On July 12, 1995, a tropical air mass with searing heat and high humidity settled over Chicago, making it feel like Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. On July 13, the temperature hit 106 degrees and the heat index, which measures how a typical person experiences the weather, reached 126. Local newspapers and television stations announced that the heat wave could be dangerous, but they didn’t recognize its severity. Along with basic health warnings and meteorological reports, they also ran humorous stories about how to “ward off wardrobe wilt and makeup meltdown” and shop for air conditioners. “This is the kind of weather we pray for,” said a spokesperson for one regional supplier. The Chicago Tribune advised readers to “slow down” and “think cool thoughts.”1
Chicago broke its record for energy consumption that day, and the surge in demand overwhelmed the electrical grid, causing outages in more than two hundred thousand homes, some lasting for days. Water pumps failed, leaving units on high floors dry. Across the city, buildings baked like ovens, roads and railways buckled, thousands of cars and buses overheated. Children riding school buses to camp got stuck in gridlocked traffic and had to be hosed off by public health crews to avoid heat stroke. Despite the mounting problems, Chicago’s city government neglected to declare a state of emergency. The mayor, along with leaders of several key city agencies, was out of the city, vacationing in a cooler spot. But millions of residents were stuck in the heat.
Like all cities, Chicago is a heat island, with paved roads and metallic buildings that attract the sun’s warmth and heavy pollution that traps it. While the verdant suburbs surrounding Chicago cooled down at night, urban neighborhoods continued to broil. So many people called 911 that paramedics had to put some of them on hold. Thousands rushed to emergency rooms with heat-related illnesses, and nearly half of the city’s hospitals refused to admit new patients because they had no more space. A line of trucks formed outside the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, waiting to unload dead bodies. There were 222 bays at the morgue, all of them filled. The owner of a meatpacking company offered to bring a forty-eight-foot-long refrigerated truck. When it was fully loaded, he brought another, and another, until nine trucks holding hundreds of bodies were jammed into the parking lot. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said the medical examiner. “We’re overwhelmed.”2
During the week between July 14 and July 20, 739 people in excess of the norm died in Chicago, roughly seven times the toll from Superstorm Sandy and more than twice as many as in the Great Chicago Fire. Before all the bodies had been buried, scientists began to look for patterns behind the deaths. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent a team of researchers from Atlanta and recruited dozens more in Chicago to investigate. Interviewers visited the homes of more than 700 people, creating “matched pairs” of victims and surviving neighbors and compiling demographic information that they used for comparison. Some of the results were unsurprising: Having a working air conditioner reduced the risk of death by 80 percent. Social isolation increased the risk. Living alone was particularly dangerous, because people often fail to recognize the symptoms and the severity of heat-related illnesses. A close connection to another person, even to a pet, made people far more likely to survive.
But fascinating patterns did emerge. Women fared far better than men, because they have stronger ties to friends and family. Despite high levels of poverty, Latinos had an easier time than other ethnic groups in Chicago, simply because in Chicago they tend to live in crowded apartments and densely packed neighborhoods, places where dying alone is nearly impossible.
For the most part, heat wave mortality was strongly correlated with segregation and inequality: eight of the ten community areas with the highest death rates were virtually all African American, with pockets of concentrated poverty and violent crime. These were places where old or sick people were at risk of hunkering down at home and dying alone during the heat wave. At the same time, three of the ten neighborhoods with the lowest heat wave death rates were also poor, violent, and predominantly African American, while another was poor, violent, and predominantly Latino. On paper, these neighborhoods looked like they should have fared badly in the heat wave. In fact, they were more resilient than Chicago’s most affluent areas. Why?
I grew up in Chicago, and when the heat wave hit I was about to move to California for graduate school. I had no plans to return to my home city. I hadn’t thought much about neighborhoods, natural disasters, or the climate. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the heat wave, and the puzzle of why some people and places that seemed fated for disaster managed to avoid it. Although I did move to California, I scrapped my plan to study the drug business and started digging into the disaster. I came back to Chicago whenever I could and eventually moved there to conduct fieldwork, turning my family’s basement into an operations center and making the heat wave the subject of my dissertation.
Like the CDC, I conducted my own comparison of “matched pairs,” only I was looking at how the heat wave affected entire neighborhoods, not just individuals. To get oriented, I found a map of heat deaths and laid it over various maps of poverty, violence, segregation, and aging in Chicago neighborhoods. I identified adjacent communities that had similar demographic profiles yet sharply different rates of heat wave mortality. I ran the numbers, analyzing all the neighborhood data that social scientists ordinarily use, but none of the standard variables could explain the divergent outcomes. So I turned off my computer and hit the streets.
At ground level, I could observe certain neighborhood conditions that aren’t visible in quantitative data. Statistics do not convey the differences between poor, minority neighborhoods that are cursed with empty lots, broken sidewalks, abandoned homes, and shuttered storefronts, and those that are densely peopled, busy with foot traffic, enlivened by commercial activity and well-maintained parks, and supported by strong community organizations. As I got to know the rhythms of life in various Chicago neighborhoods, I learned how much these local conditions mattered, both every day and during the disaster.
Consider Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two adjacent neighborhoods on the hypersegregated South Side of Chicago. In 1995, they were both 99 percent African American, with similar proportions of elderly residents. Both had high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violent crime. Englewood was one of the most perilous places during the disaster, with 33 deaths per 100,000 residents. But Auburn Gresham’s death rate was 3 deaths per 100,000 residents, making it one of the most resilient places in the city—safer, even, than tony Lincoln Park and the Near North Side.
By the end of my research, I’d discovered that the key difference between neighborhoods like Auburn Gresham and others that are demographically similar turned out to be what I call social infrastructure: the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact.
Social infrastructure is not “social capital”—a concept commonly used to measure people’s relationships and interpersonal networks—but the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops. When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves. Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions—at the school, the playground, and the corner diner—are the building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures—not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.
During the heat wave, the people of Englewood were vulnerable not just because they were black and poor but also because their neighborhood had been abandoned. The residential blocks looked and felt “bombed out,” and the social infrastructure that had once supported collective life had deteriorated. Between 1960 and 1990, Englewood lost 50 percent of its residents and most of its commercial outlets, as well as its social cohesion. “We used to be much closer, more tight-knit,” says Hal Baskin, who has lived in Englewood for fifty-two years and currently leads a campaign against neighborhood violence. “Now we don’t know who lives across the street or around the corner. And old folks are apprehensive about leaving their homes.”
Epidemiologists have firmly established the relationship between social connections, health, and longevity. In the past few decades, leading health journals have published dozens of articles documenting the physical and mental benefits of social ties.3 But there’s a prior question that scientists have not explored as thoroughly: What conditions in the places we inhabit make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships, and what conditions make it more likely that people will grow isolated and alone?
After the heat wave, prominent Chicago officials publicly declared that the socially isolated people who died had effectively chosen their own fate, and that the communities they lived in had sealed that fate. The mayor, Richard M. Daley, criticized people for not looking after their neighbors, and the human services commissioner, Daniel Alvarez, complained to the press about “people that die because they neglect themselves.” But when I spent time in Chicago’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, I observed something different. Those who lived there expressed the same values endorsed by residents of more resilient places, and they made genuine efforts to help one another, in both ordinary and difficult times. The difference was not cultural. It was not about how much people cared about one another or their community. It was that in places like Englewood, the shoddy social infrastructure discouraged interaction and impeded mutual support, whereas in places like Auburn Gresham the social infrastructure encouraged those things.
During the decades that residents fled neighborhoods like Englewood, Chicago’s most resilient places experienced little or no population loss. In 1995, residents of Auburn Gresham walked to diners, parks, barbershops, and grocery stores. They participated in block clubs and church groups. They knew their neighbors—not because they made special efforts to meet them, but because they lived in a place where casual interaction was a feature of everyday life. During the heat wave, these ordinary routines made it easy for people to check in on one another and knock on the doors of elderly, vulnerable neighbors. “It’s what we always do when it’s very hot or very cold here,” says Betty Swanson, who has lived in Auburn Gresham for nearly fifty years. It’s what they always do, period, no matter the weather. And with heat waves becoming more frequent and more severe, living in a neighborhood with a social infrastructure like Auburn Gresham’s is the rough equivalent of having a working air conditioner in every home.
I first reported my findings about the significance of the social infrastructure during the Chicago disaster in my dissertation, and then in a book called Heat Wave. When I finished, I began thinking beyond that particular catastrophic event and investigating the ways that local resources such as libraries, barbershops, and community organizations affect people during ordinary times too. I took a closer look at the neighborhoods that proved so resilient during the heat wave, and I noticed something extraordinary: they were always significantly safer and healthier than other places that are demographically similar, and by margins that were startlingly large. A half decade before the disaster, for instance, life expectancy in Auburn Gresham was more than five years higher than it was in Englewood. The disparity was even greater—ten years—in another matched pair of adjacent neighborhoods that I’d compared extensively: longevity in South Lawndale (also known as Little Village) was significantly higher than in North Lawndale.
These differences were so dramatic, and so pervasive, that they made me wonder whether social infrastructure was even more important than I’d realized. I needed to explore the hidden networks and taken-for-granted systems that support—or, in some cases, undermine—all variety of collective life.
This time, I really did leave Chicago. After all, my hometown’s depleted neighborhoods are not the only places that suffer from social disconnection, and the problems affected by social infrastructure transcend heat and health. I moved to New York City, where I began teaching at New York University, and I spent two years at Stanford University. I conducted research in many American cities as well as Argentina, England, France, the Netherlands, Japan, and Singapore. While each of the places I’ve studied has distinctive ecological challenges, political systems, and cultural orientations, their residents share similar concerns. Today, societies around the world are becoming more fragmented, divided, and conflicted. The social glue has come undone.
According to Canada’s Global News, “We all live in a bubble.” The BBC warns that “class segregation” is “on the rise,” in England. Today Online reports that “India is regressing in the happiness rankings primarily due to abysmal social capital and a lack of interpersonal trust.” Distrust and fear stemming from extreme inequality have fueled a spike in gated communities and armed private security across Latin America. The Associated Press reports that “private guards outnumber public officers” by four to one in Brazil, five to one in Guatemala, and nearly seven to one in Honduras. Foreign Policy notes that in China, “stratification has emerged in a society that had hitherto tried to eradicate the very concept…. Social class has become increasingly entrenched, opportunities for upward mobility increasingly limited.” Even the Internet, which was supposed to deliver unprecedented cultural diversity and democratic communication, has become an echo chamber where people see and hear what they already believe.4
In the United States, the presidential election of 2016 was an especially disturbing example of political polarization, and the long campaign exposed social chasms far deeper than even the most worried experts had recognized. The language of red and blue states seems too weak to describe America’s splintered cultural and political geography.
The oppositions are not merely ideological, and the divisions run deeper than Trump vs. Clinton, Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter, Save the Planet vs. Drill, Baby, Drill. Across America, people complain that their communities feel weaker, that they spend more time on their devices and less time with one another, that schools and sports teams and workplaces have become unbearably competitive, that insecurity is rampant, that the future is uncertain and in some places bleak. Worrying about the decline of communities is a hallmark of modern societies and a trope among public intellectuals. Although I’ve written extensively about social isolation, I’ve long been a skeptic of claims that we’re lonelier and more disconnected than we were in some mythical golden age. But even I am forced to acknowledge that, in the United States, as in other parts of the world, the social order now feels precarious. Authoritarian leaders threaten to undo entrenched democratic systems. Nations break away from political alliances. Cable news tells its viewers only what they want to hear.
These fissures are expanding at an inopportune moment. The United States, like most developed nations, faces profound challenges—including climate change, an aging population, runaway inequality, and explosive ethnic divisions—that we can address only if we establish stronger bonds with one another and develop some shared interests too. After all, in a deeply divided society each group fends for itself above all others: The rich may make philanthropic contributions, but their own interests are paramount. The young neglect the old. Industries pollute without regard for those downwind or downstream.
Few seem happy about these divisions—oddly, not even the winners. For much of the twentieth century, business leaders and wealthy families believed that they too would benefit from a social pact with blue-collar workers and middle-class professionals; after the Depression, they even supported housing and unemployment insurance for the poor. The system that the United States created was hardly perfect, and entire social programs (for housing, health, and education, among others) said to benefit “the public” actually excluded African Americans and Latinos, who were forcibly relegated into separate social worlds. But by sharing the wealth, investing in vital infrastructure, and promoting an ever-expanding vision of the common good, the nation achieved unprecedented levels of not only social stability but social security too.
Today, this collective project is in shambles. In recent decades, the 1 percent has taken home an outsize share of the nation’s economic gains, while the bottom 80 percent of workers have seen their wages stagnate or decline. When millions lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis, the most affluent Americans locked up their spoils, buying “safe deposit boxes in the sky” in soaring urban condominium towers.5 Those who could afford it went one step further, building survivalist retreats in New Zealand or the wooded Pacific Northwest, secluded places where they can prepare for civilization’s end.6 Meanwhile, the quality of public services deteriorated badly, as did the nation’s critical infrastructure. A small number of extraordinarily wealthy people built parallel private systems for air travel, personal security, even electricity; the merely well-off got fast-tracked (in airports, on special toll roads, and even in amusement park lines). The result is apparent everywhere: the great majority endures systems that are crumbling from overuse and underinvestment. Public transit lines are shoddy and overcrowded. Parks and playgrounds are poorly maintained. Public schools are underperforming. Branch libraries have reduced their hours, and in some cases closed for good. Heat, rain, fire, and wind wreak havoc on places that could once withstand them. Vulnerability is in the air.
None of this is sustainable.
American voters said as much in 2016, electing (albeit through the Electoral College rather than by a majority at the polls) a president who promised to blow up the system. But America’s divisions have only deepened since President Trump took office. Today, the specter of social unrest haunts cities, communities, and college campuses across the country. We fear one another, and everyone wants protection from the other side.
As a sociologist, I have grave concerns about the powerful trembling of these social fault lines. As a citizen, I can’t help asking how we can rebuild the foundations of civil society in the kinds of diverse, democratic nations we find throughout the world today. As a student of history, I wonder how we can move beyond violent opposition to a perceived nemesis and develop a sense of shared purpose based on commitments to justice and decency. As a parent of young children, I wonder whether we can repair things so that they will have a chance to flourish and not spend their lives cleaning up our mess.
But how will we do this? Economic development is certainly one solution, though increasing national prosperity helps a society become more cohesive only if everyone—not just the most successful—shares in the gains. Besides economic growth, two ideas about how to rebuild society have dominated the conversation: One is technocratic, and involves engineering physical systems that enhance security and facilitate the circulation of people and goods. The other is civic, and involves promoting voluntary associations—the Masons, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, block clubs, gardening groups, and bowling leagues—that bind people into communities. Both ideas are important, but they’re only partial solutions. Social infrastructure is the missing piece of the puzzle, and building places where all kinds of people can gather is the best way to repair the fractured societies we live in today.
It’s long been understood that social cohesion develops through repeated human interaction and joint participation in shared projects, not merely from a principled commitment to abstract values and beliefs. Alexis de Tocqueville admired the laws that formally established America’s democratic order, but he argued that voluntary organizations were the real source of the nation’s robust civic life. John Dewey claimed that social connection is predicated on “the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment.” “Democracy must begin at home,” he famously wrote, “and its home is the neighborly community.”7
Contemporary students of civil society have made similar observations. In Bowling Alone, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam attributes declines in health, happiness, education, economic productivity, and trust to the collapse of community and diminished participation in civic organizations. In Coming Apart, the conservative pundit Charles Murray argues that the “American project” has always been based on human beings “coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems.” This “civic culture” was once “so widely shared among Americans that it amounted to a civil religion,” Murray writes, echoing Tocqueville. But recently—and here is the source of his title—the “new upper class” has effectively abandoned the collective project, forming a separate society based on “spatial, economic, educational, cultural, and, to some degree, political isolation.” Unless the nation renews its sense of solidarity across class lines, Murray warns, “Everything that makes America exceptional will have disappeared.”8
Both Putnam and Murray advocate changing our cultural attitudes toward civic life and community building, and recommitting to the common good. For nearly two decades, Putnam’s magisterial account of declining social capital and his clarion call for more public engagement have influenced political officials, religious leaders, activists, journalists, and scholars alike. Yet the problems that made Putnam anxious when he published Bowling Alone are just as prevalent today, and in some ways more extreme.
In the late 1990s, when the book was written, one of Putnam’s principal concerns was that families had retreated from public life—the world of sports leagues and community groups—in favor of the private living room, where parents and children gathered together to watch TV. Today, of course, an evening when an entire family watches the same program in a common room is something like a utopian fantasy. Maybe on a special occasion: the Super Bowl, the Oscars, a presidential election, or a session of collective video gaming. But on typical nights it’s everyone on their own device.
Drawing on the best available data on American social behavior, the Harvard sociologist Peter Marsden shows that, surprisingly, trends in social activity have been fairly steady since the 1970s.9 Americans spend a bit more time with friends and a bit less time with neighbors than they used to, and, to no one’s surprise, they’re more likely to socialize on the Internet than in a restaurant or bar. Membership in traditional voluntary organizations hasn’t changed much either. But Americans are also more likely than they used to be to say that they cannot trust “most people.” The most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a modest but steady decline in rates of volunteering, with participation going down “across persons of all levels of educational attainment.”10 Immersion in their private worlds, writes the Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer, probably goes hand in hand with alienation from public life.11
Moral suasion has failed to increase our level of engagement in local institutions, where democracy takes root. But cultural values, and exhortations to change them, are not the only influences on our everyday social routines. As proponents of the New Urbanism movement have demonstrated, people with the same interest in social connection, community building, and civic participation have varying opportunities to achieve those things depending on the conditions in the places where they spend time. The social and physical environment shapes our behavior in ways we’ve failed to recognize; it helps make us who we are and determines how we live.
This book argues that social infrastructure plays a critical but un-derappreciated role in modern societies. It influences seemingly mundane but actually consequential patterns, from the way we move about our cities and suburbs to the opportunities we have to casually interact with strangers, friends, and neighbors. It is especially important for children, the elderly, and other people whose limited mobility or lack of autonomy binds them to the places where they live. But social infrastructure affects everyone. And while social infrastructure alone isn’t sufficient to unite polarized societies, protect vulnerable communities, or connect alienated individuals, we can’t address these challenges without it. In this book, I’ll explain how and why.
Infrastructure is a relatively new and entirely modern concept. It is “a collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking, substructure, foundation,” says the Oxford English Dictionary, and the higher-order projects it supports could be economic, military, or social. “It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work,” writes Susan Leigh Star, the late scholar of science and technology, in a classic article, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.”12 It is embedded, “sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies,” she adds. It is “transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks.” Its scope, in time and in space, is large. It is “fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally.” It is taken for granted by members of the group that use it most often. And, crucially, it becomes most visible when it breaks down.
The Vanderbilt University anthropologist Ashley Carse writes that the word “infrastructure” first came to the English language in the late nineteenth century, from France, where it was used to refer to the engineering work required for new railways, such as building embankments, bridges, and tunnels. After World War II, infrastructure became a buzzword in military and economic development circles. “Infrastructure was more than a word,” Carse claims. “It was world-making,” because it justified “specific visions and theories of political and socioeconomic organization” that Cold War planners advocated. The infrastructure concept catapulted from policy jargon into popular American discourse in the 1980s, when, perhaps surprisingly, President Ronald Reagan said his foreign policy objective was to help developing countries foster “the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way.”13
Today, the word “infrastructure” usually makes us think of what engineers and policy makers refer to as hard or physical infrastructure: large-scale systems for transit, electricity, gas, oil, food, finance, sewage, water, heat, communications, and storm protection. Sometimes experts call these systems the “critical infrastructure,” because policy makers perceive them to be essential for functioning societies.
When the levees break, cities and coastal areas flood, sometimes catastrophically. When the power goes out, most businesses, health care providers, and schools cannot operate, and many transit and communications networks stop running too. Breakdowns in the fuel supply can be even more consequential, since oil generates most of our heat and gas powers the trucks that deliver nearly all the food and medications consumed in large cities and suburbs as well as the automobiles that most people depend on to travel. No one needs a lengthy description of the problems that occur when the sewage system stops working. But the real problems come when several or all of these systems collapse simultaneously, as they do during extreme weather events or terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, history shows that such things are impossible to prevent, no matter how sophisticated our technology or design. And, as most policy makers and engineers see it, when hard infrastructure fails, as it did in the great Chicago heat wave, it’s the softer, social infrastructure that determines our fate.
“Infrastructure” is not a term conventionally used to describe the underpinnings of social life. But this is a consequential over-sight, because the built environment—and not just cultural preferences or the existence of voluntary organizations—influences the breadth and depth of our associations. If states and societies do not recognize social infrastructure and how it works, they will fail to see a powerful way to promote civic engagement and social interaction, both within communities and across group lines.
What counts as social infrastructure? I define it capaciously. Public institutions, such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools, are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, furniture, clothing, art, and other consumer goods. Commercial establishments can also be important parts of the social infrastructure, particularly when they operate as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third spaces,” places (like cafés, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they’ve purchased. Entrepreneurs typically start these kinds of businesses because they want to generate income. But in the process, as close observers of the city such as Jane Jacobs and the Yale ethnographer Elijah Anderson have discovered, they help produce the material foundations for social life.14
What doesn’t qualify as social infrastructure? Transit networks determine where we live, work, and play, and how long it takes to move between places. But whether they’re social infrastructure depends on how they’re organized, since a system designed for private vehicles will likely keep people separate as they travel (and consume enormous amounts of energy), whereas public systems that use buses and trains can enhance civic life. Although they have obvious social impacts, waterworks, waste treatment facilities, sewage systems, fuel supply lines, and electric grids are usually not social infrastructures. (We don’t congregate in these places.) But conventional hard infrastructure can be engineered to double as social infrastructure.
Take the case of levees. A simple levee is an artificial embankment that people build to prevent water from going into places they don’t want it to be. “A levee,” write Marshall Brain and Robert Lamb, on the popular HowStuffWorks website, “is typically little more than a mound of less permeable soil, like clay, wider at the base and narrower at the top.15 These mounds run in a long strip, sometimes for many miles, along a river, lake or ocean.” This kind of levee is physical infrastructure that protects social life on the dry side, not a robust social infrastructure. But levees can be designed differently. In the late 1930s, for instance, engineers needed to protect Washington, DC’s Federal Triangle neighborhood after a spell of heavy rains led to massive urban flooding. They could have put up a narrow mound of soil, but instead they built the Potomac Park Levee, a sloped walking path capped by a curved stone wall. In subsequent years the dual-purpose levee and parkland became one of the most popular public spaces in the city, a place where thousands of people go daily without even knowing that they’re on top of a critical infrastructure. Today, a growing number of architects and engineers are designing hard infrastructure, such as seawalls and bridges, so that it also functions as social infrastructure by incorporating parks, walking trails, and community centers. These projects, which already exist in places like Istanbul, Singapore, Rotterdam, and New Orleans, provide multiple benefits, from protecting against storm surges to promoting participation in public life.
Different kinds of social infrastructure play different roles in the local environment, and support different kinds of social ties. Some places, such as libraries, YMCAs, and schools, provide space for recurring interaction, often programmed, and tend to encourage more durable relationships. Others, such as playgrounds and street markets, tend to support looser connections—but of course these ties can, and sometimes do, grow more substantial if the interactions become more frequent or the parties establish a deeper bond. Countless close friendships between mothers, and then entire families, begin because two toddlers visit the same swing set. Basketball players who participate in regular pickup games often befriend people with different political preferences, or with a different ethnic, religious, or class status, and wind up exposed to ideas they wouldn’t likely encounter off the court.
Social infrastructures that promote efficiency tend to discourage interaction and the formation of strong ties. One recent study, for instance, shows that a day care center that encourages caregivers and parents to walk in and wait for their children, often inside the classroom and generally at the same time, fosters more social connections and supportive relationships than one where managers allow parents to come in on their own schedules and hurry through drop-off and pickup so they can quickly return to their private lives.16 Because much of our hard infrastructure—highways, airports, food supply chains, and the like—is designed to promote efficient circulation of people or vital resources, it can accelerate the trend of social atomization. Think, for example, about the contrast between a village where everyone gets their water from the same well and a city where everyone gets their water from faucets in their private homes.
Not all hard infrastructure leads to isolation. A recent ethnographic study of the New York City subway system, for instance, shows that people forge “transient communities” as they ride through the metropolis. The daily experience of spending time on crowded train cars rarely leads to long-term relationships, but it helps passengers learn to deal with difference, density, diversity, and other people’s needs. It fosters cooperation and trust. It exposes people to unexpected behavior and challenges stereotypes about group identity. The subway is not only New York City’s main social artery but also its largest and most heterogeneous public space.17
While the subway is a form of social infrastructure that, like public athletic fields and childcare centers, promotes interaction across group lines, some social infrastructures encourage bonds among people who already have a great deal in common. In elite American communities, private country clubs, some of which forbid female members and informally exclude certain ethnic or racial minorities, help build strong social ties and business networks that ultimately deepen the nation’s divisions and inequities. Border walls, including the one that currently separates parts of Israel and Palestine as well as the one that President Trump promises to build on the border of Mexico and the United States, are quint-essentially antisocial infrastructures. Paradoxically, zones around border walls, including checkpoints and access gates, often attract a diverse set of people, including members of the very groups that the structure is meant to separate, and occasionally they become sites for political engagement and protest. But their net impact is unmistakable: on good days, they segregate, discriminate, and entrench inequalities; on bad days, they incite violence.
Given the world’s cultural diversity, it’s no surprise that there is great variety in the kinds of social infrastructure that people find essential. In rural areas, for instance, hunting clubs, town halls, and fairgrounds are key sites for gathering, and community suppers are a staple of local life. Watering holes are hubs of social activity in societies across the planet, and some are especially important. “Of all the social institutions that mold men’s lives between home and work in an industrial town,” writes the MassObservation collective, in a classic ethnographic study of British industrial culture, the pub is more prevalent, “holds more people, takes more of their time and money, than church, cinema, dance-hall, and political organizations put together.” In other public places, ordinary people are “the audiences, watchers of political, religious, dramatic, cinematic, instructional or athletic spectacles,” but in the pub, things are different. “Once a man has bought or been bought his glass of beer, he has entered an environment in which he [is] participator rather than spectator.”18 Drinking grounds serve as sites of civic activity in other societies, of course. The Germans have their beer gardens, the French their cafés, the Japanese their izakayas and karaoke bars. They are vivid examples of those “third places,” the small, warm, intimate settings where people in public can feel like they’re at home.19
I’ve observed all kinds of collective life made possible by strong social infrastructures in foreign settings. For several years my family and I spent part of the winter living and working in Buenos Aires, and some of our most rewarding encounters with local residents happened around a soccer field (which in fact was a playground that children informally converted for their purposes every afternoon) where my son became a regular. In Doha and Jerusalem, as in so many Middle Eastern and African cities, I was continually pulled into the magnetic cultural activity at the souk. I never joined the early morning Tai Chi or group dance sessions in the parks near the places I stayed in Shanghai or Beijing, but undoubtedly millions of older Chinese people participate in them regularly for the social as well as physical benefits. In Iceland, geothermal swimming pools called “hot pots” are vital civic spaces, where people regularly cross class and generational lines. The Mexican zócalo, the Spanish plaza (or plaça, in Barcelona), and the Italian piazza serve the same function. I’ve never been to Rio de Janeiro, the Seychelles, Kingston, Jamaica, or Cape Town, but I’ve spent enough time in other coastal areas and lakefronts to know that nearly everyone appreciates the social opportunities created by a well-maintained beach.
Few modern social infrastructures are natural, however, and in densely populated areas even beaches and forests require careful engineering and management to meet human needs. This means that all social infrastructure requires investment, whether for development or upkeep, and when we fail to build and maintain it, the material foundations of our social and civic life erode.
The components of social infrastructure rarely crash as completely or as visibly as a fallen bridge or a downed electrical line, and their breakdowns don’t result in immediate systemic failures. But when the social infrastructure gets degraded, the consequences are unmistakable. People reduce the time they spend in public settings and hunker down in their safe houses. Social networks weaken. Crime rises. Older and sick people grow isolated. Younger people get addicted to drugs and become more vulnerable to lethal overdoses. Distrust rises and civic participation wanes.
Robust social infrastructure doesn’t just protect our democracy; it contributes to economic growth. One of the most influential trends in urban and regional planning involves converting old hard infrastructure, like discontinued rail lines and shipping docks, into vibrant social infrastructures for pedestrian activities. The High Line, which has driven billions of dollars of real estate and commercial development in Lower Manhattan, generated explosive social activity—and, alas, fueled runaway gentrification and displacement—is the most prominent model of this emerging urban form. But many other recent or current projects are reviving dead infrastructure with social infrastructure networks that attract residents, tourists, and businesses. The BeltLine in Atlanta is developing slowly, but will ultimately repurpose a twenty-two-mile rail corridor circling the city into thirty-three miles of trails, as well as a string of parks, public artworks, and affordable housing projects, that help connect some forty-five neighborhoods. In New Orleans, the Lafitte Greenway is a bicycle and pedestrian trail that’s designed to connect people and neighborhoods that might otherwise remain divided. The 606 Trail in Chicago, the Philadelphia Via-duct Rail Park, the Los Angeles River Revitalization, and the Petite Ceinture in Paris are being designed to do similar work. After burying the highway, Boston built a greenway on top of the Big Dig. Today, the Toronto City Council is trying to develop an urban park in the underpass of the Gardiner Expressway. A coalition in Sydney, Australia, is pushing to convert the Anzac Bridge into a massive pedestrian green space. The garden and walking path that Rotterdam developed on an abandoned elevated train track has environmental as well as social benefits. The designer, Doepel Strijkers, engineered a system that uses industrial waste to heat buildings along rails, dramatically reducing their carbon emissions and making the air that pedestrians breathe a little cleaner.20
Across the planet, projects like these evince the value of social infrastructure, and the rising demand for it as well. Not long ago, Jane Jacobs and other prominent advocates for improving urban life argued that entrepreneurs, not governments, should build the spaces that support our social interactions. But places like the High Line have not emerged from the free market. They required thoughtful design, careful planning, and, crucially, enlightened leadership from the public sector. Often they advanced through partnerships, with nonprofit organizations and civic coalitions supporting initiatives that cities and states couldn’t undertake on their own.
Today, the United States, like most other nations, is primed to make a historic investment in infrastructure, the kind we haven’t made in generations. Despite their many disagreements, American voters are undivided in their support for such public works projects. The need for significant infrastructure spending, if not necessarily the way to pay for it, was one of the few things that both Trump and Clinton agreed on in the 2016 presidential campaign. In coming decades, perhaps even in the next few years, we will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in critical infrastructure across the country, trillions around the world. Given the extraordinary stresses that are coming from our growing population, rising consumption, and global warming, and the sorry state of the systems that Americans rely on for electricity, transit, food, water, communications, and climate protection, we have no choice.
What we must decide, however, is whether rebuilding our social infrastructure will be part of this project. Most current debates about infrastructure investment in the United States focus exclusively on conventional hardline systems, as if the material under-pinning of our social and civic life were an unrelated concern.21 To be fair, one reason for that omission, in this country at least, is that social infrastructure is not yet a familiar concept. Other nations treat infrastructure more expansively, though, and we should too, lest we squander a historic opportunity to strengthen the places where we live and work.
To that end, this book will identify the elementary forms of social infrastructure and show how they shape conditions in different kinds of places, urban and suburban, rich and poor, in the United States and around the world. When possible, I’ll use the same comparative method I used to study the fate of Chicago neighborhoods, since looking closely at positive and negative cases is a powerful way to illustrate what works and what doesn’t, and sometimes even why. Most of the evidence I’ll marshal to support my claims comes from my own research and experiences. But I will also draw heavily on pioneering studies by colleagues across the social sciences and design fields that show how places shape human interaction and determine our fate. Although they rarely use the term, the body of research they’ve produced helped me understand the value of social infrastructure and its potential role in rebuilding civic life.
In the chapters ahead, I’ll show how social infrastructure can alleviate—or, when neglected, exacerbate—contemporary problems that we spend a great deal of time, money, and energy trying to solve: social isolation, crime, education, health, polarization, and climate change.
As we explore these global challenges, we’ll see that in every case the social infrastructure is just as important as the critical networks we’ve always prioritized, and that each depends on the other in ways we’ve yet to fully appreciate. My argument is neither that social infrastructure matters more than conventional hard infrastructure, nor that investing in social infrastructure is sufficient to solve the underlying problems of economic inequality and environmental degradation that make this moment so dangerous. It’s that building new social infrastructure is just as urgent as repairing our levees, airports, and bridges. Often, as we will see, we can strengthen both simultaneously, building lifeline systems that are also, to borrow the phrase that Andrew Carnegie used to describe the twenty-eight hundred or so grand libraries that he built across the world, “palaces for the people.”22 But first we need to recognize the opportunity.