Eric KlinenbergRecensioni

"Today, as cities and suburbs reinvent themselves, and as cynics claim that government has nothing good to contribute to that process, it's important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. After all, the root of the word "library," liber; means both "book" and "free." Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that -- even in an age of atomization and inequality -- serve as bedrocks of civil society. Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture. They are the kinds of places where the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.”

Too American for me. Though data from other countries is mentioned, the entire book is rife with " we Americans are used to being alone, look at Thoreau!" Honestly, if I read one more reference to Thoreau I am going to spit. This guy lived rent free in a friend's cottage on a tiny lake and wrote his best work "on Civil Disobedience" because he didn't want to pay tax.
So he lived alone, briefly.
As with this book, the lens is focused too tightly on the subject. Look outside the border or the lake or whatever and see how the rest of the world lives....

You may use them or not but community spaces and programs abound in many parts of America. A deeper look at what it takes to keep them going, the community that uses them and the benefits even if you don't use them. A great book and easy to read non fiction.

Vivimos en una época de profundas divisiones. Los estadounidenses se están clasificando por líneas raciales, religiosas y culturales, lo que lleva a un nivel de polarización nunca visto desde la guerra civil. Expertos y políticos nos piden que nos unamos y encontremos un propósito común. Pero ¿cómo, exactamente, se puede hacer esto? En Palacios del pueblo, el sociólogo Eric Klinenberg sugiere un camino. Cree que el futuro de las sociedades democráticas no se basa simplemente en valores compartidos, sino en espacios compartidos: las bibliotecas, las guarderías, las iglesias y los parques donde se forman conexiones cruciales. Entretejiendo su propia investigación con ejemplos de todo el mundo, Klinenberg muestra cómo la «infraestructura social» está ayudando a resolver algunos de nuestros desafíos sociales más urgentes. Ampliamente investigado y escrito de forma estimulante, Palacios del pueblo ofrece un plan para salvar nuestras divisiones aparentemente infranqueables.

I just read the chapter on public libraries, and will get back to it later. Because there were holds on it at the public library!

Like many readers, I'm obsessed with libraries. They are one of my favorite to work and study and at this point in my life, having had to move several times, I'd much rather just get books at the library rather than own them. This book shows how libraries and other public spaces can be important for things beyond their described purpose. Good social infrastructure can be crucial for reducing crime and bring together people who normally wouldn't interact. I have person experience with this. I go to college at the University of Minnesota. The campus comes right up to the edge of downtown Minneapolis, a city that's been in the news a lot recently for obvious and important reasons. One of my favorite places to go was Minneapolis Central library. This library is in the heart of the city and draws in every type of person who lives in the city. Even though my campus is very close to downtown, it's still very separate. It is the public library that gives me my best connection to the people that live in the city around me.

I have long supported investment in public infrastructure. Public transport is important, libraries are important, parks are important, and so on and so on. It's one of the issues I have with recent tech companies like Uber. Uber can sometimes be seen as a solution to the problem of public transportation infrastructure when really it, as discussed in the book, separates people further as people who have money to take Ubers remove themselves from public transportation.

I think this book is great for people like me who love the type of social infrastructure discussed in this book and would like more tools for discussing the reasons why this sort of infrastructure is so important. I would definitely recommend this book.

I've read other Klinenberg titles, and this is his most technical of any I've completed to date, but maintained his strong style of argument. The 1995 Chicago heat wave was a news maker for its sudden and high death toll, and this analysis was extremely thorough. The argument for how some Chicago neighborhoods experienced more fatalities during the several day heat wave, and how Chicago itself fared so much worse than other nearby cities, is built on an iterative basis by reviewing the experiences and actions of many, many stakeholders. You get to hear from seniors that barely survived, local and federal government staff, journalists that covered and tried to adequately shape the stories, and more. If you aren't a sociologist, you might not be seeking such a complete story but I now feel well-versed in the whole incident and its aftermath.

The subtitle of this book, “the extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone” points out a number of issues considered within — namely, the unprecedented increase in solo living arrangement, and the fact that its appeal is considered unusual. The text is richly cited, ranging from classic literature and essays to contemporary academic studies and primary research. Having read extensively on a number of topics covered herein, such as the emerging adulthood generation, the decline of marriage, the increase in highly educated single women living independently, the isolating effects of the Internet, and the emphasis on individuality, I found much of this book to be repetitive, at least for my own purposes. However, it is a very interesting slant to examining these issues all together. As someone who is living on her own for the first time in twenty-some-odd years (with family for the first couple decades, and then with a plethora of good and not-so-good roomies thereafter), I very much understand the appeal of living alone and the sentiments of those who promote the lifestyle. At the same time, I believe very strongly in the importance of community and interpersonal relationships, and the author of this book addresses that as well. I found this to be an interesting and worthwhile read

There are some great chapters about libraries as a community hub.

A thorough, comprehensive scholarly glimpse at a social catastrophe that no one considers in the same light as a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but killed over 700 people in the city of Chicago.

Good idea/information; disorganized execution.½

This may be one of the most important books of our time. People have been lamenting the loss of our sense of community, the degradation of the common good, for most of my life. Klinenberg strikes to the heart of what's missing: physical spaces where people can gather. Community space is such an easy thing to overlook and undervalue but it's perhaps the most important thing we can build for ourselves. Klinenberg presents a well-informed and compelling argument for the importance of social infrastructure, and offers ideas for how we can create and maintain it. Face-to-face interactions are how you forge a community. We need places that encourage us to spend time together.

There are two things I love about Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. First, he makes a great case for things that matter to me – public investment in basic infrastructure that encourages us to live together in healthy ways. I’ll admit, he had me at public libraries, but I stayed for the parks, housing, education, public health, and preparation for climate change. Second, it’s a great example of research made accessible to non-experts, going on the shelf next to Matt Desmond’s Evicted, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, and Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality among others. I would love to show students how the dry literature review can become a lively form of public communication. In this case, Klinenberg draws on loads of published scholarship as well as his own, weaving it together into a powerful argument.

cover Palaces for the PeopleBut it’s a big, complex argument, and some readers may find that challenging. He doesn’t focus on a singular problem, but writes about many, each of which is the subject of any number of books: social isolation, economic and racial stratification, the outsourcing of our social interactions to ad-tech companies, the opiod crisis, the defunding of libraries and schools, mistakes in urban planning, and climate change and what it means for our future lives together. His argument is that we need to think harder about how to build social infrastructure into the proposed solutions to all social problems because how we design things to benefit the humans who live with them matters as much as all the concrete or technology we pour into them.

Social infrastructure is not the same thing as social capital. It’s rather “the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact,” and those things in turn determine whether or not we can develop social capital. (I was tickled by Klinenberg’s clever riff on “bowling alone” that adds to and to some extent refutes Robert Putnam’s classic.) We can influence the things that either help us feel connected and supported in a community - or isolated and alone. The need is pressing because we face a rise in authoritarianism, polarization, and oceans all at the same time.

The systems we built in the past were expressions of what we wanted for society. National parks, railroads, libraries, schools – they were bold statements about who we thought we could be. As our hard infrastructure crumbles and our social problems grow, we need to think about who we want to be, together: “Before we lift the next shovel, we should know what we want to improve, what we need to protect, and, more important, what kind of society we want to create.” He argues for an inclusive and democratic conversation about those things, harnessing not just civil engineering or tech solutionism but what we know about society to fix the fissures in our communities. The examples he explores are fascinating and give academics and librarians plenty to think about and to apply locally as we think about our own spaces and social interactions.

Titles can be misleading, as John Warner pointed out recently – and this one is, a bit. What Klinenberg advocates is not luxury along the lines of grand train stations of the past but decency and thoughtfulness in designing the spaces we live in, especially at a moment when the current administration has promised public investment in infrastructure. (Controlling immigration on the Mexican border by building a huge, expensive wall is mentioned as hard infrastructure that doesn’t have a soft side or great social benefit apart from temporary construction jobs.) The purpose of the book is stated more clearly in the subtitle, but publishers have a habit of overpromising when they put an elevator pitch on the cover.

In this case, the author delivers, but it also shows how ambitious this work is: an attempt to pull together research that addresses “soft” infrastructure at a moment when there’s talk of spending lots of money on “hard" infrastructure that could create stronger communities if planned thoughtfully and addressed to our most pressing problems rather than politically expedient promises. This includes expensive new projects like building breakwaters that invite community engagement while addressing rising sea levels, or simply funding public libraries adequately and understanding how they bind communities together.

If nothing else, the academic research Klinenberg has pulled into this narrative is cheering news that academic research, without making it over-simplified, can be fascinating and of great value if we understand it and act on it.

When Klininberg investigated a wave of heat-related deaths in Chicago, he discovered the majority of them had some sad facts in common: most were men, living alone, without social networks or families to check in on them. One might expect, then, that his book on the exponential increase in single-person households would be dark and depressing. Not a bit of it: while he doesn't shy away from the trend's darker potentials, like the above-mentioned isolated elderly men with no one to comfort them in their last illnesses, he also spends a great deal of space discussing the upsides and enormous positives that have brought us to where we are.

Like: single-person households are more common in wealthier and developed societies, and in societies transitioning to an industrialized or developed model, single-person households quickly increase and approach western levels--so the most basic explanation for this change is that we can afford it. Maybe people will choose to live alone whenever they have the resources to do so.

Like: single-person households are often more engaged, socially and civically, than the vaunted nuclear family, where mom and dad are far too busy and stressed by raising children to turn their attention outwards to the wider society.

Like: in a world of hyper-connected individuals, through social networking and career, many of us choose to live alone to give us some/any solitude and a space to recharge.

Like: while we like to blame western individualism and our disintegrating collective instincts for thsi trend here in North America, in fact the most collective developed nations in the world (aka Scandinavia) also have the highest rate of single-person households, near or over 60%.

As a member of the grey spaces between the traditional nuclear family and the single-person household he writes about (I am a single mom with primary custody of my daughter, so for a few days each week I live here by myself--and the rest of the time I run myself ragged being both mom and dad), I can see what he speaks of in my own life. When my daughter is with me, I indeed have no or little time for friends or activism, and also don't need to grapple with the loneliness that can make single-household living difficult for those without extensive social networks. When she's not here, I get to enjoy that space and solitude, recharge and connect with friends and work on causes dear to me, but I also feel like I accidentally forgot my left arm somewhere.

The book did give me much hope that this rise in single-person households may hold great potential for our societies, more than enough to offset the downsides typically discussed--and that, like it or not, it's here to stay, so maybe we should stop building cities and suburbs primarily for nuclear families.

Good book. Worth a read whether or not you live alone.

We should invest in social infrastructure as much as normal infrastructure. As a strong believer in libraries I am not going to argue. But sadly I can't see it happening and Klinenberg is probably preaching to the choir.½

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg begins with a fatal heat wave in Chicago in the summer of 1995. Sociologists studying it tried to figure out why some neighborhoods had people suffering more or dying from the heat, while others seemed to have better support in place. Accounting for wealthy and poor neighborhoods didn't quite cover the split, as some less well-to-do neighborhoods had even better survival rates. From there, Klinenberg begins his argument about the importance of social infrastructure, those places where we gather - libraries, bookstores, college campuses, parks, churches, and more - that allow us to build relationships in our neighborhoods and communities.

The beginning of the book especially focuses on libraries, the way in which they support the community with programs and a third space, connecting multiple generations and building relationships. No one who knows me will be surprised by the fact that this was the part that interested me most. Even when he starts talking about other avenues that personally interest me less, however, Klinenberg makes a strong argument that we should start thinking about these spaces in a variety of ways, from how we address crime (cleaning up areas that are abandoned or overgrown makes a huge difference) to functional infrastructure in dealing with storm surges being made beautiful spaces to bring people together. He may be, I think, a little on the idealistic side but his ideas are worth thinking about and bringing before city planners. I have not heard many - well, any before him - people talking about social infrastructure, and I will start paying attention to ways in which his ideas play out in the public sphere. I will also keep it in my back pocket that while I can't always point out to a quantitative result in the daily work I do, I make a qualitative difference in the lives I touch every day at work, at church and at play.

This highly readable book based on academic research by sociologist Eric Klinenberg makes the case for the importance of what he calls “social infrastructure.” He defines social infrastructure as “the physical conditions that help social capital develop.” Social capital is the set of connections with others (in this case, in your local community) that helps you get through life successfully and improve your personal situation. Klinenberg looked at urban, rural, and suburban communities and identified ways in which their physical infrastructure provides (or doesn’t provide) ways for residents to connect with each other. Public libraries are a key example throughout the book, but Klinenberg also discusses childcare centers, schools, bookstores and coffeeshops, churches, community gardens, community centers, and children’s sports groups. He argues that it is crucial for people from different backgrounds to get to know each other in person (not just online) in order to be able to work together and survive when natural disasters and civic crises occur, as they do increasingly often.

A celebration of the infrastructure that makes communities healthy and strong, primarily libraries but also other spaces that citizens can and often must interact with people not like them, and figure out how to get along. Libraries are, of course, powerful engines for fighting inequality because of the access to information they provide—and increasingly they provide access to other things, including space just to be for people who don’t have other places to go, even as we defund them around the country. Other aspects of social infrastructure include public transit, public schools, and even privately owned but open to the public places like coffeehouses. There’s also the benefit of public space: not just the health benefits, but sociability and safety benefits as well when public spaces are attractive. Klinenberg builds on the missed opportunity of “fixing broken windows,” pointing out that the central concept that led to criminalizing so many mostly minority people was supposed to be about property. What if we’d taken that example/metaphor seriously, instead of policing for nuisance crimes, and focused on rehabilitating abandoned or neglected property instead of on arresting people doing potentially annoying things in public? Using evidence from the US and elsewhere, Klinenberg suggests that investment in cleaning up dangerous and unsightly pieces of property has significant benefits in reducing crime and enhancing community interactions, which then provide protective structures for people facing hard times.

How properly designed public space can affect society and individuals for the better.

In "Palaces for the People", Eric Klinenberg makes sociological research accessible to the general reader. He writes in a non-academic style—meaning his writing is clear, engaging, and relevant. In this book Klinenberg describes the importance of social infrastructure. These are shared public spaces, such as libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, barbershops, churches, and parks. Klinenberg explains how these spaces contribute to building community and the impact on health, crime, education, climate change, and other critical issues confronting society today. Klinenberg draws on examples from around the globe to illustrate the significance of an often neglected factor in society. This is a book to be read by all citizens. Klinenberg makes us aware of the urgent need to support public spaces if we are to successfully confront today’s complex social challenges.

When you think about disasters that caused a whole bunch of deaths in one swoop in the US in the last 25 or 30 years (outside of a war), you probably think about the September 11 attacks, which killed 2,977 in the US. If I were to ask you what the next biggest disaster in terms of deaths, you’d probably also get it right: Hurricane Katrina and its 1,833 deaths. But do you know what caused the third greatest number of deaths in the past 25 years?

Surprisingly (to me, at least) it was the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which took 733 lives over the course of about a week.

It’s been hotter than usually in the Pacific Northwest, where I live. We had multiple days in a row above 90, which may not sound bad to those of you used to sweltering summers, but in general folks out here don’t have air conditioning (and if you do have it but you don’t have the money for an electric bill of gargantuan proportions, you might just leave it off). My apartment in the evenings was often still in the mid-upper 80s, and we don’t even get any direct sunlight (thank goodness for north-facing windows). I also work in public health emergency preparedness, so I have an extra special interest in things that cause a whole lot of people to get sick and die at once.

Author Dr. Klinenberg is originally from Chicago, and earned his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkely in 2000. Heat Wave is his dissertation, exploring not just the health causes of those 700 deaths, but the social causes. His thesis is that the hot days didn’t kill these people alone; the systems society has set up (or not set up) instead failed many of these people in a complicated way that would be dangerous to ignore if we seek to avoid it in the future.
Much of his work focuses on comparing two neighborhoods that are very similar in some of the basic demographics, and even have the same microclimate, but had VERY different death rates. In one neighborhood (95% black), 40 out of 100,000 residents died in the heat wave; in the neighborhood next door (86% Latino), only 4 out of 100,000 residents died. That is a huge difference, and one that we should try to explain.

Beyond this, he looks at the role of city government and how they responded (or failed to respond), from the front-line police officers who were tasked with community policing but didn’t check in on the community, through the fire chiefs who ignored warnings from their staff that they should have more ambulances available, to the health commissioner who didn’t really ‘get’ that something was amiss. Dr. Klinenberg also explores the role the media played in not treated the story with the gravity it deserved until late into the heat wave.

Even if you aren’t interested in public health preparedness, or aren’t into sociological profiles, I think you might find this book to be quite fascinating. I’m impressed with the readability of what is essentially someone’s dissertation, and I think I can learn a lot that will be helpful to me in professional life.

This book got me back on track for my cannonball read, too, so I’m quite grateful for that. I haven’t finished a book in nearly three weeks. Between going to Canada for five World Cup matches (including the final – woo!), my computer dying, and learning that my back-up system failed, plus the aforementioned ridiculous heat wave we had, I’ve mostly wanted to just sit on my ass and play games on my phone. But no more! I’m back to reading and it feels fantastic.

There was a time -- say, about 1950 -- when the vast majority of adults in America were married, and almost nobody lived alone. Today, that's no longer remotely true: half of American adults are unmarried and adults living on their own, for any of a number of reasons, have become common and unremarkable, in the US as well as in many other countries. Eric Klinenberg, who has done some research on the subject, talks about this demographic shift, the reasons for it, how people who live alone feel about it, and what the challenges and benefits of single life are.

As an adult who lives alone and fully intends to continue doing so as long as physically possible, this book is definitely relevant for me, and there is a lot of thoughtful and interesting stuff in it, but, well... I couldn't help finding it it a little disappointing. I think there are several reasons for that. One is the narrowness of its focus: it's almost entirely about people living alone in big cities, with occasional brief mentions of the suburbs. People like me who live alone in small towns might as well not even exist in this narrative, and our concerns and experiences aren't even acknowledged, let alone addressed. Klinenberg says in an appendix that this is because his research simply didn't cover anything outside a few big cities, so he couldn't talk about it, but that seems like a really big gap in a book that purports to be about living alone as a general phenomenon. And he seemed to have no problems discussing the lives of people in Sweden.

Another issue is that while Klinenberg specifically says that he wants to provide a counterpoint to conventional doom-and-gloom narratives about how our society is fracturing and we're all becoming disconnected from each other, he ends up sounding surprisingly negative a lot of the time, anyway. His conclusions, ultimately, are balanced, optimistic, and focused on practical ways of adjusting society to its new status quo rather than standing around lamenting about it, and that's great. But along the way, he often makes things sound sadder than I think he realizes. And in his discussion on how these social changes have happened, complete with repeated invocations of the ugly, judgemental-sounding phrase "the cult of the individual," he makes the whole thing sound so self-absorbed and socially unhealthy that he actually had me thinking, "Geez, suddenly I actually kind of understand all those folks who wail about the breakdown of the nuclear family as if it's heralding the collapse of society!" Which I don't think was the idea at all.

Much more irritating than that, though, were some chapters towards the beginning whose style and structure were just kind of... poor. Later in the book, when he settles down to focusing on specific issues (such as the difficulties faced by elderly people living alone) or offering us longish profiles of specific people (such as the editor of a magazine aimed at singles), the writing is fine. Not particularly lively, but fine. But he really seems to have had trouble with certain earlier sections, in which he does a lot of reciting blocks of dry statistics or bits of historical context, then switching abruptly to a quote from one of the ordinary people he's interviewed in his research. These quotes are somewhat repetitive, not always incredibly relevant to the material around them, and often feel shoehorned in. Worse, he keeps introducing them in these incredibly awkward ways: throwing out random, irrelevant information about the person he's quoting, in a way that gives the impression that he's doing it solely because someone told him that's the correct formula for providing human interest. You know, what kind of clothes they wear, what shape their nose is, that sort of thing. This might be merely mildly annoying, until you notice that while he might just note the jobs or personalities of the men, every single woman gets introduced with some note about her appearance, usually with a direct or implied comment on her attractiveness. Just... grrr. Writers! Do. Not. Do. This. Just... don't.

Okay. After all that, I have to say, honestly, this is not a bad book. It's really not. It's got some interesting and worthwhile things to say, and I'm not sorry I read it, nor do I recommend that people interested in the subject steer clear of it. But, sadly, it's not quite the book I was hoping it would be, either.

A mixture of sociology, epidemiology, and personal anecdotes of those who survived or died during a heat wave in a modern US city. Very moving, and does an excellent job of convincing the reader that social isolation and a lack of support for vulnerable populations (most particularly, the elderly poor) kill.

As someone who has chosen to live alone since I graduated college, I was very interested to read this book, especially as it is a subject I had not seen written about in depth before.

Klinenberg has clearly done his research, both by reading studies and going out to talk to people from around the world. This means he is able to present a well-rounded argument that the uprise in people living alone does not mean society as we know it is crumbling. Rather, it is a positive that needs to be well-supported so as to remain a positive.

Looking at everything from the impact of social media on the sense of community, to which countries support their "singletons" best in terms of housing, Klinenberg deftly explains how this is a trend that is not going away, and that it is the world at large who needs to adjust.½