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4ee318a
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There's a term you don't hear these days, one you used to hear all the time when the Carnegie branches opened: Palaces for the People. The library really is a palace. It bestows nobility on people who otherwise couldn't afford a shred of it. People need to have nobility and dignity in their lives. And you know, they need other people to recognize it in them too.
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libraries
libraries-rule
public-library
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Eric Klinenberg (author) |
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c24c669
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In a world where we spend ever more of our time staring at screens, blocking out even our most intimate and proximate human contacts, public institutions with open-door policies compel us to pay close attention to people nearby. After all, places like libraries are saturated with strangers, people whose bodies are different, whose styles are different, who make different sounds, speak different languages, give off different, sometimes noxio..
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public-libraries
social-infrastructure
civility
difference
strangers
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Eric Klinenberg |
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eb92ef3
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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 ..
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social-relationships
third-place
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Eric Klinenberg |
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2cd2c70
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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 ..
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social-relationships
third-place
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Eric Klinenberg |
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9b5d97b
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The accessible physical space of the library is not the only factor that makes it work well as social infrastructure. The institution's extensive programming, organized by a professional staff that upholds a principled commitment to openness and inclusivity, fosters social cohesion among clients who might otherwise keep to themselves.
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social-infrastructure
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Eric Klinenberg |
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b7bdeab
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Today, as cities and suburbs reinvent themselves, and as cynics claim that government has nothing good to contribute to that process, it's important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. After all, the root of the word "library," liber; means both "book" and "free." Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that -- even in an age of atomization and inequality -- se..
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public-libraries
social-infrastructure
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Eric Klinenberg |
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e1a9470
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Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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911c225
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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.
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social-infrastructure
social-relationships
social-media
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Eric Klinenberg |
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36e63c6
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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 w..
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social-infrastructure
restrictions
teens
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Eric Klinenberg |
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99d0d42
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The dead bodies were so visible that almost no one could see what had happened to them.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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bc7cfde
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After examining the body, pathologists determined that Laczko had died of artherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and heat stress.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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3d81a58
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Hundreds died alone behind locked doors and sealed windows that entombed them in suffocating private spaces where visitors came infrequently and the air was heavy and still. Among these victims, the bodies and belongings of roughly 170 people went unclaimed until the Public Administrators Office initiated an aggressive campaign to seek out relatives who had not noticed that a member of their family was missing. Even then, roughly one-third ..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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e181183
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Heat waves receive little public attention not only because they fail to generate the massive property damage and fantastic images produced by other weather-related disasters, but also because their victims are primarily social outcasts--the elderly, the poor, and the isolated--from whom we customarily turn away.4 Silent and invisible killers of silenced and invisible people, the social conditions that make heat waves so deadly do not so mu..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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1e37ae0
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But together they will represent the range of positions and the diversity of viewpoints that constitute the heterogeneity of the modern city and account for the variations in the ways that the heat wave was managed and interpreted.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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618dc0a
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In one major U.S. city, The New York Times reports, unclaimed bodies "are piling up faster than the city can handle them"; boxes containing the personal papers of the deceased are "piled floor to ceiling" in the county office.22 "We had never been so busy before," one Cook County investigator explained, "but nothing about the heat wave was really unusual except the amounts" (see fig"
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Eric Klinenberg |
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e073498
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It's like an assembly line in there," one officer said. In many cases police delivered decomposed bodies to the morgue several days after the date of death because no one had noticed that the person had not been seen in awhile. It was impossible to know how many more victims remained in their homes, undiscovered. By Saturday the number of bodies coming in to the morgue exceeded its 222-bay holding capacity by hundreds. Incoming bodies were ..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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c95bc2a
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More than one thousand people in excess of the July norm were admitted to inpatient units in local hospitals because of heatstroke, dehydration, heat exhaustion, renal failure, and electrolytic imbalances. Those who developed heatstroke suffered permanent damage, such as loss of independent function and multisystem organ failures. Thousands of other stricken by heat-related illnesses were treated in emergency rooms.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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9615708
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quite often happens that a phenomenon is insignificant only because one fails to take it into account."4 The missing dimension in our current understanding of the heat wave stems precisely from this kind of diagnostic failure."
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Eric Klinenberg |
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add5f1c
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They determined that the death count based solely on the medical autopsies had underestimated the damage. Between 14 and 20 July, 739 more Chicago residents died than in a typical week for that month. In fact, public health scholars have established that the proportional death toll from the heat wave in Chicago has no equal in the record of U.S. heat disasters.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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d647d32
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The disaster also has a social etiology, which no meteorological study, medical autopsy, or epidemiological report can uncover. The human dimensions of the catastrophe remain unexplored. This book is organized around a social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Just as the medical autopsy opens the body to determine the proximate physiological causes of mortality, this inquiry aims to examine the social organs of the city and identify th..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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019e9a8
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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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social-infrastructure
social-media
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Eric Klinenberg |
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333d048
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Schumpeter may well have seen singles as rational. but in a survey of Americans conducted in 1957, more than half the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick", "immoral", or "neurotic," while about a third viewed them "neutrally"."
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Eric Klinenberg |
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dc5077f
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The boys were already dead, though, and when the paramedics arrived, they determined that the body temperatures were 107 and 108 degrees.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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cd5b2a5
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Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million--roughly one out of every seven adults--live alone.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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a87a702
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Do you know why so many of us live alone?" a Swedish statistician I interview in the charming Old Town district asks me. He quickly answers his own question: "Because we can."
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Eric Klinenberg |
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20d17e7
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The four countries with the highest rates of living alone are Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where roughly 40 to 45 percent of all households have just one person. By investing in each other's social welfare and affirming their
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Eric Klinenberg |
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bd8f926
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in the end, a source of deep meaning and security, but because it allows us the freedom to cultivate our selves, develop original ideas, and make a productive return to the world.
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Eric Klinenberg |
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12d09b3
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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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social-media
technology
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Eric Klinenberg |
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6cad7aa
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Living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values--individual freedom, personal control, and self-realization--whose significance endures from adolescence to our final days. It allows us to do what we want, when we want, on our own terms. It liberates us from the constraints of a domestic partner's needs and demands, and permits us to focus on ourselves. Today, in our age of digital media and ever expanding social networks, living alone can..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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429d536
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The 1995 heat wave was a social drama that played out and made visible a series of conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Investigating the people, places, and institutions most affected by the heat wave--the homes of the decedents, the neighborhoods and buildings where death was concentrated or prevented, the city agencies that forged an emergency response system, the Medical Examiners Office and scientific research ..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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447d3da
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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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Eric Klinenberg |
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f856a51
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THE SINGLE WOMAN, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times . . . She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good. Economically, she is a dream. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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452fd5a
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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 alienat..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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6009151
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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."
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voluntary-organizations
social-relationships
democracy
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Eric Klinenberg |
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690423d
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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 engage..
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infrastructure
social-infrastructure
social-relationships
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Eric Klinenberg |
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6fe6221
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spaces," places (like cafes, 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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Eric Klinenberg |
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4976c8a
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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.
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social-infrastructures
maintenance
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Eric Klinenberg |
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4afdf7f
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recent decades, American utility companies have spent relatively little on research and development. One industry report estimates that, in 2009, research-and-development investments made by all US electrical-power utilities amounted to at most $700 million, compared with $6.3 billion by IBM and $9.1 billion by Pfizer. In 2009, however, the Department of Energy issued $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to a hundred smart-grid projects across t..
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Eric Klinenberg |
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7048e0c
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We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s," Klaus Jacob observed. "But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats."
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Eric Klinenberg |