A Failure of Solidarity

“Shared spaces are hard to come by, and this is especially true if you don’t have money,” said sociologist Eric Klinenberg as he paused his lecture at the GSD on a slide showing two people sitting at a fast-food restaurant’s table. “There are places that seem accessible,” he continued, “but when you look close enough, they have signs that say, ‘no loitering.’” The result, he observes, is a public sphere that requires purchase to gain access.

Klinenberg positioned his 2018 book, Palaces for the People, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social infrastructure debate currently occupying Congress. He invited attendees to imagine an alternate United States in which a key piece of social infrastructure — the public library — did not exist. The introduction of the public library’s equivalent in 2021, he argued, would be seen as a revolutionary (and hardly fundable) proposition. This alone should make us realize that the notion that we need to invest in each other already exists. “This incredibly radical idea [of social infrastructure], something that seems so outrageous, is something we already have.” And that, he concluded,“tells us something profound.”