#I mean the romans were the first to build a capitalistic nightmare that changed the landscapes of entire countries

[hazbinbabbles]

Been studying roman history lately and boy do these racist get it wrong lmao. Anyone could become a roman citizen, and based on census, people could be called to military campaigns abroad. In the latest centuries a lot of people settled in different places. The Mediterranean was basically one giant highway of trade and one giant military battleground and these racist jackasses want to really believe small cities lived entrenched in their own ethnicities and never met with each other apart from some careful trading and military conquests that ended with the romans going away and leaving the populations un-enslaved? Nah.

Surprise. :)

[lunaspatial400]

Palaces for the People / 99% Invisible

Podcast host Roman Mars speaks with Eric Klinenberg.

This podcast by 99% Invisible has some really interesting discussion about social infrastructure, what it actually means and how important it actually is. Roman Mars chats with the author of “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life”, Eric Klinenberg. Klinenberg’s book is based on his beleif that ��a healthy community is not simply held together by shared values, but by shared spaces – physical, real world locations – where people across all strata, and ages, and races, and creeds bump into each other and form connections”(Mars). Klinenberg argues that these kinds of spaces, social infrastructure, is unappreciated and overlooked. He believes social infrastructure “could help solve or at least mitigate, some of our most pressing challenges, like isolation, polarization, education, crime, and even climate change”(Mars).

The title ‘Palaces for the people’ was taken from philanthropist and capitalist Andrew Carnegie (1887–1919). Cargenie himself was an immigrant to America, and thought one of the amazing things about the countries was the institutions there which gave much better opportunities for people, allowing them to do better than they could have in their home countries. He went on to fund more than 2500 libraries around the world which he began to call ‘palaces of the people’. Cargenie’s view saw it them as places in which everyone, even those “who worked in a factory or lived in a tenement building, and experienced life as crowded, and uncomfortable, and rushed most of the time, could go and escape all of that”(Klinenberg).

Libraries could be said as the “perfect example” of social infrastructure, so what is that? During his research and exploration Klinenberg has observed that those places in which social infrastructure is invested in gain many social advantages. We become far more likely to interact with people around us, whether they are friends and family or neighbors who we haven’t gotten to know. And when we don’t invest in social infrastructure – if we neglect it, if we let it fall apart – we tend to grow more isolated”(Klinenberg).

When Klinenberg first thought of the significance of social infrastructure, it was when he studied the deadly 1995 heat wave in Chicago. He studied the death patterns, and not surprisingly the poorer and segregated neighbourhoods had higher death rates. But the peculiar pattern that he found was a few neighbourhoods that had the demographic profile of ones that would suffer badly, were actually quite resilient. There were neighbouring neighbours, separated by just streets, almost demographically identical but one had a crazy high death rate. Klinenberg went on to go and spend time in those neighbourhoods, and what he discovered was of course, those with high death rates seemed to have depleted social infrastructure, and the resilient ones had social infrastructure that was well tended to. Everything was better taken care of. As the heatwave meant it was deadly to stay home, it makes sense how in the neighbourhoods where there was not much public areas to go, that didn’t feel safe to go or were comfortable suffered the most. “ I realized that the end of that project, actually, it was social infrastructure, not the traditional hard infrastructures that we normally think of, that explained who lived and who died that week in Chicago”(Klinenberg).

A few years later when Superstorm Sandy hit New York he emphasized the importance of infrastructure that “brings people together”, stressing this to all the teams for a competition called ‘Rebuild By Design’. One team approached him and said how they’ve listened to him about the importance of social infrastructure and they explained to him this amazing idea for something called a ‘resilience centre’. What they described, he discovered, was a library.

“At first I thought it was a little crazy, but then I realized that it was completely predictable and forgivable because we live in a moment where so many people think of the library as an obsolete institution, right? We think it’s a relic from another part of our history, and that it’s not used much by anyone. Even though it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth”(Klinenberg).

Discovering a need to spend more time in libraries Klinenberg started some physical exploration, visiting libraries all over the U.S. and discovering amazing things and ways people used the library. A favourite being a wii bowling tournament for the elderly, noting that not everyone is ‘booky’. Noted that these elderly were exactly the kind of people who would have been targewted in the chi cago heatwave…

“The complaint was people used to do things together collectively in formal groups, and now everyone, like in Putnam’s nightmare from 1999, everybody was just watching television at home together in the living room. Which I now think of … Now that I have kids who have their own mobile devices, that’s like a socialist utopian fantasy to me. Like, oh my God, if only we could have a night together watching the same screen, it would be amazing”(Klinenberg).

“There are so many people who just can’t afford books, and don’t have books at home, or have parents who speak another language, and they come to the library to learn to read and to learn to love books. And that’s amazing. Probably Carnegie anticipated that. But he probably would not have seen that libraries have now become the places where people who used to be incarcerated come more than any other institution to search for a job, to get help putting a resume together. He probably would not have anticipated that libraries have become the places where there’s more instruction for English as a second language, more citizenship classes than any other public institution. He probably didn’t anticipate that libraries would do things like karaoke hours for immigrant communities that want a good place to sing together.I don’t know that he would have seen all the teenagers who come to the library at the end of the school day because it’s the safest and warmest, or if you’re in a hot place, coolest place where you can study, apply for college, or just mess around and play video games in a social way. I’ll tell you, I’ve seen so many kids come to the libraries to play games. And when they played games together there, they did it in a way that was very collective and very social. It was not the stereotypical image of a kid in a hole, in their own basement being on their own. They were socializing in this very new way. Libraries are just doing an enormous number of things”(Klinenberg”.

Note: article in Forbes magazine about libraries being knocked down and replaced with amazon stores WTF, librarians of the world bound together through twitter and the article got taken down.

Not that libraries are the only social infrastructure that exists, but “they’re just about the most effective social infrastructure that I can imagine. And it is a shame that we don’t make more of them by maintaining them or updating them in the way that they deserve”(Klinenberg).

“And one of the things that’s so striking about libraries is that the local staff has the capacity and agency to develop programs that work for the community that they’re in”(Klinenberg).

“There’s no strong hard rule that says a library has to do X, Y, or Z thing”(Klinenberg).

Note: broken windows theory, and expirement - Pennsylvania Horticultural Society - small interventions - comparing the differently ‘taken care of’ places - 40% decline in gun voilence around the treated properties.

Libraries have the power to be a collective place but also enable privacy similar to parks.

Public ownership.

“We don’t want to force people out into the public realm, but my sense right now is that it’s the publicly-accessible public realm that’s really in short supply”(Klinenberg).

Note: Philadelphia, two African American guys Starbucks case. Idea - exclusivity of commercial places. “people just know that they’re not welcome because it costs $7 for coffee, or $9 for ice cream, or they don’t take cash at all, they’re there only for people with credit cards”(Klinenberg).

“I have to say one of the most amazing things I observed in the public libraries where I spent time, is that there are places where this impossible community of people who are so different from one another, come together, and all kinds of people who have real struggles, come to because there’s just not space for them anywhere else”(Klinenberg).

Libraries are safe places. And people respect them because people know that they themselves are being treated with respect.

Mark Zuckerberg ‘Facebook as the social infrastructure’. No one has spent more money on built social infrastructure than Mark Zuckerberg at his Facebook campus for his workers. Ironically, the people who work there don’t let their children use phones because they know how dangerous it can be as social infrastructure.

“If we want to support the kind of social life that we all need, regardless of our politics, regardless of our income, regardless of where we live, that we all need to live well and be better connected with each other, we’re going to have to find a way to invest in it”(Klinenberg).

MLA:

Klinenberg, Eric and Roman Mars. “Palaces for the People”. 99% Invisible, episode 346, 19 March 2019, Poor, Nigel and Earlonne Woods, hosts. "So Long." Ear Hustle, season 2, episode 19, Radiotopia, 20 June 2018, www.earhustlesq.com/episodes/2018/6/20/so-long.