I just
finished reading Eric Klinenberg’s excellent new book, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure can Help Fight
Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Klinenberg 2018). The book is about social
cohesion and its value for life and society today. Social cohesion refers to solidarity
and togetherness within a society or social group. In one definition:
“Social
cohesion is defined as the willingness of members of a society to cooperate
with each other in order to survive and prosper. Willingness to cooperate means
they freely choose to form partnerships and have a reasonable chance of
realizing goals, because others are willing to cooperate and share the fruits
of their endeavours equitably. Social cohesion contributes to a wide variety of
social outcomes such as health and economic prosperity” (Stanley 2003:5).
Social
cohesion is a positive value in societies today, and there is a HUGE scholarly
literature on the topic. Klinenberg’s primary insight is to show how the built
environment can promote social cohesion. When people gather in places like
libraries, parks, playgrounds, churches, or open markets, they interact with
one another. These social interactions often occur with persons who may differ
from one another in various ways. Social cohesion is a common outcome of these
interactions. By building, protecting, and promoting such places, governments
and authorities can promote the development of social cohesion, and “help fight
inequality, polarization, and the decline of civic life” (to quote Klinenberg’s
subtitle).
I find
Klinenberg’s approach particularly attractive for two reasons. First, his
emphasis on social interaction as the cause for development of social cohesion,
cooperation, and community makes sense. This is an idea that goes back to the
great sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim argued that religion contributes to
social solidarity not because people share the same beliefs,
but because their
religion leads them to participate in common rituals and ceremonies. Anthropologist
David Kertzer’s book, Ritual, Politics,
and Power (Kertzer 1988) is an
excellent study of this phenomenon, in both modern nations and the non-western
small-scale societies studied by ethnographers. In Kertzer’s words, “Solidarity
is produced by people acting together, not by people thinking together” (p.
76). Klinenberg puts it like this: “It’s long been understood that social
cohesion develops through repeated human interaction and joint participation in
shared projects, not merely from a principles commitment to abstract values and
beliefs” (p.11).
**DIGRESSION
ALERT!!** This focus on social interactions goes far beyond cohesion and
solidarity. In settlement scaling theory, face-to-face social interactions
within the built environment of settlements are the primary force that generates settlement agglomeration, social change, and economic growth. Luis
Bettencourt derived the quantitative model that predicts a number of
quantitative attributes of settlement based on population size (Bettencourt 2013). The resulting empirical
regularities of settlement size have been identified in systems from the
contemporary U.S. to Medieval Europe (Cesaretti
et al. 2016), to the pre-Inca Andes (Ortman
et al. 2016) and even some small-scale ancient North American societies (Ortman and Coffey 2017). I’ll stop here, and
refer readers to the website of the Social Reactors Project. I
explore some of the issues in a recently-published paper (finally!!) that uses
the concept of “energized crowding” to
discuss the outcomes of social interaction in growing settlements (Smith 2019). I’ve blogged about the scaling
research in a bunch of prior posts, including: Is There a Science of Human Settlements?; Cities as Social Reactors, and My Journey in Settlement Scaling (or search for the keyword "scaling" in this blog). This is getting
beyond Klinenberg’s book, but his discussion dovetails nicely with the scaling
research. **END OF DIGRESSION**
Let me give
an extended quotation from Palaces for
the People that give important details:
“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, relationship
inevitably grow” (p.5)
This leads
into the second reason I particularly like Klinenberg’s approach—the importance
of the built environment, and of the social and physical attributes of specific
places that promote social cohesion. As an archaeologist, I study buildings and
spaces where interactions once took place. Of course, the big problem for
archaeology is that the physical remains—of a room, a building, or a formal
open place—do not include the rules, norms, or practices of ancient patterns of
behavior. Furthermore, archaeologists rarely encounter the furniture and other
semi-fixed feature elements (Rapoport 1990)
that are a crucial component of any setting for activities.
In a few cases,
however, social cohesion and its physical context can be recovered
archaeologically. I am thinking of well-understood historically-recent contexts
where the archaeology is supplemented by written records. My student April
Kamp-Whittaker is writing her dissertation on social cohesion, neighborhoods,
and social dynamics at Amache, a World-War-II Japanese internment camp, and
I am envious of the level of detail—both archaeological and documentary—she has
to work with. Her research will make a contribution to our understanding of
social cohesion, both in specific difficult conditions (an internment camp),
and as a general phenomenon.
A less direct
use of Palaces for the People for
archaeologists is that it provides likely details and patterns for some of the
contexts we study in ancient cities. For example, one might infer that
premodern societies with more collective forms of governance had more, or
larger, facilities of social infrastructure, compared to societies with more
autocratic forms of rule. (See my post, "Ramses II vs. Pericles, or Darth Vader vs. the Rebel Alliance") This is something that is always on the minds of those of
us who deal with ancient Teotihuacan. But, I’m not sure how far this can be
pushed. In modern societies, civic life, social processes, and government are
radically different from those of any ancient society. It requires some thought
to figure out how well concepts like “social infrastructure” translate to early
or nonwestern contexts. I am mulling these ideas over, and perhaps will blog
about them in the near future.
Palaces for the People is Andrew Carnegie’s term for public
libraries in the U.S. Carnegie funded hundreds of libraries around the country,
most of which are still active today. The book has a nice contrast between Carnegie's attitude and works and those of a modern equivalent figure, Marc Zuckerberg. Klinenberg devotes a lot of space on
libraries. While reading the book last week, I went to use a small branch
library in rural Texas (to use the internet connection). The first thing I did
was look for the public spaces, and yes, there was a big community room where
local groups can meet. There is much more in this book that I don’t have space
to go into. I highly recommend it. It will make you pay more attention to
social infrastructure, and will help you appreciate its value and importance in
society today.
Bettencourt, Luís M. A.
2013 The
Origins of Scaling in Cities. Science
340: 1438-1441.
Cesaretti, Rudolf, Luís M. A.
Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, Scott Ortman, and Michael E. Smith
2016 Population-Area
Relationship in Medieval European Cities. PLOS-One
11 (10): e162678. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0162678.
Kertzer, David I.
1988 Ritual, Politics, and Power. Yale
University Press, New Haven.
Klinenberg, Eric
2018 Palaces for the People: How Social
Infrastructure can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of
Civic Life. Crown, New York.
Ortman, Scott G. and Grant D. Coffey
2017 Settlement
Scaling in Middle-Range Societies. American
Antiquity 82 (4): 662-682.
Ortman, Scott G., Kaitlyn E. Davis,
José Lobo, Michael E. Smith, Luis M.A. Bettencourt, and Aaron Trumbo
2016 Settlement
Scaling and Economic Change in the Central Andes. Journal of Archaeological Science 73: 94-106. http://bit.ly/2aHXpGk.
Rapoport, Amos
1990 Systems
of Activities and Systems of Settings.
In Domestic Architecture and the Use of
Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study, edited by Susan Kent, pp.
9-20. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Stanley, Dick
2003 What
Do We Know about Social Cohesion: The Research Perspective of the Federal
Government's Social Cohesion Research Network. The Canadian Journal of Sociology ' Cahiers canadiens de sociologie
28 (1): 5-17.
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