Palaces for the People

and younger ones in particular, the key is to find safe havens. As on every other Thursday morning this spring, today nine middle-aged and elderly residents who might otherwise stay home alone will gather in the basement of the neighborhood s most heavily used public amenity, the New Lots branch library.

At first glance, it s an uninviting facility. The run-down, two-story brown brick building is set back behind a wide sidewalk and bus stop, with a beige stone facade at the entry, a broken chain-link fence on one side and a small asphalt parking lot on the other. In recent years the city designated the library site African Burial Ground Square, because it sits atop a cemetery used to inter slaves and soldiers during the Revolutionary War.

The library is small, and it s already crowded despite the early hour and the good weather. There are two banks of computer terminals with Internet access on the first floor, and patrons, sometimes more than one, at every machine. There s a small display case holding photographs and short biographies of Nobel Prize winners; tall wooden bookshelves with new releases, atlases, and encyclopedias; an information desk with flyers promoting library events for toddlers, young readers, teens, parents, English-language students, and older patrons. One librarian asks if I need anything. Another stacks books.

I ask to see the second floor, and Edwin, a sweet and soft-spoken information supervisor, takes me upstairs. Here there are three separate universes. A designated children s space, which is worn but, Edwin says, about to get renovated; a set of tables for English-language courses, which are always oversubscribed; and, in the back, a classroom that serves as the library s Learning Center, a place where anyone over age seventeen who s reading below GED level can get special instruction, individually and in groups.

Everyone is welcome at the l

people is essential, and this is what I share with Klinenberg: We both believe that beauty, this kind of beauty, can save the world. Renzo Piano

This fantastic book reminds us that democracy is fortified and enlivened by people coexisting together in public, and that good design and support of a wide variety of public spaces can produce those mysterious things we call community, membership, a sense of belonging, a place, maybe a polity. In an age where the push for disembodiment and never leaving the house and fearing and avoiding strangers and doing everything as fast as possible is so powerful, this book makes the case for why we want to head in the opposite direction. It s both idealistic and, in its myriad examples, pragmatic, and delightfully readable. Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me and A Field Guide to Getting Lost

At a time when polarization is weakening our democracy, Eric Klinenberg takes us on a tour of the physical spaces that bind us together and form the basis of civic life. We care about each other because we bump up against one another in a community garden or on the playground or at the library. These are not virtual experiences; they re real ones, and they re essential to our future. This wonderful book shows us how democracies thrive. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die

A great example of research made accessible to non-experts Klinenberg draws on loads of published scholarship as well as his own, weaving it together into a powerful argument . 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. Inside Higher Ed

Eric Klinenberg believes that social life can be designed well, just as good buildings are. His book is full of hope, which is all the more striking because Klinenberg is a realist. He is a major social thinker, and this is a beautifully written, major book. Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

In very unequal societies, where the social fabric has been torn apart and the social distances between people create lack of trust, community participation and high levels of stress and distress, it is vitally important to build social infrastucture to bring people together. Healing these rifts is the key to empowering people to tackle the inequality that divides them. Eric Klinenberg shows us how this can be done - this is an important book for our difficult age.
Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level and The Inner Level

Fine reading for community activists seeking to expand the social infrastructure of their own home places.   Kirkus Reviews

The author s paean to public libraries will strongly appeal to those who support them as well as interested sociologists and urbanists. Library Journal