For the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, a vision of the good city begins in the local library. It’s a place where a huge amount of knowledge is available permanently, free of charge. It’s a computer centre; it’s a place where everyone goes, including the marginalised young and elderly. Security is light-touch – “you rarely see a police officer in the library”. It is adaptable in a crisis. During Hurricane Sandy, a branch library in Staten Island became the place where local people sheltered and where relief was coordinated. In north-west Bangladesh, libraries float on moored boats in flood-prone areas. All this passes almost unnoticed. Libraries are closing across the UK and the US at a scarily rapid rate (nearly 130 have closed in the past year, it was recently revealed). The public library is not, and inherently never can be, a market, and so, Klinenberg writes, “If it didn’t already exist, it’s hard to imagine our society’s leaders inventing it.”
Klinenberg, who comes from a similar Chicago community milieu as his friend Barack Obama, has written a paean to libraries, parks, playgrounds and other public spaces, but he is unable to keep the bleaker realities of urban (and, unusually, suburban) life out of his would-be-inspiring “Aren’t Cities great?” narrative. What are clearly meant to be instructive just-so stories and heartwarming anecdotes are often much more grim and upsetting than he seems to think they are.
He’s well aware that there is a crisis in the US – he names opioids, housing costs that are now out of control, racial politics that are more tense than ever, collapsing infrastructure and undrinkable water, and inequality that has become insulting: “When millions lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis, the most affluent Americans locked up their spoils, buying ‘safe deposit boxes in the sky’ in soaring urban condominium towers. Those who could afford it went one step further, buying survivalist retreats.” Much of this could equally be said of the UK.
This is about as angry and vehement as the usually cosy world of American liberal urbanism can get. At the heart of the book is that idea of the library or park rather than the market as the real agora, the place where urban life is lived at its best, an example of the “social infrastructure” that could really rebuild America. Unlike in a McDonald’s, a Starbucks or a chic Sourdough bakery, “You have to try very hard to be kicked out of the library.” Klinenberg praises the charitable work of Andrew Carnegie, whose programme of branch libraries provided miniature baroque palaces in the most ordinary places. It is best put in the words of one working-class resident of Queens, New York, who tells the author that during a difficult childhood “the library was a place where I could go and ignore people, and also know I wasn’t alone”. That’s what many of us most want, but can’t have, in city life.
Klinenberg argues that places such as a branch library have fallen by the wayside in discussions of what makes a good city, because they’re public infrastructure, and hence not anarchic or, in the current parlance, “bottom-up” – so their importance passes below the radar of both left and rightwing libertarian city enthusiasts. He finds similar possibilities in churches, mosques and other religious buildings and public swimming pools; he devotes some of the more speculative parts of the book to imagining what new “social infrastructure” might be needed to cope with climate change.
Singapore’s Marina Bay and Rotterdam’s Waterplein Benthemplein, which control water levels while providing valuable public spaces, are two examples. The flaws of the book come out in a discussion of another of these apparently public “infrastructures”, New York’s High Line, the remodelling of a disused freight viaduct that began as an elevated park but has become a riotously successful accelerator of gentrification. The “Big U”, a flood barrier-cum-park proposed for Manhattan by the architect Bjarke Ingels, could be a High Line for climate change – but how can New Yorkers stop it having the same effect? This leads us to the question of ownership, and places where this book won’t go – harder measures, such as nationalisation, that could keep social infrastructure social, and keep public spaces public. The book concludes with an attack on Mark Zuckerberg for claiming Facebook as “social infrastructure”. Klinenberg argues that Facebook’s need for constant expansion and profit means that it ends up spreading dubious news stories and intensifying paranoid political cliques. He asks, rightly, why no tech billionaire has ever done for “the people” what Carnegie did with his libraries. We need not stop there, as we don’t need billionaires to give us palaces. We can build them ourselves.
• Owen Hatherley’s The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space is published by Repeater. Palaces for the People: How to Build a More Equal and United Society is published by Bodley Head. To order a copy for £16.71 (RRP £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
