UC Press Blog

By Daniel P. Aldrich, author of Beyond Common Ground: How Everyday Places Solve Big Social Challenges.

Washington keeps a list of the things it cannot afford to lose. Sixteen sectors make the cut, overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and reaffirmed in 2024 by National Security Memorandum 22. Energy. Water. Dams. Transportation. Communications. Chemical plants. If any of them fail, the thinking goes, our security, our economy, and our public health would go down with them.

Scan that list for a library. Or a park, a community center, a church, a mosque, a synagogue. You won't find one. That gap, sitting right next to everything my data kept showing me, is a big reason I wrote Beyond Common Ground.

We are not short on spending. The United States has poured some $2.23 trillion into disasters since 1980, and climate-related disasters alone cost us more than $165 billion in 2022. All that money has neither stopped nor slowed the cascade of shocks. So I went looking elsewhere. Over several years I studied the places where people meet, linger, and learn to trust one another (parks and libraries, community centers, houses of worship, even radio networks) across Australia, Israel, Japan, Singapore, the United States, and beyond. I interviewed more than 120 people and gathered tens of thousands of data points. Those places are social infrastructure. They save lives.

Take the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I tracked more than 560 neighborhoods along the Tohoku coast, holding constant wave height, seawall height, and distance to the sea. Where libraries, parks, and community halls were scarce, predicted mortality among older residents sat around 5 in 100. Where they were most plentiful, it fell below 2 in 100. Raising a seawall three feet costs about five times as much as adding one gathering place to a community. The gathering place saves nearly two-thirds as many lives.

Crime tells a similar story. Residents of Portland's Mt. Scott-Arleta neighborhood reclaimed a neglected park and turned a concrete traffic island into a rainbow-striped plaza. Plenty of observers expected nothing. Shootings dropped by two-thirds, while other parts of the city held steady or got worse. In Philadelphia, crews greened abandoned lots for around $1,500 apiece; a randomized trial found that self-reported depression among neighbors fell by 40 percent. And when the thermometer spikes, more than half of American libraries open their doors as cooling and warming centers.

Then there's the way these places fail. Gently. Suppose a library draws only a handful of isolated seniors out of their sweltering upper-floor apartments on a hot afternoon. That still counts as a win. When a dam fails, as one did in Libya in 2023, more than 5,000 people die.

Still, our reflex is what I call breakwaters, berms, bombs, and brigs. Seawalls for rising seas. Levees for floods. Force for terrorism. Prisons for crime. Boston's Big Dig was pitched at $2.8 billion and finished at $14.6 billion, sixteen years after work began. Social infrastructure, by even the most generous estimates, gets 3 to 7 percent of infrastructure spending worldwide. It is a Cinderella service, beloved by the people who use it and overlooked by the people who pay for it.

Keep the roads. Keep the grid. Libraries need electricity, and nobody reaches a community center without a sidewalk. What I want is balance. Put social infrastructure on the federal list and it gets a lead agency, a role in resilience planning, and a line in the cost-benefit analyses that steer billions of public dollars. Connection would finally show up in the ledger.

Clean water, reliable roads, working power grids: we would never treat these as nice-to-haves. The places where we gather belong in the same company. Our official lists should say so.