different World,” New York Times, June 13, 2016. For useful synopses of the data on gun violence, see https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-by-the-numbers/#DailyDeaths.
23 Kees Keizer in the Netherlands: Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder.”
24 high-poverty and extreme-poverty areas: William Spelman, “Abandoned Buildings: Magnets for Crime?,” Journal of Criminal Justice 21, no. 5 (1993): 481–95, and Lance Hannon, “Extremely Poor Neighborhoods and Homicide,” Social Science Quarterly 86, no. S1 (2005): 1418–34. Both articles are summarized in John MacDonald, “Community Design and Crime: The Impact of Housing and the Built Environment,” Crime and Justice 44, no. 1 (2015): 333–83.
25 two natural experiments in Philadelphia: Charles Branas, Michelle Kondo, Sean Murphy, Eugenia South, Daniel Polsky, and John MacDonald, “Urban Blight Remediation as a Cost-Beneficial Solution to Firearm Violence,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 12 (2016): 2158–64.
26 grass if the police drive by: Branas and his colleagues hypothesize that the utility of abandoned property for those hiding guns is why the remediation project reduced gunrelated homicides but not other violent crimes; see ibid.
27 other crime reduction programs: Ibid.
28 “are exposed on a daily basis”: Ibid., 2163.
29 “for every dollar invested”: Ibid., 2162.
30 “a 10% reduction in homicides”: Ciro Biderman, João M. P. De Mello, and Alexandre Schneider, “Dry Laws and Homicides: Evidence from the São Paulo Metropolitan Area,” Economic Journal 120, no. 543 (2010): 157–82.
31 “individuals under the age of 18”: World Bank, Making Brazilians Safer: Analyzing the Dynamics of Violent Crime, 78, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/252761468015010162/pdf/707640ESW0REVI0ics0of0Violent0Crime.pdf.
32 São Paulo’s great crime drop: Ibid., chap. 3.
33 “from those considered dangerous”: Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1–2.
34 luxurious residential developments: Karina Landman, “Gated Communities in South Africa: The Challenge for Spatial Planning and Land Use Management,” Town Planning Review 75, no. 2 (2004): 158–59.
35 “Many people object to a restriction of access”: Ibid., 162.
36 “demanded full citizenship”: João Costa Vargas, “When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated Condominium: The Politics of Race and Urban Space in Rio de Janeiro,” Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2006): 49–81.
37 imperil local residents: See Vincent Carroll, “The Mindless Roasting of ink!,” Denver Post, December 1, 2017, https://www.denverpost.com/2017/12/01/unfair-roasting-of-ink-coffee-for-gentrification-sign/.
38 remain in their broiling homes: My finding on the protective effects of commercial density during the heat wave came from observational research, but was subsequently verified by a quantitative study. See Christopher Browning, Danielle Wallace, Seth Feinberg, and Kathleen Cagney, “Neighborhood Social Processes, Physical Conditions, and Disaster-Related Mortality: The Case of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006): 661–78.
39 restrict their development: Shlomo Angel, “Discouraging Crime Through City Planning,” Working Paper 75, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley, 1968.
40 more protective than Angel realized: The criminologist James Wo, for instance, studied the long-term impact of retail outlets on neighborhood crime rates and found that while alcohol-related shops and banks led to more crime, “third places,” such as coffee shops and restaurants, made places safer. James Wo, “Community Context of Crime: A Longitudinal Examination of the Effects of Local Institutions on Neighborhood Crime,” Crime & Delinquency 62, no. 10 (2016): 1286–312.
41 informal surveillance to deter crime: Andrew Papachristos, Chris Smith, Mary Scherer, and Melissa Fugiero, “More Coffee, Less Crime? The Relationship Between Gentrification and Neighborhood Crime Rates in Chicago, 1991 to 2005,” City & Community 10, no. 3 (2011): 215–40.
42 feels at home: The quotes about the ink! controversy are from Jean Lotus, “Gentrification Gaffe: Denver Coffee Shop and Ad Agency Apologize,” Denver Patch, November 25, 2017, https://patch.com/colorado/denver/gentrification-gaffe-denver-coffee-shop-ad-agencyapologize/.
43 “displacement of Cabrini residents”: Papachristos et al., “More Coffee, Less Crime?,” 228–29.
44 high-poverty residential development: The research of Kuo and Sullivan, along with many other studies that document the health benefits of nature, is nicely summarized in Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
45 building height, and vacancy rates: Frances Kuo and William Sullivan, “Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime?,” Environment and Behavior 33, no. 3 (2001): 343–67.
46 feelings of ownership and control: In a paper cowritten with Rebekah Levine Coley, Sullivan and Kuo argue that the lack of green spaces can mean diminished opportunities for social interaction. Using observational data from trees and vegetation at both Ida B. Wells and the Robert Taylor Homes, they find that people are more likely to be present in outdoor areas with trees than in those without trees, concluding that natural elements in outdoor spaces can draw people outdoors and make them feel more ownership over their surroundings. Rebekah Levine Coley, William Sullivan, and Frances Kuo, “Where Does Community Grow?: The Social Context Created by Nature in Urban Public Housing,” Environment and Behavior 29, no. 4 (1997): 468–94.
1 “solve every one of these critical issues”: Deborah Meier, “In Education, Small Is Sensible,” New York Times, September 8, 1989.
2 “violence or other antisocial behavior”: Ibid.
3 graduation rate reached 80 percent: Julie Bosman, “Small Schools Are Ahead in Graduation,” New York Times, June 30, 2007.
4 his book Small Victories: Samuel Freedman, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
5 “Are you ashamed to go to Seward?”: Ibid., 20.
6 “a security guard said”: InsideSchools, “Seward Park Educational Campus,” October 2011, https://new.insideschools.org/component/schools/school/93.
7 feelings about the school climate: See National Education Association, “Research Talking Points on Small Schools,” http://www.nea.org/home/13639.htm Jonathan Supovitz and Jolley Bruce Christman, “Small Learning Communities That Actually Learn: Lessons for School Leaders,” Phi Delta Kappan 86, no. 9 (2005): 649–51; and Craig Howley, Marty Strange, and Robert Bickel, “Research About School Size and School Performance in Impoverished Communities,” ERIC Digest (Charleston, WV: ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools, December 2000).
8 attend selective universities: The MDRC research on small schools is summarized in the report “Frequently Asked Questions About MDRC’s Study of Small Public High Schools in New York City,” October 2014, https://www.mdrc.org/publication/frequently-asked-questions-about-mdrc-s-study-small-public-high-schools-new-york-city.
9 “diversity in discourse and vision”: Richard Dober, Campus Design (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992), 280, 8. Dober viewed higher education as “the common ground for acculturation” in contemporary societies, and in recent years universities have grown more central. Today, more than 20.4 million students (roughly 7.3 million in two-year schools and 13.4 million in four-year schools), totaling about 6 percent of the US population, enroll in American universities each academic year; more than 2 million, or 3.5 percent of the population, attend universities in the United Kingdom; and about 1.7 million, or 5 percent of the population, go to college in Canada. Their experiences are usually consequential, and often pivotal. For US college enrollments, see the report Fast Facts from the National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372. For the United Kingdom, see http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2014/patterns-and-trends-in-uk-higher-education-2014.pdf . For Canada, see http://www.univcan.ca/universities/facts-and-stats/.
10 otherwise never form families together: See Michael Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
11 the Stanford professor Paul Turner recounts that the first universities: Paul Venable Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 9–10.
12 “world outside the college”: Ibid., 12.
13 “the distractions of civilizations”: Ibid., 17.
14 “many spirited resolves”: Ibid., 47. Surprisingly, Turner writes, in addition to their goal of teaching future leaders from settler families, the first colleges were often “motivated by the goal of training Indians for missionary work” (18).
15 parties and social events: See Jordan Friedman, “11 Colleges Where the Most Students Join Fraternities,” US News & World Report, October 25, 2016, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/2016-10-25/11-colleges-where-the-most-students-join-fraternities.
16 sleep deprivation, and sex acts: Elizabeth Allan and Mary Madden, Hazing in View: College Students at Risk, March 11, 2008, https://www.stophazing.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hazing_in_view_web1.pdf.
17 Northern Illinois University, and Fresno State: See John Hechinger and David Glovin, “Deadliest Frat’s Icy ‘Torture’ of Pledges Evokes Tarantino Films,” Bloomberg News, December 30, 2013, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-30/deadliest-frat-s-icy-torture-of-pledges-evokes-tarantino-films. Also see Richard Pérez-Peña and Sheryl Gay Stolberg,“Prosecutors Taking Tougher Stance in Fraternity Hazing Deaths,” New York Times, May 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/penn-state-prosecutors-fraternity-hazing-deaths.html.
18 perpetrate sexual assault than those who are not: See Catherine Loh, Christine Gidycz, Tracy Lobo, and Rohini Luthra, “A Prospective Analysis of Sexual Assault Perpetration: Risk Factors Related to Perpetrator Characteristics,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 20 (2005): 1325–48, and Leandra Lackie and Anton de Man, “Correlates of Sexual Aggression Among Male University Students,” Sex Roles 37, no. 5 (1997): 451–57.
19 controlling for background factors: Jeffrey DeSimone, “Fraternity Membership and Binge Drinking,” Journal of Health Economics 26, no. 5 (2007): 950–67.
20 “secrecy and self-protection”: Lisa Wade, “Why Colleges Should Get Rid of Fraternities for Good,” Time, May 19, 2017, http://time.com/4784875/fraternities-timothy-piazza/.
21 perceived as dangerous: A recent academic study found that many of America’s most famous university towns—including Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, and Evanston—top the nation’s list of communities with wide racial achievement gaps. See Sean Reardon, Demetra Kalogrides, and Ken Shores, “The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps,” CEPA Working Paper No. 16-10, Center for Education Policy Analysis, Stanford University, 2017.
22 “and rebuild our neighborhood”: Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (1983; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 147.
23 they’d be targets of crime: For a firsthand report on the experience of being told not to cross out of the university’s safe space, see Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
24 avoid neighboring communities: See https://arts.uchicago.edu/arts-public-life/arts-block.
25 grown up with at home: Ibid.
26 people from 190 countries enrolled: Jeremy Selingo, “Demystifying the MOOC,” New York Times, October 29, 2014.
27 four-year college programs: John Horrigan, “Lifelong Learning and Technology,” Pew Research Center, March 22, 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/03/22/lifelong-learning-and-technology/.
28 “receive a credential”: Chen Zhenghao, Brandon Alcorn, Gayle Christensen, Nicholas Eriksson, Daphne Koller, and Ezekiel Emanuel, “Who’s Benefiting from MOOCs, and Why,” Harvard Business Review, September 22, 2015.
29 college experience so rich: Dhawal Shal, “By the Numbers: MOOCS in 2016,” Class Central, December 25, 2016, https://www.class-central.com/report/mooc-stats-2016/.
30 “Minerva’s performance is unique”: Stephen Kosslyn, “Minerva Delivers More Effective Learning. Test Results Prove It,” Medium, October 10, 2017, https://medium.com/minerva-schools/minerva-delivers-more-effective-learning-test-results-prove-it-dfdbec6e04a6.
1 their miserably low scores: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/americas-grades/.
2 street drugs like heroin: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Vital Signs: Overdoses of Prescription Opioid Pain Relievers—United States, 1999–2008,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 60, no. 43 (2011): 1487.
3 have been devastating: Katherine Keyes, Magdalena Cerdá, Joanne Brady, Jennifer Havens, and Sandro Galea, “Understanding the Rural-Urban Differences in Nonmedical Prescription Opioid Use and Abuse in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 104, no. 2 (2014): 52–59.
4 almost $80 billion: Curtis Florence, Chao Zhou, Feijun Luo, and Likang Xu, “The Economic Burden of Prescription Opioid Overdose, Abuse, and Dependence in the United States, 2013,” Medical Care 54, no. 10 (2016): 901–6.
5 linked to opioid abuse: German Lopez, “How to Stop the Deadliest Drug Overdose Crisis in American History,” Vox, August 1, 2017, https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/1/15746780/opioid-epidemic-end.
6 the entirety of the Vietnam War: Josh Katz, “Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever,” New York Times, June 5, 2017.
7 the next decade alone: Max Blau, “STAT Forecast: Opioids Could Kill Nearly 500,000 Americans in the Next Decade,” STAT, June 27, 2017, https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/27/opioid-deaths-forecast.
8 social cohesion and social support: Another is the massive increase, pushed by pharmaceutical companies, in the prescription of these painkillers. See, for example, Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
9 white Americans dying in middle age: Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 49 (2015): 15078–83.
10 “deaths of despair”: Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2017, 397–443.
11 “Durkheim-like recipe for suicide”: Ibid., 429–30.
12 naturally occurring opioids: Tristen Inagaki, Lara Ray, Michael Irwin, Baldwin Way, and Naomi Eisenberger, “Opioids and Social Bonding: Naltrexone Reduces Feelings of Social Connection,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11, no. 5 (2016): 728–35.
13 “cause there ain’t shit else to do”: Katherine McLean, “‘There’s Nothing Here’ Deindustrialization as Risk Environment for Overdose,” International Journal of Drug Policy 29 (2016): 19–26.
14 comparatively fragile communities: Michael Zoorob and Jason Salemi, “Bowling Alone, Dying Together: The Role of Social Capital in Mitigating the Drug Overdose Epidemic in the United States,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 173 (2017): 1–9.
15 to find them and call 911: In a stunning article on opioid addiction in West Virginia, the journalist Margot Talbot reports a spike in people taking drugs and overdosing in public spaces, including parks and athletic fields, in part because they want other people to find them and call 911 if they overdose. See Margot Talbot, “The Addicts Next Door,” New Yorker, June 5, 2017.
16 become addicted to heroin: My account of the Swiss experiment comes from Joanne Csete, “From the Mountaintops: What the World Can Learn from Drug Policy Change in Switzerland,” Open Society Foundations, 2010.
17 elements of “recovery capital”: William Cloud and Robert Granfield, “Conceptualizing Recovery Capital: Expansion of a Theoretical Construct,” Substance Use & Misuse 43, no. 12–13 (2008): 1971–86.
18 overdose deaths in Switzerland dropped by 50 percent: Jürgen Rehm, Ulrich Frick, Christina Hartwig, Felix Gutzwiller, Patrick Gschwend, and Ambros Uchtenhagen, “Mortality in Heroin-Assisted Treatment in Switzerland 1994–2000,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 79, no. 2 (2005): 137–43.
19 not a single person died: Salaam Semaan, Paul Fleming, Caitlin Worrell, Haley Stolp, Brittney Baack, and Meghan Miller, “Potential Role of Safer Injection Facilities in Reducing HIV and Hepatitis C Infections and Overdose Mortality in the United States,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 118, no. 2 (2011): 100–10.
20 heroin-related property crimes: Csete, “From the Mountaintops,” 4.
21 program made an immediate impact: Francie Diep, “Inside North America’s Only Legal Safe Injection Facility,” Pacific Standard, August 30, 2016.
22 deaths dropped less than 10 percent: Brandon Marshall, Michael Jay Milloy, Evan Wood, Julio Montaner, and Thomas Kerr, “Reduction in Overdose Mortality After the Opening of North America’s First Medically Supervised Safer Injecting Facility: A Retrospective Population-Based Study,” Lancet 377, no. 9775 (2011): 1429–37.
23 there than in comparable places: Chloé Potier, Vincent Laprévote, Françoise Dubois-Arber, Olivier Cottencin, and Benjamin Rolland, “Supervised Injection Services: What Has Been Demonstrated? A Systematic Literature Review,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 145 (2014): 48–68.
24 particularly women, from assault: Susan Zalkind, “The Infrastructure of the Opioid Epidemic,” CityLab, September 14, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/methadone-mile/539742/.
25 “IDs hanging around their necks”: Ibid.
26 presence of gangs and guns: The USDA classifies food deserts as urban areas in which at least five hundred people or one-third of the population lives more than half a mile from a supermarket, supercenter, or large grocery store. In rural areas, the distance must be greater than ten miles. Delaram Takyar, an NYU graduate student and research assistant for this book, calculated the percentage of low-income census tracts by using data from the USDA Food Access Research Atlas.
27 fortunate enough to live near them: See the interactive map at the Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping Project, http://cuamp.org/#/searchGardens?q=-1&q=-2&community=-1&ward=-1&boardDistrict=-1&municipality=-1.
28 overheated urban environments: American Public Health Association, Improving Health and Wellness Through Access to Nature, November 5, 2013, https://www.apha.org/policies-and-advocacy/public-health-policy-statements/policy-database/2014/07/08/09/18/improving-health-and-wellness-through-access-to-nature.
29 many more small-scale green spaces: See Robert Channick, “4,000 Empty Lots on Sale for $1 to Chicago Homeowners,” Chicago Tribune, November 28, 2016.
30 thousands of dollars per month: See the report “Chicago City Hall Green Roof” at the Conservation Design Forum website, https://www.cdfinc.com/Chicago-City-Hall-Green-Roof. There’s some disagreement about the energy savings that the green roof generates. One report claims that it reduces costs by up to $10,000 per month, while another says it’s closer to $5,000 per year.
31 “neighborhood redevelopment projects”: The APHA report Improving Health and Wellness Through Access to Nature is just one of several recent studies to show that treating vulnerable places by developing accessible public green spaces and other social infrastructure can do more to improve a community’s health and well-being than targeting vulnerable individuals or groups. In the past decade, reams of published research have established scientific evidence for long-standing and widely held beliefs about the benefits of spending time in natural settings: It promotes social cohesion. It encourages physical activity and makes people feel more energetic. It lowers the risk of obesity and reduces stress, anxiety, anger, and sadness. It helps prevent attention disorders in children. It quickens the pace of recovery in people who are sick.
32 “nation forward at too slow a pace”: According to Charles Branas and John MacDonald: “Electric power grids, water treatment plants, building codes, and roadway redesign did more to enhance the health of the public than many (maybe any) other programs, including medical care.” See Charles Branas and John MacDonald, “A Simple Strategy to Transform Health, All Over the Place,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 20, no. 2 (2014): 157–59.
33 “persons repeatedly exposed”: Eugenia South, Michelle Kondo, Ross Cheney, and Charles Branas, “Neighborhood Blight, Stress, and Health: A Walking Trial of Urban Greening and Ambulatory Heart Rate,” American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 5 (2015): 909–13.
34 “difficult urban problems”: Ibid., 913.
35 “almost half of women living independently”: United Nations, World Population Ageing 2013, 38, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/ageing/WorldPopulationAgeing2013.pdf.
36 16 percent of the global population, by 2050: World Health Organization, National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health, Global Health and Aging, NIH Publication 11-7737, October 2011, http://www.who.int/ageing/publications/global_health.pdf.
37 important to understand how they work: Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Lené Levy-Storms, and Madeline Brozen, Placemaking for an Aging Population, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, June 2014, https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/Seniors-and-Parks-8-28-Print_reduced.pdf.
38 and the United States is thirty-first, at 79.3: The life expectancy data come from the World Health Organization’s Atlas, which uses 2015 data. See http://gamapserver.who.int/gho/interactive_charts/mbd/life_expectancy/atlas.html.
39 eat together whenever they choose: See the conclusion of Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).
40 playground is on the nearest lot: All of these examples are from the case studies presented in Loukaitou-Sideris et al., Placemaking for an Aging Population, chap. 4.
41 more than a minute to seventeen seconds: David Sillito, “Finns Open Playgrounds to Adults,” BBC News, February 8, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4691088.stm.
42 skills that will help them in civic life: See, among Roger Hart’s many excellent papers on childhood and play, Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship (Florence: UNICEF International Child Development Center, 1992) and “Containing Children: Some Lessons on Planning for Play from New York City,” Environment and Urbanization 14, no. 2 (2002): 135–48.
43 “peering out their tenement windows”: Pamela Wridt, “An Historical Analysis of Young People’s Use of Public Space, Parks and Playgrounds in New York City,” Children, Youth and Environments 14, no. 1 (2004): 100–20.
44 “I text message on my cell phone”: Ibid., 99–100.
45 “regional park system”: The City Project, Olmsted Report Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Regions, 1930s and Today, 2015, https://www.cityprojectca.org/blog/archives/39416.
46 “improve parks in every neighborhood”: The City Project, Healthy Parks, Schools and Communities: Green Access and Equity for Los Angeles County, 2011, http://www.mapjustice.org/images/LosAngelesENGLISH.pdf.
47 census wards across the United Kingdom: Jamie Pearce, Elizabeth Richardson, Richard Mitchell, and Niamh Shortt, “Environmental Justice and Health: The Implications of the Socio-Spatial Distribution of Multiple Environmental Deprivation for Health Inequalities in the United Kingdom,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 4 (2010): 522–39.
48 environmental deprivation matters, period: There’s a nice account of how Richard Mitchell’s scholarship on nature evolved in Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), chap. 7.
49 access to all of Hyde Park: Indeed, the life expectancy for men in Islington is nearly three years lower than for men in the rest of England, and for women it’s one year lower. See “Introduction to Islington,” a report from the National Health Service, http://www.islingtonccg.nhs.uk/jsna/Introduction-and-The-Islington-Population-JSNA-200910.pdf.
1 “similarity begets friendship”: The classic account of “primary” and “secondary” groups comes from Charles Cooley, Social Organization (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), chap. 3. The quotes from Aristotle and Plato are from a classic sociological article on homophily: Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415–44.
2 social dynamics worked: William Kornblum, Blue-Collar Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
3 “competition among peers”: Ibid., 66.
4 “switchyards of the steel industry”: Ibid., 37, 18.
5 segregated by race and class: See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
6 most major policy matters: The leading text on polarization from the 2000s is Morris Fiorina, Samuel Abrams, and Jeremy Pope, Culture War? (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005). In 1996, the sociologists Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson showed that there was little evidence to support widespread assertions that Americans were growing more polarized. Why, then, did so many people perceive rising fragmentation? They suggested several possible reasons, including that Americans might be developing more intense political beliefs, that the media might be airing more polarized opinions, and that people tended to romanticize the past and forget how conflicted they used to be. See Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, “Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 3 (1996): 690–755.
7 that confirm their beliefs: On inequality and class segregation, see Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 4 (2011): 1092–153. On the filter bubble, see Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
8 “discrimination based on race”: Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (2015): 690–707.
9 “threaten the nation’s well-being”: Pew Research Center, “Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016,” June 22, 2016, http://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/.
10 forms of group mixing that are uncommon today: The data on labor unions come from Gerald Mayer, Union Membership Trends in the United States (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2004). The quote is from Peter Bearman and Delia Baldassarri, “Dynamics of Political Polarization,” American Sociological Review 72 (October 2007): 787. On the rise of marriage within a social class (or “assortative mating”), see Robert Mare, “Educational Homogamy in Two Gilded Ages,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 663 (2016): 117–39.
11 “met with plausible counterarguments”: Cass Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 91–92.
12 It’s urgent that we understand them: See Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
13 “they all meet up”: Hafstein is quoted in https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/20/health/iceland-pool-culture/.
14 “among their countrymen”: Dan Kois, “Iceland’s Water Cure,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 2016.
15 “defines them as social others”: Jeff Wiltse, “America’s Swimming Pools Have a Long, Sad, Racist History,” Washington Post, June 10, 2015.
16 swam together in relative peace: Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1.
17 “don’t touch the water!”: Ibid., 2.
18 draining the entire pool: Rachaell Davis, “This Tweet Perfectly Sums Up Why Simone Manuel’s Olympic Win Is So Important,” Essence, August 12, 2016, https://www.essence.com/2016/08/12/simone-manuels-why-olympic-win-so-important.
19 declined to review the case: Wiltse, Contested Waters, 156.
20 could never swim together: “Swimming Pool Clash Reported in St. Louis,” Atlanta Daily World, July 21, 1950.
21 as a white-only facility: Yoni Appelbaum, “McKinney, Texas, and the Racial History of American Swimming Pools,” Atlantic, June 8, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/troubled-waters-in-mckinney-texas/395150/.
22 head off a lawsuit: Rose Hackman, “Swimming While Black,” Guardian, August 4, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/04/black-children-swimming-drownings-segregation.
23 to end its segregationist practices: Ibid.
24 twenty-five hundred to more than four million: Appelbaum, “McKinney, Texas.”
25 inaccessible to the middle and lower classes: Ibid.
26 pool is “a way of life for us”: See Robert Flipping Jr., “Blacks Demand Re-opening of Sully’s Pool,” New Pittsburgh Courier, June 7, 1975, and Wiltse, “America’s Swimming Pools.”
27 whereas public schools are a “necessity”: “The Court’s Swimming Pool Ruling,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1971.
28 die from unintentional drowning: Hackman, “Swimming While Black.”
29 part of African American culture: National Public Radio, “Public Swimming Pools’ Divisive Past,” May 28, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10495199.
30 go back to their “Section 8 homes”: Wiltse, “America’s Swimming Pools.”
31 “Thank you McKinney Police for keeping us safe”: Appelbaum, “McKinney, Texas.”
32 “and quite possibly in the world”: Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 4.
33 before engaging other groups: The classic texts on counterpublics are Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Social Text 25, no. 26 (1990): 56–80, and Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.
34 American civic life in the long run: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 163, 200.
35 “him the word on local doings”: William Grier and Price Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 88.
36 145 restaurants, and 70 taverns across the city: St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 438, 461.
37 “blanket condemnation of police actions”: Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET, 198.
38 “nothing but sit her black ass down”: Barbershop, story written by Mark Brown; screenplay written by Mark Brown, Don D. Scott, and Marshall Todd, directed by Tim Story, 2002.
39 prepared to engage the world outside: Urban ethnographers have also observed the social processes visible in black barbershops in other protected spaces, including the tavern. The classic study is Elijah Anderson’s A Place on the Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Anderson writes: “Urban taverns and bars, like barbershops, carryouts, and other such establishments, with their adjacent street corners and alleys, serve as important gathering places for people of the ‘urban villages’ and ghetto areas of the city. Often they are special hangouts for the urban poor and working-class people, serving somewhat as more formal social clubs or domestic circles do for the middle and upper classes” (1).
40 even reducing violent crime: The most impressive studies that measure the effects of community organization on local life are Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
41 10 percent black by 1990: Elmhurst-Corona was the site of a remarkable research project led by the City University of New York anthropologist Roger Sanjek. Sanjek and his team of research assistants began studying how community organizations shaped group relations in the multiracial, multilingual neighborhood in the early 1980s. They remained there, conducting fieldwork on everyday activities and closely observing what happens in civic associations, churches, neighborhood events, and local political meetings, until 1996. The main findings from the project are reported in Robert Sanjek, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). My account of community organizations in Elmhurst-Corona draws heavily on this work.
42 INS would root them out: Ibid., 72.
43 “or we won’t survive”: Quoted in Roger Sanjek, “Color-Full Before Color Blind: The Emergence of Multiracial Neighborhood Politics in Queens, New York City,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 4 (2000): 765–66.
44 doubling their level of representation: Ibid., 766.
45 meaningful relationships off the field: Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969; repr., New York: Routledge, 2017). For an overview of the anthropology of sport, see Kendall Blanchard, The Anthropology of Sport (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995).
46 a cricket field in Brooklyn plays a starring role: Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Pantheon, 2008).
47 “unAmericanness accentuates their singularity”: James Wood, “Beyond a Boundary,” New Yorker, May 26, 2008.
48 who’s trying to find secure footing: Ibid.
49 our social distance narrowed: For an ethnographic account of similar experiences, see Anderson, Cosmopolitan Canopy.
50 “employed elsewhere in the community”: Liam Delaney and Emily Keaney, “Sport and Social Capital in the United Kingdom: Statistical Evidence from National and International Survey Data,” December 2005, http://www.social-capital.net/docs/file/sport%20and%20social%20capital.pdf.
51 democratize a deeply divided society: Eric Worby, “The Play of Race in a Field of Urban Desire: Soccer and Spontaneity in Post-apartheid Johannesburg,” Critique of Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2009): 105–23.
52 “without this team”: Emmarie Huetteman, “Shooting Shines Light on an Annual Baseball Game and a Bipartisan Pastime,” New York Times, June 14, 2017.
53 “and work together again”: See Cass Sunstein, “The Polarization of Extremes,” Chronicle Review, December 14, 2007. Haidt is quoted in Sean Illing, “Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies,” Vox, November 15, 2016, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/15/13593670/donald-trump-jonathan-haidt-social-media-polarization-europe-multiculturalism.
54 cannot be entirely to blame: Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro, “Is the Internet Causing Polarization? Evidence from Demographics,” Working Paper, 2014, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/age-polar.pdf.
55 different education level, ethnic identity, or religious affiliation: Gina Potarca, “Does the Internet Affect Assortative Mating? Evidence from the U.S. and Germany,” Social Science Research 61 (2017): 278–97.
56 to get news from home: Ivan Watson, Clayton Nagel, and Zeynep Bilginsoy, “‘Facebook Refugees’ Chart Escape from Syria on Cell Phones,” CNN, September 15, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/10/europe/migrant-facebook-refugees/index.html.
57 with a diverse set of peers: See Nicole Ellison, Charles Stein-field, and Cliff Lampe, “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 4 (2007): 1143–68, and Min-Woo Kwon, Jonathan D’Angelo, and Douglas McLeod, “Facebook Use and Social Capital: To Bond, to Bridge, or to Escape,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 33, no. 1–2 (2013): 35–43.
58 attend traditional support groups: See Tabor Flickinger, Claire DeBolt, Ava Lena Waldman, George Reynolds, Wendy F. Cohn, Mary Catherine Beach, Karen Ingersoll, and Rebecca Dillingham, “Social Support in a Virtual Community: Analysis of a Clinic-Affiliated Online Support Group for Persons Living with HIV/AIDS,” AIDS and Behavior 21, no. 11 (2017): 3087–99.
1 rainfall figures were “simply mind-blowing”: Jason Samenow, “Harvey Marks the Most Extreme Rain Event in U.S. History,” Washington Post, August 29, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/29/harvey-marks-the-most-extreme-rain-event-in-u-s-history/?utm_term=.94d4e7d3b7ad.
2 deepened their faith in the community: Two of my research assistants, the NYU graduate students Kiara Douds (who grew up in Houston and had friends at Wilcrest) and Delaram Takyar, went to Houston to report on the collective response to Harvey. They were at this church meeting, and they spent several days with the Wilcrest Baptist Church congregation observing how it helped those affected by the storm.
3 and it didn’t happen at random: “Congregations have long been hyper-segregated,” writes the sociologist Michael Emerson. “As of 2007 (our most recent data with such detail), 85 percent of congregations in the United States were comprised of at least 90 percent of one group. As of 2010, just 4 percent of all congregations claimed to have no racial majority.” See Michael Emerson, “A New Day for Multiracial Congregations,” Reflections: A Magazine of Theological and Ethical Inquiry from Yale Divinity School, 2013, https://reflections.yale.edu/article/future-race/new-day-multiracial-congregations.
4 a place of cross-racial, multiethnic integration: Rodney Woo has written a book that recounts his experience helping Wilcrest become more open and multiracial: The Color of Church: A Biblical and Practical Paradigm for Multiracial Churches (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009).
5 rising for thousands of years: See Anders Levermann, Peter Clark, Ben Marzeion, Glenn Milne, David Pollard, Valentina Radic, and Alexander Robinson, “The Multimillennial Sea-Level Commitment of Global Warming,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 34 (2013): 13745–50.
6 “combined and multiplied by three”: Korie Edwards, Brad Christerson, and Michael Emerson, “Race, Religious Organizations, and Integration,” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 212.
7 “ever occurring again”: The quotes from Nicole Lurie and Barack Obama appear in Eric Klinenberg, “Adaptation,” New Yorker, January 7, 2013.
8 “the social infrastructure matters, too”: Ibid.
9 people who watch them: De Urbanisten explains how the Water Square works on its website: http://www.urbanisten.nl/wp/?portfolio=waterplein-benthemplein.
10 dangerous monsoons and floods: See Khurshed Alam and Habibur Rahman, “Women in Natural Disasters: A Case Study from Southern Coastal Region of Bangladesh,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 8 (2014): 68–82.
11 betting on the concept: David Gelles, “Floating Cities, No Longer Science Fiction, Begin to Take Shape,” New York Times, November 13, 2017.
12 Bjarke Ingels and the BIG Group: See Eric Klinenberg, “Want to Survive Climate Change? You’ll Need a Good Community,” Wired, November 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/10/klinenberg-transforming-communities-to-survive-climate-change/.
13 goal of Living Breakwaters: Ibid.
14 flood protection, adaptation, and climate security: City of New Orleans, Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030, 2010, https://www.nola.gov/city-planning/master-plan/.
15 its bike-share program: See Shannon Sims, “Building a Social Scene Around a Bike Path,” CityLab, August 1, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/lafitte-greenway-new-orleans/534735/, and Richard Florida, “Mapping America’s Bike Commuters,” CityLab, May 19, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/05/mapping-americas-bike-commuters/526923/.
1 “Are we building the world we all want?”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/.
2 “That’s who we are”: See Tony Romm, “Trump Campaign Fires Back at Zuckerberg,” Politico, April 13, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/mark-zuckerberg-trump-feud-221897, and Seth Fiegerman, “Mark Zuckerberg Criticizes Trump on Immigration,” CNN, January 27, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/27/technology/zuckerberg-trump-immigration/index.html.
3 “engagement will go down”: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, January 11, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571/.
4 reach their targeted audiences: Benjamin Elgin and Vernon Silver, “Facebook and Google Helped Anti-Refugee Campaign in Swing States,” Bloomberg.com, October 18, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/facebook-and-google-helped-anti-refugee-campaign-in-swing-states.
5 experiencing displacement or gentrification pressures: See the Urban Displacement Project’s map and report at http://www.urbandisplacement.org/map/sf.
6 remains a food desert: George Avalos, “Facebook Campus Expansion Includes Offices, Retail, Grocery Store, Housing,” San Jose Mercury News, July 7, 2017, http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/07/facebook-campus-expansion-includes-offices-retail-grocery-store-housing/.
7 are “without peer”: Philanthropy Roundtable, “Andrew Carnegie,” http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/hall_of_fame/andrew_carnegie#a.
8 “depth of gratitude which I feel”: Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 47.
9 establish Internet connections: See the press release here: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/1997/06/Bill-and-Melinda-Gates-Establish-Library-Foundation.
10 just need companionship to get through the day: Until 2017, when the Stavros Niarchos Foundation gave $55 million to rebuild the circulating library in Midtown, the last major effort to invest in the New York City Public Library was a misguided, massively expensive, and ultimately ill-fated effort to renovate the flagship library, led by elite trustees who, as one former library executive said, “only care about the 42nd Street building” and “don’t care about the branches.” See Scott Sherman, Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library (New York: Melville House, 2015), 73.
11 maintenance on existing facilities: See the transcript of testimony by Jonathan Bowles before the New York City Council in September 2013: https://nycfuture.org/research/testimony-building-better-libraries.
12 24 percent drop in staff hours: In 2014, the city increased public library funds for the first time since 2008, to $144 million, but this is still far below the level of public support that it had offered to libraries in the early 2000s, when it was typically above $200 million per year. See New York City Independent Budget Office, “Library Funding: Subsidies Rebound, Disparities Remain,” Fiscal Brief, July 2007, http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/libraryspending.pdf.
13 “reopen a store in the Bronx in the future”: Steven Goodstein, “Barnes & Noble Commits to Bronx Return in 24–36 Months,” Bronx Times, November 15, 2016, https://www.bxtimes.com/stories/2016/46/46-barnes-2016-11-11-bx.html.
14 “100 feet away from you”: McDonald is quoted in Elizabeth Segran, “Two Ex-Googlers Want to Make Bodegas and Mom-and-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete,” Fast Company, September 13, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/40466047/two-ex-googlers-want-to-make-bodegas-and-mom-and-pop-corner-stores-obsolete?utm_content=bufferb45ab&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer.
15 households lacked Internet access: See Deborah Fallows, “Not Your Mother’s Library,” Atlantic, October 6, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/not-your-mothers-library/381119/, and the report “Internet Connection Data for Cities,” Governing.com, http://www.governing.com/gov-data/city-internet-connection-household-adoption-rates-data.html.
16 all the local branches: “Voters OK 2.8-mill Columbus Metropolitan Library Levy,” ThisWeek Community News, November 3, 2010, http://www.thisweeknews.com/article/20101026/news/310269541.
17 “a thriving community where wisdom prevails”: Columbus Metropolitan Library, “Columbus Metropolitan Library to Eliminate Overdue Fines Beginning Jan. 1, 2017,” press release, December 1, 2016, http://www.columbuslibrary.org/press/columbus-metropolitan-library-eliminate-overdue-fines-beginning-jan-1-2017.
18 sixty thousand participants in its summer reading groups: Columbus Metropolitan Library, “Media Fact Sheet,” 2017, www.columbuslibrary.org/sites/default/files/uploads/docs/Media%20Fact%20Sheet_0.pdf.
19 conceal potential contaminants: Oliver Milman and Jessica Glenza, “At Least 33 US Cities Used Water Testing ‘Cheats’ over Lead Concerns,” Guardian, June 2, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/02/lead-water-testing-cheats-chicago-boston-philadelphia.
20 across group lines: See the Studio Gang description of the Polis Station on its website: http://studiogang.com/project/polis-station/.
21 organize economy and society: David Billington, The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).