Have you ever spent time at a school, a public library, a park, a community theater, or a sports club? If so, you’ve engaged with social infrastructure.
Social infrastructure refers to the physical places that shape the way we interact. These places are used for gathering, sharing activities, building friendships across socioeconomic divides, and developing entrepreneurial initiatives among citizens. At its best, social infrastructure can help reduce inequality, polarization, and the increasing partisanship of civic life.
Here are five ways in which social infrastructure contributes to social well-being:
1. Social infrastructure contributes to community development.
While economic growth measures economic improvement in quantifiable terms (wages, rate of employment, etc.), economic development focuses on qualitative issues and policy interventions to improve a population’s well-being in the long run.
Social infrastructure is the final piece in a development plan that includes economic growth (prosperity); a physical infrastructure that enables the safe circulation of people and goods (for example, services such as water, electricity, and transportation); and a civic environment that promotes voluntary associations that bind people into communities.
2. Social infrastructure grounds civic values in real-life experiences.
To alleviate the increasing polarization of communities, social infrastructure offers spaces for connection that make societal relationships and responsibilities tangible and meaningful.
3. Social infrastructure promotes recurrent interaction, containment, and cohesion.
Social cohesion develops through repeated human interaction and joint participation in tangible shared projects, not merely from a principled commitment to abstract values and beliefs.
4. Social infrastructure is the result of both public and private initiatives.
Social infrastructure is not necessarily a government-built facility. Private initiatives destined for the public can also contribute to social infrastructure: malls, diners, barbershops and hair salons, cafés, and sporting grounds, are examples of this. If people can meet and linger regardless of purchase, they engage with social infrastructure.
Community organizations, including religious institutions and civic associations, also act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble.
5. Social infrastructure is focused on physical space.
While culture and identity are being transformed in social media, we cannot consider social media platforms to be spaces of social infrastructure. The reason is that spaces such as Facebook, IG, YouTube, X (Twitter), and even LinkedIn favor extreme emotional messages that enhance polarization instead of deliberation. Impactful content always performs better.
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About Eric Klinenberg
Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He also serves as research director for Rebuild by Design, a US nationwide competition that generates innovative infrastructure projects for twenty-first-century challenges.
