#social-infrastructure — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #social-infrastructure, aggregated by home.social.
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We know that libraries, parks, and pubs matter in our lives. But can they help during shocks and disasters? In my article I demonstrate how communities with greater densities of #socialinfrastructure - places where we built trust - survive at higher rates
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/how-social-infrastructure-saves-lives-a-quantitative-analysis-of-japans-311-disasters/4BD3AA196B334A23F0B749E85AE4E38F#figures -
"What would have happened if we had responded to broken windows not by sending in so many police officers, but instead by fixing the windows?" -Eric Klinenberg #SocialInfrastructure https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-people/
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With Anaya Joshi, we sought to answer the question: What is #socialinfrastructure? We argue that these are spaces that involve high stewardship and coproduction, cultivating trust, enhancing cooperation, and deepening social cohesion and social capital
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23789689.2025.2456363 -
The importance of #socialinfrastructure: From schools to dance clubs, how intentional public spaces can help our social connection and wellbeing blossom offline ht Reimagining the Civic Commons
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“Individuals may form communities, but only institutions can create a nation”*…
Traffic police in Rome, 1981.Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. Game theorist and social scientist Julien Lie-Panis unpacks the extraordinary phenomenon of human cooperation to explain how– and why– institutions work…
Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel.
The solutions we’ve devised are remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. We create rules. Then we appoint guardians to enforce them. Those who break the rules are punished. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that the Roman poet Juvenal identified nearly 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Fisheries appoint monitors to prevent overfishing – but what if the monitors accept bribes to look the other way? Police officers exist to protect everyone’s property and safety – but who ensures that they don’t abuse their power? Governments collect taxes for public services – but how do we stop officials from diverting the funds to their own accounts?
Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world…
[Lie-Panis explores human cooperation, and examines the ways in which, while it follows the same evolutionary rules as cooperation among other species, humans have expanded the ambit of their coordination. He explains the ways in which institutions depend on “a present-future trade-off,” on its constituents’ patience as it works through problems. And he illustrates the ways in which constituents’ concerns with material security and social capital can generate that patience. He concludes…]
… Institutions can thus be understood as social technologies. We engineer them constantly, often without realising it. When neighbours organise to maintain a shared garden or playground, they appoint a small committee to manage funds and decisions. The arrangement works because it transforms the hard problem of coordinating dozens of contributors into the easier problem of trusting a few visible people who can be praised for diligence or blamed for misuse.
Like any tool, institutions cannot create what isn’t already there; they can only amplify existing cooperative capacity. Institutions rest on the conditions that make cooperation rational: material security and social capital. Where those conditions hold, reputation can work at scale. One layer of accountability supports the next, until cooperation extends far beyond the limits of familiarity. From the same force that binds vampire bats and coral reef fish, we have built cities, markets, and nations. Institutions are how trust is scaled to millions of strangers.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Guarding the Guardians,” from @jliep.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Apposite (albeit a bit orthogonal): “Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings,” from @marco-giancotti.bsky.social.
* Benjamin Disraeli
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As we get along, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a film poking fun at a plethora of institutions, Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby, premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
#BringingUpBaby #CaryGrant #cooperation #culture #film #history #HowardHawks #institutions #KatherineHepburn #movies #politics #reputation #socialCapital #socialInfrastructure #socialTechnology #society -
With Timothy Fraser1 et al, our paper "Uneven paths: Soft Policy's benefits to recovery in Louisiana Parishes after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita" tracks ROI on policies
TL;DR: investment in #socialinfrastructure improves population recovery and income flow
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479722012956#fig4 -
New #article from Chisholm et al: “Like a family without being a family”: Social connectedness between social housing tenants in New Zealand
TL;DR: Social connections are supported by community rooms and “bump” spaces, that is, #socialinfrastructure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666558125000995?via%3Dihub#fig0001 -
New #article from Chisholm et al: “Like a family without being a family”: Social connectedness between social housing tenants in Aotearoa New Zealand
TL;DR: Social connections are supported by community rooms and “bump” spaces = #socialinfrastructure.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666558125000995?via%3Dihub#fig0001 -
Very excited to have worked with Renae Hanvin CEO of Resilient Ready to create a framework for measuring #socialcapital and #socialinfrastructure
TL;DR: invisible networks of trust and connection that shape how communities respond, and recover have been overlooked
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Very excited that with Resilient Ready we have put out a framework for mapping #socialcapital - the ties that bind us together - and #socialinfrastructure - the places and spaces where we build those ties and trust
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396792279_Building_a_connected_and_resilient_Australia_by_measuring_our_invisible_infrastructure_October_2025_Publisher_Acknowledgement_of_Country -
The higher-quality your local library, the less need you’ll have for paid streaming services. @carnegielibrary #kiki #pittsburgh #socialinfrastructure #library
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Amazing that Resilient Ready built a tool for measuring #socialcapital and #socialinfrastructure for all of Australia
TL;DR: new framework brings social systems into the center of disaster planning, making social capital and social infrastructure measurable and actionable.
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Libraries, parks, and pubs - #socialinfrastructure - are important parts of our lives. But can their presence help save lives? In my article How social infrastructure saves lives: a quantitative analysis of Japan's 3/11 disasters I show precisely that
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/how-social-infrastructure-saves-lives-a-quantitative-analysis-of-japans-311-disasters/4BD3AA196B334A23F0B749E85AE4E38F#article -
Very excited about our new framework which measures #socialcapital and #socialinfrastructure!
TL;DR: invisible networks of trust and connection that shape how communities respond, and recover have been overlooked
https://sociabli.resilientready.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Resilient-Ready-Social-Capital-Sociabli-Framework.pdf -
Why should communities invest in #socialinfrastructure - the places that connect us - rather than standard projects like bridges, ports, and roads? Our article with Timothy Fraser shows that libraries, pubs, and parks increase population return and income
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479722012956#fig4
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Very excited about our new #socialcapital and #socialinfrastructure measurement framework
TL;DR: brings social systems into the center of disaster planning by making social capital and social infrastructure visible, measurable and actionable
https://sociabli.resilientready.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Resilient-Ready-Social-Capital-Sociabli-Framework.pdf -
Our new #article: Linking Social Infrastructure and Social Capital: Barangay Halls and Courts as Cornerstones of Community Resilience
TL;DR: #socialinfrastructure provides activity, neutrality, co-creation, organising, institutionalisation, and information
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393759520_Linking_Social_Infrastructure_and_Social_Capital_Barangay_Halls_and_Basketball_Courts_as_Cornerstones_of_Community_Resilience -
We know that #socialinfrastructure - the places and spaces like libraries and parks that foster social connection - are critical. But can it save lives during shocks? In my article I found evidence that it can
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/how-social-infrastructure-saves-lives-a-quantitative-analysis-of-japans-311-disasters/4BD3AA196B334A23F0B749E85AE4E38F#article -
We know that #socialinfrastructure - parks, libraries, and cafes - are critical. Help our panel on this important topic get into @sxsw by voting for it!
https://participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sxsw26/community-voting-sxsw/page/community-voting/session/1753634863546001Mps9 -
Japan reducing the number of #socialinfrastructure facilities as the population shrinks: Work to consolidate public facilities, including both national and local government buildings, is gaining momentum across Japan, more efficient use of space
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/07/16/japan/consolidating-public-facilities/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter#Echobox=1752633161 -
What does the term #socialinfrastructure mean? With Joshi, we trace the meandering definition to its recent centering on networking places, such as libraries, parks, and coffee houses.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23789689.2025.2456363?scroll=top&needAccess=true -
We know that #socialinfrastructure - the places and spaces where we connect, like libraries and parks - are critical. But can they help communities mitigate shocks and reduce casualties? I explore this in my article How social infrastructure saves lives
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/how-social-infrastructure-saves-lives-a-quantitative-analysis-of-japans-311-disasters/4BD3AA196B334A23F0B749E85AE4E38F#article -
We know that places and spaces where we connect - #socialinfrastructure - are important. But how do we define them? Our article with Anaya: Corralling a chimera: a critical review of the term social infrastructure
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23789689.2025.2456363#abstract -
Trump's attacks on #socialinfrastructure have consequences: Libraries are cutting back on e-books, audiobooks and loan programs after Trump suspended millions of dollars in grants as he tries to dissolve the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
https://apnews.com/article/institute-museum-library-services-funding-cuts-trump-d3a236243b3a5c2b04e85d2004d1a946 -
Supporting #socialinfrastructure: the Tokyo government will be help the declining sento (local bath houses) industry.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Tokyo-government-steps-in-to-keep-sento-bathhouses-alive -
We mapped the #socialinfrastructure - the places and spaces where we build trust, like libraries and parks - and found tremendous inequities across the city.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209552200205X#f0030 -
We know that #socialinfrastructure - places like libraries and parks where we build connections - are important. But can they mitigate the impact of a disaster? My new article brings evidence that they can
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/how-social-infrastructure-saves-lives-a-quantitative-analysis-of-japans-311-disasters/4BD3AA196B334A23F0B749E85AE4E38F#article