"Palaces for the people" is the title of a recent book I have read, probably one of my favorites in 2019, is a phrase used by Andrew Carnegie describing some of his libraries. Mr. Carnegie was known as a titan of the Gilded Age in America and one of the most affluent of his time. Andrew Carnegie was also very cruel as a capitalist. He was famous for strike-braking and using tactics that promoted inequality in his factories and in many other parts of the world. He was also a first-generation immigrant. He really believed that the US was a country where people could get ahead in life. He also spent time and investment, helping to build a social establishment that would promote that first-generation immigrant attitude.
During his lifetime, Andrew Carnegie supported the funding and building of thousands of public libraries around the world, most of them located in the US. He called the greatest of them "palaces for people." (If you haven't seen these palaces, visit the one in Pittsburgh on Forbes Ave, located in Oakland or the one in the Northside of the City, now home to Children's Museum Lab) The great Carnegie libraries, of course, had high ceilings, big windows, very spacious halls where people can read, think, learn, and "achieve something that they felt proud of." Although these places were not always for everyone, many of the great Carnegie libraries remained racially segregated throughout the early 20th century, but later became battlegrounds in the civil rights movement in America. In the book "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life" Eric Klinenberg tells us a captivating narrative about Social Infrastructure and importance of them in our contemporary societies. When we think about infrastructure, we tend to think about water, roads, railway, power or communication, but the social infrastructure is the glue that ties communities together, and it is just as real and valuable as hard infrastructure. The author argues when we invest in social infrastructures such as libraries, parks, or schools, we draw all kinds of benefits. What kind of benefits? Think about it, we become more likely to interact with people around us, and therefore connected to the broader public, not through virtual platforms like Instagram or Twitter. If we neglect social infrastructures, we tend to grow more isolated, which can have severe consequences for our collective society. The book examines the terrible heat wave that took place in Chicago in the mid-90s to explain the importance of social infrastructure and how the horrifying heatwave in the city that killed more than 700 people. It looks at various neighborhoods in Chicago that had very high death rates and realized a drastic difference in Social Infrastructure. There were severely depleted. Think about it; it means there were a lot of abandoned properties, empty blocks, and vacated houses. Many sidewalks were damaged and broken, and there was minimal commercial life on the streets. This virtually all meant that people were likely to stay home, and this was a deadly thing to do during a heatwave. It is hard to believe that Mr. Carnegie envisioned the role his libraries would play in the very social fabrics of our time. Just look at Carnegie libraries in Pittsburgh, these are places where lots of early literacy development happens every day. These libraries have also now become the places where formerly incarcerated people come more to search for jobs or obtain help on their job search and resumes building. Mr. Carnegie probably would not have anticipated that these libraries are the proper places where there are more classes for English as a second language or more citizenship classes than any other public institutions in America. He wouldn't have imagined all the kids coming to the library after the school day to play games, or just because it's the safest and warmest or just to play games, or learn about computers and maybe one-day ReadyAI can develop a free class ecosystem for the community about Artificial Intelligence. Carnegie libraries in Pittsburgh and elsewhere have surely reinvented themselves in recent years, and one of the things that is so striking about the ones I have seen in Pittsburgh is that the local staff has built the capacity and means to develop programming that works for the community that they're in (i.e., Homewood, Braddock, East Liberty, and Edgewood neighborhoods). Today these libraries are lending tools for learning, and they give clothes to people who need better clothes for a job interview. There are also doing programs in all kinds of languages (in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, we have Swahili classes). Building social infrastructure such as libraries and parks are costly, so how are we going to pay for them? In the 20th century, Mr. Carnegie - the greatest philanthropist of his time, and his philanthropic dollars went into building libraries. However, how should be address building social Infrastructure in the 21st Century? Today's billionaires, like a Facebook founder - have made billions of dollars of social media and computing but haven't made contributions to our physical, social infrastructure in a meaningful way. These tech titans of the information age, utilize the concept of social infrastructure furthermore have been promoting the platform Facebook as social infrastructure. He believes that these platforms like Facebook are where people should go for meaningful social interactions. The jury is still out on that. "Palaces for the People" makes me think more about our parks and libraries. Perhaps we need more philanthropists of our time to spend more money on things like libraries and parks. But philanthropic funding is ultimately incomplete and mostly distributed to the places where these billionaires spend their own time living or visiting. To make it work, I believe we need real public commitment, such as a major public works program. Leave your phone at home and visit your local library, get a copy of a "palaces for the People" or any other book that you'd like to read and sit in your local park and turn those pages...
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AuthorRoozbeh, born in Tehran - Iran (March 1984) Archives
April 2024
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