Book Review: Palaces for the People
Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg is all about building social infrastructure and closer knit communities. As discussed in books like Happy City and This is Where You Belong, social connection is the key to living a happier, more fulfilling life. As Palaces for the People goes into, these social connections also provide greater community resilience in times of crisis and prosperity in times of plenty. In other words, social infrastructure is key to fulfilling the promise of the city to improve prosperity and happiness for residents.
As defined in Palaces for the People, social infrastructure is anything in the built environment that brings people together and allows them to form social bonds. The obvious and most talked about piece of social infrastructure – and what the book title references – is the library. While many public libraries are under funded and unable to provide their long-standing role in the community today, a properly functioning library is a place where communities can gather and get to know one another through library programs.
The book also spends a chapter talking about schools as social infrastructure. Schools can be a great place for parents to form new friendships and social bonds, but the schools must be conducive to these connections. Namely, schools must put parents in the same place at the same time, outside of their cars, for those connections to be made.
There are also other ways traditional hard infrastructure can become social infrastructure. Take for example river walks, which have become popular in American cities in recent years. Instead of just encasing a river flowing through a city in levies and berms, cities can use those spaces to provide a combination of flood protection and social gathering spaces.
However, not all social infrastructure is public. Non-profits, churches, and companies are all critical in providing social infrastructure as well. In expanding social infrastructure to these non-public places, Palaces for the People really builds off of books like The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg or Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Unfortunately, Palaces for the People doesn’t do much to extend those other works.
Palaces for the People falls short in three main ways. The book provides a series of snapshots of existing pieces of social infrastructure in various communities. However, the book does not tie any of these snapshots together to an overarching view of social infrastructure. The book feels like it’s missing a concluding chapter that ties everything together.
More importantly, the book is missing any sort of guidance on how to evaluate our own communities for social infrastructure gaps and how to develop new infrastructure to fill those gaps. Someone who picks up this book and realizes the deficiencies in their own community cannot then use this book to help them figure out how to correct those deficiencies. Undoubtedly, this was not intended as a how-to book, but at the end of the book readers are left feeling empty and wanting because they now better understand the holes in their community but might not have a clear path on how to fill those holes.
The final problem with the book is that it already feels dated even though it was just published in 2018. The book makes many references to the 2016 election between President Trump and Secretary Clinton. These references feel quaint given the recent history of the presidency. If a second, updated edition of this book is ever published, the book would become more timeless if these references were removed.
Overall, Palaces for the People is a good and interesting book, but by no means groundbreaking. If you’ve enjoyed The Great Good Place and Bowling Alone, but want a more modern take on the subject, pick this book up. Otherwise, you’re probably fine sticking with the classics.