How Social Infrastructure Can Help People Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

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.

Eric Klinenberg

We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together and find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?

In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides.

According to author Eric Klinenberg, 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.

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inspired by Palaces for the People, by Eric Klinenberg