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Book: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
Quotes of Book: Palaces for the People: How
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  1. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    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 cafes, diners, barbershops, and bookstores} where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased."
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  2. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    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 infrastructures require 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.
    book-quotemaintenancesocial-infrastructures

  3. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    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.
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  4. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    infrastructure" is not a term conventionally used to describe the underpinnings of social life. But this is a consequential oversight, 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.
    book-quotesocial-infrastructuresocial-relationshipsinfrastructure

  5. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    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 begins at home," he famously wrote, "and its home is the neighborly community.
    book-quotedemocracysocial-relationshipsvoluntary-organizations

  6. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    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.
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  7. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    Living in a place like East New York requires developing coping strategies, and for many residents, the more vulnerable older and younger ones in particular, the key is to find safe havens. As on every other Thursday morning this spring, today nine middle-aged and elderly residents who might otherwise stay home alone will gather in the basement of the neighborhood's most heavily used public amenity, the New Lots branch library.
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  8. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    Even the Internet, which was supposed to deliver unprecedented cultural diversity ad democratic communication, has become an echo chamber where people see and hear what they already believe.
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  9. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    Social media, for all their powers, cannot give us what we get from churches, unions, athletic clubs, and welfare states. They are neither a safety net nor a gathering place. In fact, insider accounts from Silicon Valley tech companies establish that keeping people on their screens, rather than in the world of face-to-face interaction, is a key priority of designers and engineers."
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  10. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    The teens whom {danah boyd, director of the research institute Data & Society} interviewed insisted they prefer hanging out in person to messaging on smartphones, but adults have restricted their mobility so thoroughly that they have few alternatives. The Internet has become young people's core social infrastructure because we've unfairly deprived them of access to other sites for meaningful connection. If we fail to build physical places where people can enjoy one another's company, regardless of age, class, race, or ethnicity, we will all be similarly confined.
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  11. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    For most of us, Facebook friends and Instagram followers are supplements to -- not surrogates for -- our social lives. As meaningful as the friendships we establish online can be, most of us are unsatisfied with virtual ties that never develop into face-to-face relationships. Building real connections requires a shared physical environment -- a social infrastructure.
    book-quotesocial-mediasocial-infrastructuresocial-relationships

  12. Eric Klinenberg _ Palaces for the People: How

    Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
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