The Social Infrastructure

Speaker: Eric Klinenberg, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU

Conventionally, the word infrastructure refers to the critical systems that support flows of essential goods like transit, energy, food, water, and communications. Social interaction and civic engagement also depend on a set of physical places and material conditions that could be profitably theorized as infrastructure. This talk, which draws heavily on ethnographic fieldwork in branch libraries and urban climate adaptation projects, argues that the social infrastructure plays a crucial but unappreciated role in modern life.