 Welcome to Coast to Coast. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Lily Weinberg. I'm here joined by my colleague, Lillian Corral. We are both program directors of the Community and National Initiatives at Knight Foundation, and we are thrilled to have you join us. Lillian, I'm going to kick it off to you if you can tell us a little bit about what we are doing with Coast to Coast. Hi, Lillian. Well, as you know, Knight's mission is to foster more informed and engaged communities because we feel that they're essential to a healthy democracy, and our national strategy focuses on two areas, public spaces and the role of technology in communities. So, Coast to Coast is going to be a weekly show that's going to take a deep dive into cities and explore all the ideas and insights that are emerging, especially during this time of rapid change. I'm really excited to be partnering with you on this, Lillian, and we have a few things in common. We are both on the Coast, right? Opposite Coast. Miami to LA, we'll be covering everything in between, and we love cities, and there's a lot to talk about in this dynamic time, and on top of that, we are quarantined with a toddler. So, what can go wrong, right? But I'm really excited to be co-hosting this with you, and let's just dive right in. Yeah. So, Eric, Eric Kleinenberg is our first guest, and we are thrilled to have you, Eric. So, I'm going to take a second to introduce Eric, and we'll dive right in. So, Eric is Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Institute of Public Knowledge at NYU. He served as a Research Director of Rebuild by Design after the Superstore in Sandy. He has many books, but most recently, Palaces for the People, a book about the essential role of social infrastructure, like libraries, playgrounds, and parks, which many of you in the audience lead a work-around public space. And he's really looking at revitalizing civic life. I'm really excited, Eric, because you're going to be launching a new series, The Shift, Looking at the Shifts in Public Life during COVID-19. Tonight is the first episode of The Shift at 5 p.m. Eastern, and you guys will be doing a deep dive on public space. So, hopefully, this will wet your appetite for that. Last but not least, he is the inaugural Night Public Spaces Fellow, and we're thrilled to have you, Eric. So, welcome. Great. It's great to be here. Thank you for doing this. I'm just really happy to have another excuse to be on Zoom today, my favorite public space. You can't believe how much time I'm spending on Zoom. It's the place to be. I know. It's pretty crazy. And I know people are going to be asking about the wallpaper and your back. So, we'll get it out there. And so, for anybody, you can put your questions in the Q&A box, and then we also will be streaming live on Facebook, hashtag Night Live. And so, Eric, the way that we're going to structure this is going to be short and sweet. We have about 30 minutes together. For the first 15, it's going to be a conversation between you and me. I have a few questions to ask you. It's going to go by really quickly. And for the audience, we really encourage you to ask questions. My co-host, Lillian Corral, will be looking at those questions on Facebook Live and then also in the Q&A function. And she'll be elevating those themes. So, she'll be jumping in and asking you those questions, and then we'll close it. So, let's just dive right in, Eric. Let's do it. So, first, there's a lot that we can talk about because you are so uniquely situated to discuss pandemics with your background and studying living alone and crises and disasters and, of course, social infrastructure. For this conversation, we're really going to go in deeper into place and how that's a driver of social connections. So, first, if you could start with defining for our audience, what does social infrastructure mean and why does it matter for crises? Why does it matter for a pandemic? Yeah. So, I use this concept of social infrastructure in Palaces for the People, the book that came out about a year and a half ago. And it's a concept we don't use very often in the United States. It has had a little bit more traction in Europe. The way I use it is specific, though, and different. And so, when I say social infrastructure, I'm referring to the physical places which can include organizations as places that shape our interactions. And the argument I make in the book is that when we invest in social infrastructure, when we design it well, when we maintain it well, especially when we program it, we have tremendous capacity to improve the likelihood or increase the likelihood that people will engage one another in real time. So, think of the playground, for instance. Think of what it means to live in a neighborhood that's got a playground. If you're a parent, if you're a child, you're just so much more likely to have a shared gathering place from which all kinds of relationships and possibly even eventually community can develop. Whereas, if you live in a neighborhood that doesn't have a playground or I grew up in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s, we had some playgrounds because the city had invested a lot in public space, but then the city stopped spending money on maintaining them and they became problem areas and people avoided them. So, if you live in a context like that, you're just much less likely to engage one another. And how that affects us in daily life is it makes it more or less likely that we will be in a place that develops social support networks and something that feels like cohesion. If there's a crisis, that can make a big difference. So, the first book I wrote is a book about a heat wave in Chicago in 1995 that killed hundreds of people and people were much more likely to die in their apartments if they lived in a neighborhood that had a really weak social infrastructure. They just didn't have the same connected tissue that allowed for support. Now, this pandemic situation we're in is really different because obviously you don't want your neighbors coming into your apartment right now to take care of you. The way that we're supposed to stay safe is by physically distancing. I say physical distancing, not social distancing because I actually think social distancing is kind of a dangerous concept. We actually need social support. So, the question of the moment is, is it possible that the neighborhoods that built up strong solidarity, a strong sense of cohesion that had a robust social infrastructure before this have been able to maintain more virtual connections or continue to do things like provide food delivery service to older people or to sick people or to make sure that they get care? Are those protective bonds still working in the same way? That's an open question we're going to have to explore when it's safe to do that. And you'll be looking into that, I would say, right? Very much. We're already starting. I teach at New York University. I'm a social scientist and we're already starting a bunch of projects where we're trying to understand a bunch of different comparisons. So, the world has been talking about why South Korea done so well and the United States done so badly or why has San Francisco done so well in New York City where I am done so badly. But we also want to look at neighborhoods and one of the things that I did in my Chicago project is I tried to look at neighborhoods that were demographically very similar. Places that looked on paper like they should have had about the same income or same outcomes during the heat wave but in fact did really differently. And we're trying to identify those kinds of cases within cities in the US right now. So, can we find sets of places that are demographically very similar within the same urban area but that have different outcomes and try to understand why that's the case? And obviously, a contagious virus is different as a mechanism then because the heat hits you more or less uniformly. The virus could have different vectors in but we think there's a lot that we can learn from this situation and hopefully we can learn things in time too. Yeah. No, I think you touched upon this a little bit, Eric. I mean there are definitely, there's clearly parallels from the heat wave and but there are differences and you touched upon that with the pandemic. We are supposed to stay inside and we can't be going door to door like you talked about in heat wave and so I guess I want to dig in a little bit deeper. I want to understand what does social infrastructure look like in a time of social distancing and I know you hate that word social distancing so but I want to tease that out a bit so please. Well, first of all if we say physical distancing, very comfortable with that because after all it's physical proximity that puts us at risk. Physical proximity is what creates capacity to spread the virus. Social connections don't have to be face to face. We don't actually need social distancing. I think we need to be looking out for each other like never before because a lot of people are very vulnerable. A lot of people are only going to get through if we extend a helping hand and that doesn't happen with social distancing. Social distancing tells us to stay inside. So social infrastructure right now, I mean in ordinary times the models of social infrastructure that I've written a lot about include places like libraries which are great physical places that are also programmed right. So you have people these like librarians who help to bring people together and create you know structured activities in different spaces that accommodate a lot of people or like a playground, a park, a schoolyard, even places in the private sector obviously like diners and coffee shops. There's a lot of different kinds of social infrastructures. Right now we need to be physically distant. So the infrastructure we're using to engage one another is largely the screen and in the book I write about how I think that you know our kind of digital communication system is better seen as a communications infrastructure than a social infrastructure. I think that's you know generally the case because the truth is that things work best when they are in ordinary times, they work best when there are supplements to our face interactions not substitutes. And one of the dangers we sometimes get is that too many people are substituting you know FaceTime or Skype or you know Instagram and Facebook for actual interactions in real life and I don't think that they're generally speaking as they're filling. Now they're all we have like we couldn't be having this conversation with a thousand people participating you know with any other technology. I'm continuing to teach my classes at NYU because Zoom lets me do that. There's a lot of things that the technologies are affording us but I still find them to be inadequate. And so here as I think it's important you ask this question as we're entering into summer because we're going to have to get out into the world even with physical distancing. It's we're going to go crazy and we're going to get very sick when the extreme heat comes. You know you've got you know infants and toddlers. There's a lot of children who are older than that too who just can't be you don't want to be inside when it's 90 to 100 degrees in urban areas. A lot of parents who can't there's a lot of older people who can't. So we're going to have to find we're going to need parks more than ever because we're going to be out in the world but physically distant. I would like to see us be able to open up beaches in a safe way. I'd like to see us be able to use you know libraries potentially if we can find safe ways to do it. We're hopefully going to find a way to keep playgrounds and certain athletic facilities open so people can exercise at least and be active. The next phase for us is going to be figuring out how to re-enter the social world safely and we're going to have to do things differently than we've done before and I think having a generous social infrastructure is going to make all the difference. If you live in a place where there's not a lot of physical places that's going to result in crowding and stress and heightened danger. So here's an area again where I think places that have made investments in more generous spaces that are designed well that are maintained well could potentially have some more success. And so that is really important and we're figuring out as it goes. We have a lot of practitioners you know on this and the audience that are that are rapidly trying to figure out how to open up how to rebuild and thinking that through. I do want to tease out before we get questions from the audience the idea around social solidarity because that's going to be an important role for our leaders and communities to really you know have social solidarity and to lead with social solidarity. I think we could have a really robust conversation around social solidarity at a national level. I'm going to steer us away from that though and talk about at a local level. What is what does that look like for our leaders who are managing parks libraries you know how can they lead with social solidarity. Well you know look we are clearly in a moment where we can see the extent to which our fates are linked to the fates of our neighbors like never before. It's if we're not respecting some basic guidelines about how to look after each other we're in big trouble here. That's I think what for me is so threatening and dangerous about people who are saying you know I want to be out in public without a mask doing my regular activities no matter what is they're not just putting themselves at risk they're putting everyone else at risk. So we only get through this period if we are if we have enough recognition of our linked fates of our mutual interdependence that we can respect each other and get and support one another's efforts to stay alive and so we can think about solidarity at just the most basic level you know if I'm feeling sick do I you know should I stay home or go outside if my child's feeling sick do I keep them home or do I you know they send they send them out we can think of it at the policy level you know do we want to live in a society where if you skip work you're going to get fired or you won't get paid even if you're sick so we have people working in the food industry who are showing up you know with a contagious virus because they have you know they need to get paid that you know they don't have that kind of insurance so there's it scales up as well I think at this moment our capacity to get through this hinges on how much we decide to take each other's well-being into account the most fundamental level we are being challenged to take each other's well-being into account and you know we see this kind of these mantras like you know freedom or you know freedom or death you know freedom or life you know give me liberty or give me what that's the question for how much is how much is my personal freedom worth putting at risk I want liberty at what expense and I think we are facing a crisis in this country because I think we we're currently seeing so much self-seeking behavior and not enough behavior that is focused on the collective and so as we head into the summer you know if you're running a park system we're thinking about how to keep a neighborhood safe you know how do you how do you make sure you're getting the physical distancing that you need while also giving people a chance to be in a public place it's a park or a playground or a beach those are going to be very tough questions for us to address and I mean that is so critical as we're thinking about opening up public spaces that that piece that you're highlighting I mean thinking about others too because because that cooperation is going to be critical for for the success of these phases that are going to be occurring I just want to in the in the chat function we've put up a few links I do want to link to Eric's op-ed too on social solidarity I I love that because it really challenged us to think about you know what was greater than just ourselves it certainly challenged myself and my husband and and I think that it was it was it was a fantastic piece so so Lily and I'm going to invite you to to hop in I know that you've been getting questions from from the audience and let's elevate some of the themes that we're hearing and and continue this conversation with Eric yeah this fascinating talk Eric so if we can see if we can try and squeeze the squeeze in a couple of questions so the first one just as a starter is can you talk a little bit about the difference between social infrastructure and social capital if there's a difference I do see a difference so social capital you know as social scientists see it as the refers to the number of connections that you have with other people so you know it can be the strength of your ties or the number of your ties social infrastructure is like the thing that comes underneath that it's the thing that it's the conditions that make social capital possible so that the argument I make in palaces for the people is that when you invest in social infrastructure you know the physical places the public spaces the the libraries the playgrounds the parks the athletic fields commercial corridors that you know encourage people to come together investing in social infrastructure is what promotes social capital it's not you can't you can't really build social capital by just telling people that they should have more friends you know by just telling people to connect it doesn't work but you can change the way you design a city or a suburb or a neighborhood to encourage it and so that's what social infrastructure does so that's a perfect segue into the next set of questions we have a couple of folks asking about libraries and parks and what are your ideas for how do you actually design these spaces in a way where we can keep that physical distance but as you know like there you know a lot of the work that night and others um that are listening in have really focused on is how do we design these spaces to create connection and cohesion and so when we're six four six feet apart like what does that design look like do you have any thoughts on that um yeah so I don't know we're going to redesign uh our parks and playgrounds and libraries in a durable way you know to get through the period the period that we have in front of us right now but there's there's things that we're going to have to do differently the first thing we're going to have to do so let me just say we want to create beautiful places we want to create places that are inviting and then encourage people to come and participate in face-to-face interactions even if the faces are six feet apart you know we continue to want to do that I know there are a lot of people who are concerned that the facilities that they manage are going to be overrun right like you have a you have a city and you run the parks department and you have a basketball court up maybe you're okay with a one or two people in a family being together on a court but you don't want full on pick up basketball right now it's too early for that so I've talked to city parks commissioners by to take the hoops down to promote public health which is not ordinarily what you want to do but we're going to get to a point where we're going to need to have facilities open and then I think we're going to need to do things like message better so for instance instead of saying to everyone social distance social distance we need to say things like you know we need physical distance social solidarity and that's what gets us to a healthy city you know physical distance social solidarity healthy cities we might need to do what New York City is starting to know which is let's hire a bunch of young people who would otherwise be out of work this summer and give them you know special shirts that you know that we're going to get through this shirt for the parks department and encourage them to help promote social physical distancing right so we don't want police officers separating people violently but we could have some young people with a nice hat on and a visible t-shirt who're just saying hey Lily you know please welcome to this parking and keep keep yourself a little bit distant so the messaging is really going to matter and I think at some point you know some facilities will it's possible we're going to have to have limits onto the number of people who can be in there at a time I don't I don't know how that works it's going to be tricky don't have long lines getting to the beach or the swimming pool but we're going to have to think about how to create conditions for access that make people feel safe and comfortable yeah that's a great point about young people another one of our great public spaces fellow Shalina Humbert who's giving me just some insights as to how the critical role that you play in really sharing messages across communities because of of the way that they see things happening in community and also the way that adults tend to receive the messages from young people so there's a couple of questions here around how do we deal with sort of the blue red divide in America especially if you have Americans visiting or traveling from areas that are in lockdown versus in these no rules areas or cities that are starting to open up do you have any thoughts about how we take each other into account when we have such a divisive political system you know it's this is really one of the deepest and most difficult questions we we have in this country right now you know how do we build solidarity in a time when our political leadership is dividing us we have we have been polarized for some time there's you know just blatant hostility from you know one part of the country to the other part of the country and so the you know the real question for us as a nation I think is what's our capacity to recognize our shared humanity and our common purpose at a moment like this you know I've been going back to the Great Depression and the New Deal and listening to some of FDR's fireside chats and it's really interesting the way he talked about the appeal of his message coming from this kind of basic Judeo-Christian value and the idea that you know I'm my brother's keeper and he felt like the message he was giving to Americans at that time was a message that we're all in it together you know my fellow Americans and it's just so striking to me that we seem unable to muster that kind of rhetoric right I think the absence of political leadership that is encouraging us to to seek come ground is a real danger it's worse than that of course we're I think we're being you know actively divided and made more hostile toward each other and so I hope we have better leadership and we're seeing leadership you know we're seeing governors and mayors step up and establish local leadership that is you know really extraordinary including in red states by the way yeah not a blue state red state thing because there are a lot of people who live in red states where someone will say it's we need to open up there'll be a protest movement but the overwhelming majority of of Americans say you know we'd rather stay home a little bit longer it's dangerous because a small number of people can do a lot of damage right now but this whole thing only works if we learn to take care of each other yeah it's it's dangerous to fall into that division between blue and red and it is you're totally right I mean for us one of our 26 communities includes Akron Ohio and I've had great conversations with the local leadership there and the governor there is doing an amazing job so it really doesn't have to be that distinction um all right just one quick question I'll turn it over to Lily to close close us out there is if we are to stay connected in this virtual world while we're all staying indoors and what do you think about the digital divide there's a question um on the q&a about whether you think um the internet should be considered a utility does your work delve into that or what are what are your thoughts there pretty much does and I wrote a book my work with the night foundation uh started years ago because I wrote a book called fighting for air about the state of our nation's media system and uh I continue to believe that the internet must be a utility uh you know you can't like think of all the families uh who whose children are trying to do remote education right now you can't do remote education if you can't get online um obviously issues about who has access to a laptop or a tablet but there's even more fundamental issues about who has access to the internet and especially now we're entering into a moment where uh you know getting access to education doing the census uh potentially voting this year you know is going to registering to more and more of our activities uh cultural civic political social require an internet connection and if we don't have the internet as a utility that's accessible for everyone we are systematically excluding all of those people from our public life and our civic life and so I think now is there's a lot of things that we're able to see more clearly because of this crisis and a lot of my research has been about all the things that generally we can see more clearly uh during crises and this crisis has clearly highlighted our nation's glaring need for a better internet policy thanks Eric Lily you want to take it away yeah I'll jump in thank you Eric thank you Lillian um so so Eric I loved what you said you said physical distance social solidarity healthier cities that's what we're going to be thinking that's what practitioners can be thinking about you know as we're transitioning physical distance social solidarity healthier cities um and and with that I just I have a I have to ask the final question to you um because um because we have we have many practitioners that are dealing with serious budget cuts literally as we speak um with libraries and parks and and um and so any advice that you can give um as as our cities are navigating these these cuts I mean you know I'm a social scientist and I've never had the challenge of having to run a park system on a declining budget so I don't know if I'm the right person to give advice about how to do that right but I do think it's time for all of us who are advocates and believers in public spaces to do a better job of telling the story of why it's important for us to bail our institutions out too I mean we there's no idea you can't have an economic stimulus plan that that isn't affecting our social life and we're you know we're not just having an economic recession we're also experiencing a social recession a very painful one and we are going to need to make a massive investment in our social infrastructure to get through this and so I you know it's time for us at the policy level to think about you know not cutting the budget for parks and public spaces and libraries and athletic fields but doing what they want to do in the New Deal which is making a dramatic expansion uh in programming in all of those areas so I think the way we get through this is by making the bailout bill more expansive and making sure that you know people who are trying to build physical places that will allow Americans to stay healthy this summer have the resources they need that's something we're only going to get if we as a community I'm talking about the people who are on this zoom chat right now find a way to make that point and to raise our voices and to demand that there's a bailout for public spaces that we revive public life and civic life that that our our well-being depends on it because if we don't advocate for ourselves no one's going to hand out that money for us I guarantee you everybody on this call who's managing a system is facing budget cuts at the very time when we need this system to work more than ever yeah it's essential thank that was beautiful thank you um take a second though to to tell us um about the shift and and it's launching tonight at 5 p.m. um we also we circulated the link and that in the chat function yeah thank you thank you for doing that so uh at NYU I run a an institute called the Institute for Public Knowledge we do a lot of programming and research you know the issues that affect all of our well-being we partnered with the night foundation with civic signals with the social science research council and starting tonight at 5 p.m. we're going to run a series of panels that bring together people who are trying to make sense of the shift from our physical face-to-face world to our face-to-screen world here we are together and we're going to try to understand it in all of its implications we're going to talk tonight about public space but future conversations we will be about things like work and democracy equality and inequality around access so please join us um hopefully you've circulated the link um I'm really excited about this initiative and about our partnership so hopefully this this this wet everyone's appetite for to to learn a bit more about this and to and to go in deeper for public spaces um thank you so much Eric uh for joining us um I also I also want to flag that um every Tuesday we are doing this and um at 1 p.m. um and the next episode is on equity and public space what inequities is the current crisis amplifying and how can we address that in the recovery um we will be circulating our speaker our SPP for that and we're excited to to go into that topic next week uh 1 p.m. same time same place thanks a lot see you then Lily bye bye