Social Infrastructure

“A comprehensive, entertaining, and compelling argument for how rebuilding social infrastructure can help heal divisions in our society and move us forward.”—Jon Stewart NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) 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. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION “Just brilliant!”—Roman Mars, 99% Invisible “The aim of this sweeping work is to popularize the notion of ‘social infrastructure'—the ‘physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact'. . . . Here, drawing on research in urban planning, behavioral economics, and environmental psychology, as well as on his own fieldwork from around the world, [Eric Klinenberg] posits that a community’s resilience correlates strongly with the robustness of its social infrastructure. The numerous case studies add up to a plea for more investment in the spaces and institutions (parks, libraries, childcare centers) that foster mutual support in civic life.”—The New Yorker “Palaces for the People—the title is taken from the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s description of the hundreds of libraries he funded—is essentially a calm, lucid exposition of a centuries-old idea, which is really a furious call to action.”—New Statesman “Clear-eyed . . . fascinating.”—Psychology Today

This book, Social Infrastructure: New York, one of a series that documents the Bass Fellowship at the Yale School of Architecture studio led by real estate developer Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization, a leading New York firm known for spearheading sustainable high-rise developments, and architect Bjarke Ingels, founder of Copenhagen- and New York-based Bjarke Ingels Group. Their students explored potential synergies between public and private programs in the design of inhabited bridges crossing major waterways in metropolitan New York. The group traveled to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway to research developments that successfully integrated the needs of numerous stake-holders. The featured projects from the studio demonstrate a diverse range of approaches for combining residential, cultural, and commercial activities on complex and dense infrastructural sites in imaginative and productive ways.

Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time. Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy. Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The author explores a set of questions that, once asked, seem obvious: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.

The development of any contemporary economy is affected by numerous factors. By creating stable infrastructures, countries can more easily thrive in competitive international markets. Social, Health, and Environmental Infrastructures for Economic Growth is a comprehensive source of academic material that examines the impact of infrastructure development on modern economies. Highlighting relevant perspectives on topics such as employment, rural development, and energy production, this is an ideal reference source for researchers, students, professionals, practitioners, and policy makers interested in the social, health, and environmental infrastructures in contemporary economies.

Social Infrastructure and Vulnerability in the Suburbs examines how the combination of the low-density, car-centric geography of outer suburbs and neoliberal governance in the past several decades has affected disadvantaged populations in North American metro areas. Taking the example of York Region, a large outer suburb north of Toronto, the authors provide a spatial analysis that illuminates the invisible geography of vulnerability in the region. The volume examines access to social services by vulnerable groups who are not usually associated with the suburbs: recent immigrants, seniors, and low-income families. Investigating their access to four types of social infrastructure – education, employment, housing, and settlement services – this book presents a range of policy recommendations for how to address the social inequalities that characterize contemporary outer suburbs.

Obtaining the ultimate objective of economic growth depends largely on the availability of infrastructure in the economy. New developments in finance also play an important role in enhancing economic prosperity in a country. Strategic Infrastructure Development for Economic Growth and Social Change explores different avenues of research in the areas of corporate governance, socioeconomic conditions, modern business infrastructure, business automation, strategic financial management, and financial aspects of modern businesses. This reference work discusses practical applications, skills, practices, and strategies involved in economic and business growth, and overall economic development. Academicians, practitioners, professionals, and researchers will benefit from the topics discussed in this book.

Richard Rogers was born in Florence in 1933. He was educated in the UK and then at the Yale School of Architecture, where he met Norman Foster. Alongside his partners, he has been responsible for some of the most radical designs of the twentieth century, including the Pompidou Centre, the Millennium Dome, the Bordeaux Law Courts, Leadenhall Tower and Lloyd's of London. He chaired the Urban Task Force, which pioneered the return to urban living in the UK, was chief architectural advisor to the Mayor of London, and has also advised the mayors of Barcelona and Paris. He is married to Ruth Rogers, chef and owner of the River Café in London. He was knighted in 1991 by Queen Elizabeth II, and made a life peer in 1996. He has been awarded the Légion d'Honneur, the Royal Institute of British Architects' Royal Gold Medal, and the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour. Richard Brown is Research Director at Centre for London, the independent think tank for London. He was previously Strategy Director at London Legacy Development Corporation, Manager of the Mayor of London's Architecture and Urbanism Unit, and an urban regeneration researcher at the Audit Commission.

Creating Spaces for an Ageing Society considers the existing social science literature on shared neighbourhood spaces through the perspective of an ageing population. It asks the question; how can we use social infrastructure to build local neighbourhoods that are supportive of the social relationships we need in later life?