Chicago Sun-Times front page from July 17, 1995, reporting numerous deaths from the Heat Wave of ’95. It was a disaster that killed more than 700 people, and as a social scientist, Klinenberg was interested in understanding the patterns that emerged from it. The first time Klinenberg thought about social infrastructure was when he was a graduate student doing a research project about a terrible heat wave that took place in Chicago in 1995.

If we neglect social infrastructure, we tend to grow more isolated, which can have serious consequences. We become more likely to interact with people around us, and connected to the broader public. But Eric Klinenberg says that when we invest in social infrastructures such as libraries, parks, or schools, we reap all kinds of benefits. Social infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although it’s often harder to see. Photo by Dllu (CC BY-SA 4.0) Social Infrastructure Many of the great Carnegie libraries remained racially segregated throughout the early 20th century, and they later became battlegrounds in the civil rights movement. Although it should be noted that these palaces were not always for everyone. He called greatest of them “palaces for the people.” The great Carnegie libraries had high ceilings, big windows, and spacious rooms where a person could read, think, and achieve something that they felt proud of. Over the course of his life, Carnegie helped to fund more than 2,500 libraries around the world-about 1,700 of which were in the United States.

Andrew Carnegie Carnegie Library in Dallas, Texas Carnegie wanted to help build a social institution that would facilitate that. The phrase “palaces for the people” actually comes from Andrew Carnegie who was known as a titan of the Gilded Age and one of the wealthiest people in the world when he lived.Ĭarnegie was a ruthless capitalist, famous for strike-breaking and doing things that promoted inequality in many parts of the world, but he was also an immigrant, and was committed to the idea that the US was a country where people could get ahead in life. Eric Klinenberg is the author of a book called Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.

Ninety nine percent invisible