Come Together, Right Now, Maybe at the Library

In July 1995, fatally high temperatures hit Chicago. The heat index reached 126, millions were stuck in place for days, and an estimated 739 people died. That such a disaster could occur in a major American city on the brink of the 21st century humbled all who studied it. In his 2002 book, Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg performed a "social autopsy" of the event, finding, not surprisingly, that living alone was an especially high risk factor: An elderly person without a social network had a sharply higher chance of dying than peers with someone to check up on them. But the research also refuted claims that people in high-fatality neighborhoods had simply let their neighbors down. The real problem, Klinenberg concluded, wasn't values; it was architecture. In public housing units designed to foster connection, residents survived at much higher rates than neighbors in buildings that were similar in all other respects.

In his new book, Palaces for the People, Klinenberg takes on a wider investigation of our social infrastructure—the physical places and organizations that influence how people interact with each other. "The social and physical environment shapes our behavior in ways we've failed to recognize," he writes. "It helps make us who we are and determines how we live." But he warns that it has become dangerously frayed, threatening not just the body politic but our physical and mental health. And while he finds models of social innovation worth emulating around the world, he is clear-eyed about the challenges of implementing them in the United States.

Klinenberg's foreign excursions are reliably fascinating. Iceland, for example, is a homogeneous nation of just 330,000, but it has its social differences, and they are eased at the rugged country's network of 120 geothermally heated pools. Icelanders take dips day and night, especially during the interminable winter. In a country with few private pools, the "hot pots" are de facto melting pots where rich and poor cordially mix. Immigrants report that trips to the pool help them learn local customs; young women say that locker rooms full of diverse ages and body types help them become more comfortable with their bodies; and elected officials dutifully dip to take the temperature of their constituents. The U.S. has its own history of grand public pool construction, primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, but it's a legacy tarnished by segregation in many locales. And where segregation wasn't legally viable, many whites opted out of the communal space, sparking a midcentury boom in residential in-ground pool construction.

Homophily, our eagerness to associate with those who are most like us, is a part of our evolutionary history, and one with some benefits: An African-American male who has moved to a new city may make a point of visiting the local barbershop, an institution Klinenberg praises, to find out about his new community, just as other newcomers might seek out a church, bowling league, or parent-teacher association. But homophily doesn't necessarily benefit the social infrastructure, especially at a time when economic factors conspire to limit our opportunities to interact across ethnic and political lines.

In the industrial cities of the Midwest, white, Mexican, Eastern European, and African-American men once worked side by side in factories and steel mills, developing cordial and even jovial relationships and fostering respect and understanding even as they settled in ethnically distinct neighborhoods. "In this social environment, prejudices don't hold up well," Klinenberg writes. But the decline of industrialization has largely put an end to such connections.

The damage to civic life of such shifts, he believes, has been catastrophic. Without opportunities to debate our political differences with peers we respect, on the job or in integrated associations, we go online to find ideological succor in filter bubbles where we get plenty of bonding social capital to boost our egos, but little of the bridging social capital we need to live together. Abstract values are not enough, at least not anymore; a meeting of the minds remains best facilitated through the crucible of face to face interaction. Without it, "in a deeply divided society, each group fends for itself above all others."

Green, No Gang

Klinenberg sees social cohesion, or its lack, as a factor in a range of societal challenges. The recent historic rise in the rate of white Americans dying in middle age can be classified, Princeton researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue, as "deaths of despair." Declining marriage rates and rising divorce rates in this population, in tandem with other signs of communal decline, leave people with less social structure. Without that support, when decisions fail, "the individual can only hold himself or herself responsible."

Criminality is traditionally seen as the product of opportunity, motive, and, above all, character. But what if environment is an equally crucial pillar? Klinenberg sides with late criminologist C. Ray Jeffery, who argued that "the built environment helps determine local crime levels." And while readers may reasonably believe that economics, psychology, genetics, and other factors play more crucial roles, Klinenberg presents considerable proof that where residents are empowered to take charge of their shared spaces, where abandoned buildings are quickly remediated, and where well-tended greens replace weed-infested lots, neighbors see crime and gun violence recede, with a reduction in economic and social costs that provides a net benefit for all.

Epidemiologist Charles Branas has found that walking past a blighted block causes residents' heart rates to increase by 9.5 beats per minute, suggesting that proximity to such spaces is a consistent, underrecognized source of psychological and physical stress, with all their associated ills. Studies in Britain found similar physiological effects of living without regular access to green space, an outcome that was notably consistent across economic strata.

Surveillance is also a factor in creating a safer and healthier public space—not so much police cameras as the informal surveillance of neighbors, shopkeepers, shoppers, and others. One sign of a neighborhood where crime can be expected to drop: The introduction of coffee shops, whose presence is linked to reduced street crime and murder in virtually every type of locale. The studies Klinenberg cites, he admits, don't address the pros or cons of gentrification, and he knows that commercial establishments like Starbucks are imperfect "third places," as they're not always equally open to the lingering of all groups at all times. "No Loitering" signs are posted in such places for a reason—so that management can enforce the rule at will.

Leaving the Virtual Square

The public spaces that give the book its title are public libraries, which Andrew Carnegie called "palaces for the people" as he funded the creation of 2,811 of them around the turn of the 20th century. Klinenberg believes the library is among our most critical forms of social infrastructure, providing a setting for social participation and an essential space for thwarting isolation and loneliness.

He's not alone: According to the Pew Research Center, while virtually every other major institution has declined in public esteem, only the military, first responders, and libraries have maintained it, with the latter polling at 90 percent. And unlike commercial establishments, one proud New York City librarian told the author, "You have to try very, very hard to get kicked out of this library."

The greatest beneficiaries may be children. For humans to achieve their potential, or to muster the confidence to try, they need, among other things, to feel secure. Expanding this bedrock notion beyond its traditional confines in the family unit to the larger community, Klinenberg finds libraries to be among the most reliable safe havens for ambitious young people. If they didn't already exist, we'd have to invent them, although he strongly doubts we could muster the effort in the current climate.

After detailing the varied ways that physical spaces can provide us a social and, in natural disasters, a literal lifeline, Klinenberg turns with perhaps predictable scorn to virtual communities that claim to do the same. Mark Zuckerberg's vision of online social infrastructure is "flimsy," with only one real goal, profit: "No matter how the site's designers tweak Facebook content, the human connections we need to escape danger, establish trust, and rebuild society require recurrent social interaction in physical places." He also charges the benevolent giants of Silicon Valley with disrupting their region's social fabric, not least by building massive, luxurious campuses that provide highly paid workers almost every service they need, negating their reason to patronize the small local businesses that have long anchored their communities and putting the social infrastructure those merchants provide at dire risk.

Carnegie built libraries to support "boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it." Klinenberg struggles to find a comparable concern for the public weal within companies that built their fortunes on a technology that was developed by the government and that is carried over a publicly funded communications infrastructure.

For those who haven't been to a big-city library in a while, the places may be unrecognizable: Still repositories of books, for sure, they are also full-on community centers offering internet access, hosting clubs and classes, and going to whatever lengths they can afford to create a home away from home for people who need one.

When our public spaces encourage us to get out of our homes and engage with neighbors in places we feel safe, we become more likely to look out for each other and answer the call when disaster strikes. As climate change brings more powerful and frequent storms, smarter public architecture will be vital. But stronger walls and barriers can do only so much. "The water is coming," Klinenberg writes, but with the right social infrastructure, "we may well get through it without building an ark."

A Houston pastor whose church sheltered congregants and strangers during tropical storm Harvey in 2017 and then organized members as volunteer work crews to salvage flooded homes, said of his neighbors in his first post-storm sermon, "If it was my house, they would be there. If it was your house, they would be there." In a crisis, he now knew, "I know where you live. That's my prayer."