Social Infrastructure in Cities Today: Eric Klinenberg's “Palaces for the People”

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.

Smith, Michael E.

2019 TheGenerative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In Coming Together:Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization,edited by Attila Gyucha, pp. 37-58. State University of New York Press, Albany.

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.

Archaeology and pink flamingos in Chicago neighborhoods

I just received Robert Sampson's new book on Chicago neighborhoods in the mail, and it got me thinking about some student archaeology projects in Chicago that I supervised years ago. Sampson's book synthesizes many years of research and technical publications, and it looks great. He argues for the importance of urban neighborhoods in understanding cities, poverty, crime, and urban life. Not only is Sampson one of the most prominent urban sociologists, but he also writes well. I'll blog about it here once I've had a chance to read the book. It is published by the University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Chicago is a great city for its distinctive neighborhoods, many based on variation in ethnicity, national origin, wealth, and social class. My first teaching position was at Loyola University of Chicago, and for a couple of years I sent students out to do research on modern material culture in Chicago. The students did the kind of research archaeologists normally do, but addressed at modern Chicago, not at ancient sites.

For example, archaeologists often compare different contexts (neighborhoods, or houses, or settlements) in terms of the kinds of material objects each had. These could be portable artifacts, or buildings or architectural spaces. We use the differences in artifacts between contexts to make inferences about social differences in the past. But do wealthy and poor neighborhoods really differ in their material remains? Archaeologists rely on knowledge of modern and recent contexts to generate analogies (formal comparisons) to interpret the past. We study these issues in modern contexts where we know both the material remains and their social significance, and then we apply that knowledge to the past. While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that rich and poor neighborhoods look different in their housing, their streets, and innumerable material measures, it is still useful to have firm data about how these relationships between artifacts and society work today, so that we can make better inferences about the distant past.

I wish I had kept better records about the student projects. I recall two projects where students selected an upper middle class neighborhood and a working class neighborhood and compared them systematically. One student was an ardent cyclist, and her project focused on bicycles parked at high schools in the two neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, one could predict the neighborhood on the basis of the types of bikes found at the schools. Another student, interested in gardening, looked at landscaping--the kinds of trees and bushes planted in the two neighborhoods (both in yards, and in public spaces). Again, the differences were clear. Actually, Robert Sampson carried out some generally similar research as part of his studies of Chicago neighborhoods, recording information about building types, trash in public places, graffiti, types of stores, and other observable traits of the urban build environment. He related those data to information on poverty, crime and social dynamics in various neighborhoods. Maybe he should be an archaeologist! If he ever gets tired of sociology, we can find things for him to do......

Another project I recall was done by a student who had a job working in the field house of a large public park. She rented out sports equipment and did other tasks relating to use of the park for sports activities. But in addition to the regular legal use of the park, there were quite a few unofficial, informal, and illegal activities going on. She did an archaeological survey, noting the presence and types of artifacts on the ground surface in different parts of the park (this was a survey WITHOUT artifact pick-up!). It turns out that the various informal activities were divided into separate areas, all out of sight behind vegetation and other features. Lovers used one part of the park (as evidenced by small foil packages), winos were in another area (bottles), and the junkies used a third place (needles). One issue in the use of space (in both modern and ancient cities) is whether activities are separated into specialized places, or whether they share common spaces, perhaps at different times. This project was called something like "Illicit activities in a Chicago city park."

My favorite student project on Chicago material culture was a test of the hypothesis that lawn ornaments were associated with ethnicity. If you asked people in Chicago about who tended to have lots of lawn ornaments -- pink flamingos, blue balls, jockeys holding lanterns, upturned bathtubs with shrines -- the most common answer was that the Polish people had lots of ornaments. But the Poles said that the Italians or Mexicans were the ones with lots of junk on their lawns. The basic local story was that lawn ornamentation was associated with ethnicity. The student had seen a neighborhood where lots of houses had lots of lawn ornaments, so she set out to see if these were associated with a particular ethnic group. She got a list of names and addresses in this neighborhood (from a Democratic party worker), and used surname as a measure of ethnicity for each household. This was obviously a rough measure, but good enough for a student term paper. She also counted the lawn ornaments on each lawn, and made a map of the neighborhood showing the distribution of the numbers of ornaments (this student went on go get a Ph.D. in archaeology).

It turns out that the number of ornaments had nothing to do with ethnicity (in this neighborhood, at least). There was a hot spot on one street -- two houses, diagonally across from one another, had far more ornaments than anybody else. These two homeowners were in competition with one another, and they both went bonkers with more than 100 things in their front yards. But they clearly had an effect on their neighbors, because most yards on that one street had far more ornaments than elsewhere in the area. In fact, the map showed a steady decline in the frequency of ornaments as one moved away from the two top houses (a nice distance decay distribution, to be technical). So, in this one Chicago neighborhood, ethnicity had nothing to do with the frequency (or type) of lawn ornaments. Instead, two homeowners went nuts competing with one another for the gaudiest yard, and their neighbors joined in and put lots of things in their yards too.


So in this case, archaeological methods of studying the spatial and quantitative distributions of artifacts yielded information about modern society in Chicago. While archaeologists more commonly use insights from modern cities to interpret ancient cities, in this case archaeological methods from ancient cities contributed to our knowledge of modern cities. Research on past and present cities can be a two-way street.

But Aren't Modern Cities Very Different from Premodern Cities ?

This post is a kind of reply to my previous post, "Why are Premodern Cities Important Today?" If cities today are completely different from those that came before, then it is hard to make the argument that premodern cities have anything to tell us about urbanization today. I am playing devil's advocate with myself here. These are the main arguments I have found in the literature on how modern cities are very different from earlier cities. They come mostly from environmental historians.

(1) The Industrial Revolution

Environmental anthropologist Emilio Moran talks about how cities after 1800 (I assume he refers to  Europe and North America) differed greatly from earlier cities. He presents a common technological and demographic argument:

Prior to the eighteenth century, urbanization was a limited phenomenon and cities had a coupled relationship to their surrounding rural areas. Provisioning cities back then depended on a relatively proximate rural zone near the city. Cities recycled their ‘night soil’ and other urban wastes in the nearby rural areas, making them bad smelling but ecologically virtuous (Guillerme 1988; Harvey 1996). These same processes also made cities a locus of disease, pestilence, and plagues that decimated urban populations until the implementation of drainage systems, potable water supplies, and public health services. Before 1800 the ecological footprint of cities was light because they were embedded bioregionally and their size permitted provisioning by the immediate surrounding hinterland. (Moran 2008: 310).

(2) Cities and the Environment

(A)  Environmental historian John McNeill focuses on urban changes in the twentieth century:

Twentieth-century urbanization affected almost everything in human affairs and constituted a vast break with past centuries (McNeill 2000:281).

McNeill points to changes in the sizes of cities, the nature and extent of garbage and pollution, and the size of ecological footprints.

(B) In the broader sustainability literature, the great social changes of the recent period are sometimes referred to as the "Great Acceleration" and the epoch is sometimes referred to as "the Anthropocene" (Steffen et al 2007).

These and many other changes demonstrate a distinct increase in the rates of change in many human-environment interactions as a result of amplified human impact on the environment after World War II—a period that we term the “Great Acceleration. (Hibbard et al 2007).

For an up-to-date review of the environmental focus on contemporary urbanization, see Seto et al. (2010).

(3) The World Picture

For twentieth century changes in cities, urban scholars Gordon McGranahan and David Satterthwaite stress globalization and the expansion of the world capitalist economy over the strictly environmental factors discussed above:

The most important underpinning of urban change during the twentieth century was the large increase in the size of the global economy. In general, the nations with the largest cities and with the most rapid increase in their levels of urbanization are the nations with the largest increases in their economies. (McGranahan and Satterthwaite 2003: 246).

Unlike many urban scholars who rarely think beyond the modern western world, these two are clearly concerned with urbanization all over the world today (as their many fine publications indicate).

(4) An Archaeological Response

While not disagreeing with any of the observations listed above,  I think that there are still non-trivial continuities, similarities and parallels between modern and ancient cities. Indeed, this whole blog is based on this premise. But just how far can the similarities be pushed? We still need considerable comparative research to answer this question. Many of my posts in this blog illustrate my own exploration of this theme. But I am not the only archaeologist who feels this way. A number of years ago, Monica Smith (no relation!) made this observation:

Rather than seeing cities as fundamentally changed by the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the global connections of the modern world, new anthropological research suggests that both ancient and modern cities are the result of a limited range of configurations that structure human action in concentrated populations (Monica Smith 2003:2).

I heartily agree!! What do you think? I'd be interested in other opinions on this matter.

References:

Hibbard, Kathy A., Paul J. Crutzen, Eric F. Lambin, Diana M. Liverman, Nathan J. Mantua, John R. McNeill, Bruno Messerli, and Will Steffen

2007    Group Report: Dacadal-scale Interactions of Humans and the Environment. In Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, edited by Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Will Steffen, pp. 341-375. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

McGranahan, Gordon and David Satterthwaite

2003    Urban Centers: An Assessment of Sustainability. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 28:243-274.

McNeill, John R.

2000    Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. Norton, New York.

Moran, Emilio F.

2008    Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology. 3rd ed. Westview, Boulder.

Seto, Karen C., Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez, and Michail Fragkias

2010    The New Geography of Contemporary Urbanization and the Environment. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35:167-194.

Smith, Monica L.

2003    Introduction: The Social Construction of Ancient Cities. In The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, edited by Monica L. Smith, pp. 1-36. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill

2007    The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio 36:614-621.