Best of “How To”: The Infrastructure of Community

Summary

**Podcast Summary: "Infrastructure of Community"
Title: How to Age Up
Host: The Atlantic
Episode: Best of “How To”: The Infrastructure of Community
Release Date: December 9, 2024

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Infrastructure of Community," host Julie Beck and producer Becca Rashid delve into the intricacies of building meaningful connections in today’s fast-paced world. They explore how societal structures and public spaces influence our ability to form and maintain communities, featuring insights from sociologist Eric Klinenberg and historian Kelly Carter Jackson.

Understanding Social Infrastructure

Eric Klinenberg introduces the concept of social infrastructure, defining it as the physical and organizational structures that facilitate social interactions among people within a community.

"If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance. There is also an infrastructure that supports social life, social infrastructure."
[05:25]

He explains that social infrastructure includes parks, libraries, schools, and other public spaces that encourage people to linger and interact, thereby fostering a sense of community.

The Role of Public Spaces in Community Building

The discussion highlights how public spaces serve as the "railroad tracks" for relationships, enabling spontaneous interactions that lead to deeper connections.

Eric Klinenberg elaborates:

"We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, today I give you the playground and the library, and it's our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. You know, these are human inventions, right?"
[10:11]

Julie Beck underscores the importance of design in these spaces, noting that places like cafes prioritize business over community building, which can hinder the formation of new relationships.

"They're selling you a coffee, they're selling you a sandwich... if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, where are the spaces?"
[03:32]

Challenges to Building Community in Modern Society

The episode addresses several barriers to community building:

1. Efficiency vs. Social Life: Eric Klinenberg asserts that the relentless pursuit of efficiency undermines social interactions.

   "Efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time."
   [15:13]

2. Social Media’s Impoverished Connections: Social media is depicted as a substitute for robust social infrastructure, yet it fails to provide the depth of relationships necessary for strong communities.

   "Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic because we were all in our homes, cut off from each other... that’s life where social media is social infrastructure."
   [18:46]

3. Individualism and Living Alone: 높은 비율의 개인주의가 고립감을 증폭시키고, 특히 혼자 사는 사람들이 공공장소에 더 의존하게 만드는 사회적 구조의 중요성을 강조합니다.

   "What’s really driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state... you give people the choice to live the way that feels best to them at that moment."
   [19:36]

The Importance of Institutions: Churches and Libraries

Kelly Carter Jackson shares personal anecdotes illustrating how institutions like churches foster deep, supportive relationships within communities.

"My church has been everything to me because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep... we have this idea of kinship, this idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin."
[29:36]

Eric Klinenberg critiques the current state of public libraries, highlighting how underinvestment has transformed them into de facto shelters for the marginalized, thereby stigmatizing these vital social spaces.

"Libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net... we've stigmatized our public spaces because we've done so little to address core problems."
[23:16]

Building Community: Individual and Collective Actions

The conversation emphasizes the dual necessity of thoughtfully designed public spaces and the intentional actions of individuals to cultivate community.

Julie Beck reflects on personal experiences:

"Talking with both Eric and Kelly kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space."
[39:40]

Becca Rashid adds that fostering a culture of mingling and lingering is crucial for community building, but it requires active participation from individuals.

"It's like, on top of the physical space designed to bring people together, you also need that culture of mingling and lingering."
[28:15]

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a poignant realization that building strong communities requires both infrastructural support and the active willingness of individuals to engage and connect. Without intentional design and cultural shifts towards valuing communal interactions, the potential for meaningful relationships remains largely untapped.

Eric Klinenberg finalizes:

"We need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like, how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st century version of the 20th century library. What are the kinds of places we'd like to design so that we could be with each other differently?"
[27:54]

Key Takeaways

• Social Infrastructure: Essential for fostering community, comprising public spaces like parks, libraries, and schools.
• Design Matters: The layout and purpose of public spaces significantly influence the ability to form relationships.
• Barriers to Connection: Efficiency-driven lifestyles, individualism, and the rise of social media impede community building.
• Role of Institutions: Churches and libraries can be pivotal in nurturing deep, supportive relationships when properly supported and designed.
• Collective Responsibility: Both infrastructural investment and individual intentionality are required to cultivate thriving communities.

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This episode of "How to Age Up" provides a comprehensive exploration of the factors that enable or hinder the formation of strong, supportive communities. Through expert insights and personal narratives, it underscores the importance of investing in and valuing the spaces and relationships that bind us together.

Transcript

[Narrator]

Saint John's College is the nation's great books. College students explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two. For graduate students, encounter history's most influential works where students engage in group discussions about the fundamental questions underlying human society. Learn more about St. John's undergraduate and graduate programs in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Annapolis, Maryland, including online options at SJC.edu.

[Megan Garber]

Hey, it's Megan Garber, one of the co hosts from how to Know what's Real. We're excited to share with you a special series drawn from past seasons of the how to series. For the next few weeks, we'll be revisiting episodes around the theme of winding down. This episode is from season four, how to Talk to People and is called the Infrastructure of Community. Building a network of friends and support can feel elusive, but in this episode, host Julie Beck and producer Becca Rashid investigate how to slow down and build meaningful connections.

[Julie Beck]

I think what I've observed in public spaces, especially in my neighborhood, is really just a hustle and a bustle and people are going somewhere specific to do something specific with specific people. They're sort of on a mission, right?

[Eric Klinenberg]

Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today?

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

You know, people say, like, misery loves company. I just, I don't think that is true. I think that misery in a lot of ways requires company. It requires kinship, it requires community so that you are not isolated in your pain.

[Eric Klinenberg]

You know, what kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

[Julie Beck]

I'm Julie Beck, a senior editor at the Atlantic.

[Becca Rashid]

And I'm Becca Rashid, producer of the how to series.

[Julie Beck]

This is how to Talk to People.

[Becca Rashid]

Though I normally am not making a friend. At the cafe recently, there was a girl that was working on her laptop. She noticed I was too. We started chitting and chatting, and after a few weeks of running into each other so many times at the cafe, she finally slightly awkwardly asked yesterday, hey, do you mind if I get your number if you maybe wanted to get a drink? Very friendly, sweet sort of way of fighting through the awkward and just asking for the contact info. So it was bold even then. I could tell that people were sort of observing our interaction and being like, what's happening there? There are two strangers who just sort of started chatting at this table. And it's because obviously the space is not designed for the formation of new relationships. It's more so just we're all here doing our thing in our neighborhood.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah, yeah, it's. That's the thing. It's hard because, of course, like, people do connect at cafes, like you literally just did. And, you know, in Paris or whatever, they may be happy for people to linger and chat all day, but I think the connection that's happening in those spaces, like, that's not the purpose of the space. That's a byproduct, perhaps a welcome byproduct. But, like, the point of the space is to make money. The point is to sell you something.

[Becca Rashid]

It's a business.

[Julie Beck]

They're selling you a coffee, they're selling you a sandwich. There's several cafes in D.C. that I really like that just don't offer Wi Fi or they give you a ticket where you have, like, a couple of hours of WI Fi after you buy something. And I get why they're doing that, because they want the customers to cycle through, and they don't want people taking up tables all day when, you know, they could get a fresh paying customer in there. That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, where are the spaces? What are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling? And that's the point. Eric Klinenberg is a researcher who's really into all of these questions that we've been talking about. He's a professor of sociology at New York University, and he's an expert on city infrastructure and urban life. He wrote this book called Palaces for the People, in which he talks about this concept called social infrastructure. That is essentially the physical spaces that are available to the public that are designed to facilitate these social connections.

[Eric Klinenberg]

If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance. There is also an infrastructure that supports social life, social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I'm referring to physical places. They can be organizations. It could also be parks, physical places that shape our capacity to interact. When you have strong social infrastructure, people have a tendency to come out and linger. And if you live in a poor neighborhood where the social infrastructure is strong, if you're older, if you're more frail, if you're very young, you might spend more time, you know, sitting on the stoop in front of your home, you might have a bench that you spend time on that's on your street. There might be a diner where you go every day. And what that means is there are people who are used to seeing you out in Those public places on a regular basis. And when it's dangerous outside, someone might notice that you're not there, and they might not even know your name. They might just know your face. Maybe they know where you live. They're used to seeing each other in the public realm. I grew up in Chicago, and in 1995, just before I was about to start graduate school in sociology, There was a heat wave that hit my hometown. Lasted just a couple of days, but the temperatures were quite extreme. It got to about 106 degrees. Chicago did what it always does when there's a heat wave. It turned on air conditioning everywhere you could go, and the power grid got overwhelmed, and very soon, the electricity went out for thousands of homes. At the end of this week in July, Chicago had more than 700 deaths from the heat. And this was the pre pandemic time. So people dying in a city in a couple of days seemed like an exceptional thing. We hadn't gotten numb to it yet. I was really curious about what had happened. And the first thing I did is I made these maps to see which people and places in Chicago were hit hardest. And at first blush, the map looked exactly like you would expect it to look. The neighborhoods that were hit the hardest were on the south side and the west side of Chicago. They were the, you know, historically segregated, black, poor, ghettoized neighborhoods.

[Julie Beck]

Right. Chicago's extremely segregated, and when there's a.

[Eric Klinenberg]

Disaster, you know, poor people living in segregated neighborhoods will fare the worst. So I looked a little more closely at the map, and I noticed something that no one else had seen, which is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that were located right next to places that were among the deadliest neighborhoods in Chicago. But this other set of places wound up being extraordinarily healthy.

[Julie Beck]

So these were neighborhoods that were geographically really close to each other and shared a lot of characteristics, but they were having really different outcomes matching neighborhoods.

[Eric Klinenberg]

Like, imagine two neighborhoods separated by one street, Same level of poverty, same proportion of older people. The risk factors that we ordinarily look for were equal, but they had wildly disparate outcomes in this heat disaster. That's the kind of puzzle that you live for when you're a social scientist. And so what I observed is that the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, they looked depleted. They had lost enormous proportion of their population in the decades leading up to the heat wave. They had a lot of abandoned buildings. They had empty lots. The sidewalks were broken. They didn't have a lot of strong community organizations that had resources to put up impressive operations Even the little playgrounds were in terrible shape, not well maintained. And across the street, in the neighborhoods that did better, the public spaces were much more viable. They didn't have abandoned homes, they didn't have empty lots. There were community institutions, grocery shops, coffee shops, a branch library, Places that anchored public life in those neighborhoods in Chicago, people knocked on the door and they checked in on each other. And as a consequence, if you lived in one of these poor neighborhoods that had a strong social infrastructure, you were more likely to survive the heat wave. People in the neighborhood, across the street, the depleted neighborhood, they were 10 times more likely to die in the heat wave. And that difference was really quite stark.

[Julie Beck]

So you said, when we talk about regular infrastructure, we're talking about what carries the train, right? So what carries the train of our relationships? What are the actual railroad tracks?

[Eric Klinenberg]

Think about a playground, for instance. We know that one of the core places that families go to meet other families in their neighborhood is. Is a playground. There's all kinds of socializing that happens when parents or grandparents or caretakers of all kinds are pushing a swing and looking for a companion, someone to talk to. Those conversations at the swing set often lead to a shared little break together on the bench, or maybe to a picnic and then a play date, and then to families getting to know each other and communities growing. If you took playgrounds out of American cities and suddenly there was no playground, our social lives would be radically different. Now, take away our schools, take away our zoos, our museums, our libraries, piece by piece, you know, we would erode our capacity to share space and engage one another. And we haven't exactly had a demolition plan to get rid of shared public spaces in America over the last several decades. But in a lot of places, we haven't done much to update them or improve them or build new ones. You can build a social infrastructure that's very exclusive, and that also leads to fragmentation and distrust. So, for instance, like the country club, that's an amazing social infrastructure, like the best social infrastructure that your money can buy. And it's likely to make you surrounded by people who are just as elite as you are. We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, today I give you the playground and the library, and it's our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. You know, these are human inventions, right? We build giant parks, theaters, art spaces. We created a good society based on a vision of radical inclusion. Not quite radical enough. People have always been left out of our public Spaces. There's no history of this idea that is completely. If it doesn't pay attention to how racial segregation worked and how racial violence worked and how gender excluded some people from some public realms, all of that stuff is there in the history of public space. I think in the last several decades, we've kind of come to take all of these places for granted.

[Julie Beck]

What is the connection between having places to just hang out and vibe and having a community rally together and support each other in an emergency like a heat wave?

[Eric Klinenberg]

Well, you know, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. You can have places where people hang out and vibe and don't get active and engaged on important civic matters. I generally argue that public spaces and social infrastructure, they're a necessary condition for having some sense that we're in it together and we have some kind of common purpose, but they're by no means sufficient. In my book, I write about the work of a sociologist named Mario Small, who studied daycare facilities for young children. And he compared a very modern daycare facility that was set up for busy working parents who were in a hurry and needed a place that was efficient and who could drop off their kids and seamlessly get back on the street and get to work. And he compared that to a daycare center that worked in the old fashioned model. The parents were expected to be in the room for five or 10 minutes and to do a little bit of volunteer work. There was a kind of shared physical space that they had to go through every day. And what he found is that people who were in the first place, they got to work more quickly. They just didn't get to know each other all that well, whereas people in the second place, they built up all these relationships. Parents were sending their tiny child, the person about whom they cared more than anything or anyone else in the world, to the home of a relative stranger, to the park with a relative stranger, because they so quickly were able to develop this sense of being in it together with someone who's in many cases very much unlike them. And so that has to do with programming, that has to do with design, that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project. And some public spaces give us that feeling and others really don't.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah, I'm curious about the mechanics of how that even happens. I mean, maybe it's because I don't have children and I don't go to the playground, but I feel a bit of a divide where being in public is for being active and relaxing is for home. And so much of the public space around me is people are bustling, people are engaging in commerce or they're just walking from here to there. And they're not opportunities to slow down and talk to each other. And I don't know that we would. Yeah, I mean, does that make sense?

[Eric Klinenberg]

It makes perfect sense because efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time. And in fact, one of the really striking things, I think, for Americans when we travel to other countries is to see the extent to which people all over the world delight in sitting around, you know, the culture of the souk or of the coffee shop or the wine bar or the plaza.

[Julie Beck]

Oh, yeah, you have five hour dinners in France. Like you can't find that waiter to get your check. You know, he's gone.

[Eric Klinenberg]

Because the point is not to pay the check. Right. The point is to be there. And it's hard for us to come to terms with just how forcefully the ticking clock shapes our capacity to take pleasure in social life.

[Becca Rashid]

It's interesting that you see the no WI fi on the weekends as a way to cycle people out of the space. I thought that was the cafe or coffee shop making a grand gesture in favor of relationship building.

[Julie Beck]

Oh, I guess I'm just more cynical than you. I mean, this isn't Luke's diner on Gilmore Girls, right? With his like no cell phone sign. You know, that's a very optimistic way to look at it. But I think it's because they need to make money. You know, I go to the public pool with friends. I get books from the library. There is a very hot ticket at our local library, which is like a semi regular puzzle swamp that they do. And my partner and I were very cool. We go and we swap puzzles with the community. But I don't feel like I am really building new relationships or getting to know my neighbors at these places or even at these events. Like, I love these resources. I don't want to lose them. I enjoy them, but I just kind of use them by myself or with people I already know. Maybe I make a little light chitchat at the puzzle swap, but I'm not making new friends there. And I think it would feel pretty weird if I tried to. You know, I definitely see what Eric is saying in the sense that certain spaces are much more amenable to connection other places. Like, there's no doubt that there's way more potential at the library puzzle swap for connection than there is at like the McDonald's drive thru but I still feel like there's a barrier of politeness or a norm of keeping to yourself that keeps that potential from being fully realized.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

Yeah.

[Becca Rashid]

And I think the norm of keeping to yourself is only fueled more by things like social media and being able to look away and be on your phone. And weirdly, during the pandemic, I'm the least social media savvy person of all time. Like on Facebook, talk to my grandma on there. That's like the extent of my knowledge. But I really felt like I needed social media to survive at certain points during the pandemic because it became the main platform for my social life. It's interesting how just that shared physical presence with people also doesn't necessarily mean that were closer.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah. Just because you go to the cafe doesn't mean you're gonna look up from your phone.

[Becca Rashid]

Yes.

[Julie Beck]

Do you think that to some degree, we've replaced our relationship to social infrastructure with social media?

[Eric Klinenberg]

You know, I think of social media as like a communications infrastructure. It definitely helps us to engage other people. It's a kind of impoverished social life that it delivers in the end. Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic because we were all in our homes, cut off from each other. We were talking to each other all the time. Right. We're on FaceTime. We're on Skype. Right. We talk to everybody we didn't talk to before. We weren't exactly socially isolated. Right. But we were physically isolated and we were miserable. So that's life where social media is social infrastructure.

[Julie Beck]

I do wonder whether there is an individualism that is also affecting our living choices and the way that we engage with the social infrastructure.

[Eric Klinenberg]

Can I tell you something amazing?

[Julie Beck]

Please. I love to be amazed.

[Eric Klinenberg]

I discovered that the United States is a laggard, not a leader, when it comes to living alone. Living alone is far more common in most European societies than it is in the US it's more common in Japan. It's more common in France and England. Scandinavian societies have the highest levels of living alone on Earth. Germany's higher than the United States. And what I learned about doing this research is that what really is driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state and you guarantee people the capacity to make ends meet without being tethered to a partner who they might not want to be with, you give people the choice to live the way that feels best to them at that moment.

[Julie Beck]

Do you think then that the solo livers rely on social infrastructure.

[Eric Klinenberg]

More they do. They're more likely to go out to bars and restaurants and cafes and to go to gyms, to go to concerts. I just published a paper in a journal called Social Problems with a graduate student named Jenny Lee. And we interviewed 55 people who were living alone in New York during the first stage of the pandemic. And we talked to them about their experiences and it was really interesting. Like, they talked very little about social isolation and they didn't complain that much about kind of conventional loneliness, like lacking people to talk to. But they felt physically lonely. They felt kind of physically isolated, and they really missed the kind of familiar strangers we see when we spend time in a neighborhood. Just give us a sense of where we are and that we belong. They felt an acute kind of pain that was slightly different than the pain of the common conversation we had at the time.

[Narrator]

St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives, who ask hard questions of themselves and their world, and who dare to free their minds. In vigorous discussion based classes, students grapple with fundamental ideas by engaging with works by some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers, from Homer, Plato, Seneca, and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, Wolff and Baldwin. St. John's program of study includes over 200 great books from across 3,000 years of history, including philosophy, literature, politics, math, science and music. At St. John's faculty are known as tutors and not professors. This is because they will never profess to know anything. Rather than telling you what to think, they will help you ask great questions. Questions like how can human flourishing be maximized? What kinds of leaders do we want and need? Can personal peace exist when social chaos reigns? At St. John's you will learn to listen deeply and across perspective, to speak and reason with precision, and to honor the value that each student brings to the conversation. St. John's graduates, who are systems thinkers and a world of specialists, go on to become writers, judges, diplomats, lawyers, school leaders, ethicists, linguists, scientists, researchers and more. Explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two for graduate students on St. John's two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland. Learn about our robust financial aid and our academic programs at sjc. Edu. That's sjc. Edu.

[Eric Klinenberg]

One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There's neighborhood libraries. The building is there now. The buildings are generally not updated. They need to have new H Vacs, they need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, let alone New books. Some are still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. I mean, there's all kinds of problems with libraries just physically, because we've underinvested in them. But libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net. If you wake up in the morning in the American city and you don't have a home, you're told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you're suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place, they'll send you to a library. If you need to use a bathroom, you'll go to a library. If you don't have childcare for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you're old and you're alone, you might go to the library. We've used the library to try to solve all these problems that deserve actual treatment. And how many times have you talked to someone who said, like, it's basically a homeless shelter? What's happened is we've stigmatized our public spaces because we've done so little to address core problems that we've turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent middle class Americans. And that is, if you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah, yeah. If you're always being a crisis center, you don't necessarily have energy for other things.

[Eric Klinenberg]

No. And librarians are overwhelmed. They have these kind of superpowers and are capable of helping in all these ways, but they, you know, if you go and talk to libraries in urban library systems, they have more to chew on than they can possibly get through.

[Julie Beck]

It's really interesting to me to hear about the ways our environment either encourages or discourages interaction and community building, because I think on some level I've always felt like if I don't have that ideal sense of community that I really want, then it's my fault for not trying hard enough. How much of this is just on the government? And there's not much we can do besides pestering aldermen.

[Eric Klinenberg]

I think it's on us to build the political institutions that we want and also to build the public places that we need. So one of the miracles of American life is that we have these public libraries in every neighborhood. And it makes you think, like, how do we get these things? If you went to the governor of New York right now, who's a Democrat and calls herself a progressive, and the library didn't exist. And you said, like, could you build a building in every neighborhood in New York and fill those buildings with, you know, books and videos and computers and comfortable furniture? Tell people that they're welcome five, six, seven days a week? In some places, the buildings are gonna be staffed by librarians who are public employees. People can take the stuff out for free. And to make sure they bring it back, we'll use the honor system. If we didn't have a library already, if we hadn't invented that, do you think any governor in America would support that idea? Like, no chance. No chance in hell.

[Julie Beck]

Dolly Parton would do it, but I don't know if they would.

[Eric Klinenberg]

Nobody would support the idea of a library if we didn't already have it. It's like a utopian socialist fantasy, the library. And the miracle is that we have them. If you think about the American public park system, the public schools, we built all these things. The reason so many of us feel like it's so hard to hang out and enjoy the companionship of other people is because the signals we get from each other and from the state and from the corporate world tell us that we're freakish and weird if we want that kind of collective experience. Everybody knows happiness is in your phone. It's at the $22 cocktail bar. It's at the $9 coffee shop, the $14 ice cream cone. Those are the things that are supposed to give us pleasure. I think we need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like, how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st century version of the 20th century library. What are the kinds of places we'd like to design so that we could be with each other differently?

[Julie Beck]

Another important piece, Becca, to actually finding community in these spaces is people acting on the opportunity to connect that they present. It's hard if I'm going to the puzzle swap and no one's talking to each other. I mean, I'm guilty of going in, grabbing my puzzles, and getting out and not really making a big effort to chitchat and make a new relationship there.

[Becca Rashid]

Right. So it's like, on top of the physical space designed to bring people together, you also need that culture of mingling and lingering. So now I'm in the place, the library, wherever it may be now, something needs to come after that.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah. And it's hard to feel like you're just taking that on yourself to try to make that happen. It's also. Do you see people welcoming you? Do you feel comfortable going up to someone to strike up a conversation. Do you see other people mingling? The design of a place can totally encourage or discourage interactions, but obviously so can the behavior of the people in the place.

[Becca Rashid]

Right. Like the friend I made at the cafe is kind of a rare occurrence because normally people in the cafe are working, reading, or as you've said before, with people they already know.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah. And the social norms of a cafe are going to be different than the social norms of a public pool or, you know, a local sports team or a church. In a cafe, everyone kind of has different agendas. Like Becca's out there making a friend, but like, some people are just reading a book by themselves or having that one on one lunch with somebody. But in a church, for instance, like, generally speaking, there's a norm that we want to be in community with each other. We have shared values and we're here to connect.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

My church has been everything to me because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep. Every single highlight in my life or low life, the church, my church, has been there for me.

[Julie Beck]

Kelly Carter Jackson is a historian and a professor from Wellesley College. And we recently spoke about the culture of care in her community. So in her life, she's found that places like the church and her kids school have smoothed that path to building those deep relationships of support because both the spaces themselves and the people in them have been welcoming. Do you feel like finding a church in the new places where you've moved to? Has that helped in getting to those deep relationships quickly?

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

Yes, absolutely. I will say that when we lived in North Dakota, almost all of my friendships either came from the military or the church that we were going to. People were just so warm and so kind and, you know, you would join like a Bible study group or a Mommy and me group, and those became fast friendships. When my husband was going through extensive training and he was in Memphis, he was out of town for like three months and I was overwhelmed by three kids. They did a meal train and just brought. I hate cooking, I should just say. And so my church, small group was like, hey, how can we take off some of the burden since Nathaniel's gone? What can we do? And I was like, I just need meals. And so just to know that people would go the extra mile for you when you're really taxed is huge.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah, I guess I see, you know, church as sort of a natural gathering place because it has those kind of communal values, like, built into the institution. How does your faith sort of influence your approach to community with your neighbors?

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

I Think that I have always tried to model what it means to be a good neighbor, regardless of my neighbor's religious affiliations. I grew up in the church, so my parents modeled for me. Hospitality. We always had people over our house all the time. We have a big family, one of seven. So it's like, what's one more? What's six more? What's 10 more?

[Julie Beck]

Bring them on in.

[Eric Klinenberg]

Yeah.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

That is how I show my friendship, show my love, show my care. It is by making you feel welcome and by giving you a place to rest. And it does not always extend to people we know. Like we had good friends. They said, hey, we know this guy, he's a good guy. He needs a place to crash for two months. Yeah, sure. So like most people would be like, who was this random guy? You know what I mean?

[Becca Rashid]

Right.

[Julie Beck]

Who is he?

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

But he was actually really nice. His wife and kids are lovely and they're dear friends of ours. Now I've always tried to occupy the space of the Good Samaritan and looking out for people who don't have connection in trying to bring them into the fold. That's really important for me. Like, I take friendship very seriously. And the only reason sometimes I feel burdened by new friendships is because I'm like, I don't know if I can love you the way I want to love you. My plate's full right now because I take those friendships so seriously. I don't just casually bring in new people. Not everybody's receptive to that and that's fine. But for those who are, I think you can have really deep, meaningful relationships. Like when I think of neighbor, I think that extends even into my kids school. So my 6 year old had a real hard time because not only had my mother in law passed away, but her great grandmother had died as well. So we had like two big losses, a mother and a grandmother in about a three month period. JoJo is my middle child's name. Jojo was just distraught by it. Like she cried for 30 minutes and I couldn't almost, I couldn't calm her down. I sent her teacher an email and I said, hey, Jojo's having a really hard time. I sent her to school with a picture of her grandmother's. She might keep it in her backpack, she might take it out. But I just want you to know, like, this is what's going on.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

And her teacher did something. Gosh, sorry, I'm going to get emotional talking about. Her teacher saw her with the picture and she said, jojo, do you Want to share that with the classroom. And so she got up in front of the classroom and she talked about her grandmothers and just who they were, and, like, the fact that her teacher gave her space to do that. She gave her a hug. And JoJo was so happy. Like, she was so happy to be able to share that. It just meant, like, I don't know her teacher very well, but I know that she loves on my kid, and I know that she created space for my kid when she was having a hard time emotionally, and that she would do that for any kid. And then afterwards, she wrote me this long note, like, she told me everything that happened. And she was like, you know, JoJo's a wonderful kid. We're supporting her. We're here for her. And it's just those little things that let you know that, like, when you're not around your kids, that there are other people that are giving them care, that are giving them space, that are listening to them and affirming their feelings. They're really big feelings that most kindergartners cannot articulate. Most adults. Adults can't articulate. I am always overwhelmed by just, like, the goodness of neighbors and people's capacity to provide comfort during hard times. Yeah, sorry, I got so.

[Becca Rashid]

No, it's really.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

Love emotional.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah, it's really lovely.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

I said I wasn't going to cry. No.

[Julie Beck]

I mean, I think there's so much go it aloneness in our culture a lot of the time. And, like, sometimes you can get by with that. Like, it seems lonely, but, like, you can do it and can.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

But should.

[Julie Beck]

You can, but should you?

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

You know what I mean?

[Julie Beck]

When you are in such a place of intense grief, like, it becomes very.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

Clear that you can't, you can't and you shouldn't. If I hear one more person say, God won't give you more than you can bear, I'm like, I won't want to punch them. But I think that, like, we have these clich that are so empty. They're so empty. And I think that, you know, just giving people the freedom to feel what they feel, to act upon those feelings without feeling judged, to be heard. Most people just want to be heard. You know, I think in the black community, we care for one another. There is this idea of kinship, this idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin. This is your fam. That we see each other, that we recognize each other's humanity, that we show up for each other. There are ways I think I just see how, like, black women interact with each other, and we're always, like, you know, boosting each other. Okay, sis, I see you love that sweater. Ooh, girl. Yeah. Like, there is a way in which black people. We love to love on each other. You know, we love to root for everybody black. We don't know who's in the game, but we see a black dude, that's who we rooting for. You know, like, there is something about that familiarity of blackness that connects people that is both spiritual and cultural. And so if you grew up in the church, I think those ideas are fortified for you of how you should show up and care for other people.

[Julie Beck]

I mean, how do you get to that place with neighbors and people in your community without a church?

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

I think it's tough.

[Julie Beck]

Yeah, it is tough.

[Kelly Carter Jackson]

I think it's not impossible. I mean, there is something about, like, a shared set of values sometimes that comes from the church that allows making friendships to be a little bit easier, you know, so if you are meeting people in the church, for the most part, you have sort of a shared sense of like, okay, we all love Jesus, all right? You know, like, that's the base point. We all know how we should treat each other, hopefully, you know, like. But if you don't have that, sometimes I think that trust can be an issue. Like, I've had to let people know who are outside of my faith. You can depend on me. You can trust me. I am not going to judge you. That our home is welcome to anyone of all backgrounds, because I think people can sometimes be skittish around people that they think are religious. And I never wanted anyone that I connected with to feel like that. I had a friend who was in graduate school whose mother passed away. And I remember reaching out to her, like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You know, here's some literature that helped me because my siblings had passed away maybe about a year before. And she was a little startled, actually, by my response, I think, because she said, you know, I grew up in a community of atheists. She said, we just don't have a practice or tradition that the idea of, like, bringing food or, you know, sort of, like, ongoing care was not something that was a part of her tradition. So regardless of people's faith, my job as a good neighbor is to help shoulder some of that weight so you don't have to carry it all on your own. So I try to remember important dates. I try to remember names, which is why I say when I meet new people, I'M like, oh man, okay, give me more capacity.

[Becca Rashid]

So Julie, where do you go to build community or at least feel this sense of community in a shared space?

[Julie Beck]

I don't feel like just sitting out on my front porch if I had one, or going to a cafe or going to a specific place is going to make community come to me. I feel like talking with both Eric and Kelly kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space. The sort of post college secular world particularly doesn't feel set up for just spontaneous, easy connection in the same way. And if you just have an impeccably designed space where people don't want to connect, then like, I guess what you have is the Apple Store. And if people really want to connect and they don't have anywhere to go to do that, then they're going to struggle as well. And even though this is kind of a frustrating takeaway, honestly, it feels to me like if you want that deep, interconnected sense of community outside of a church or a college or an institution that's built to help you find it, you kind of have to swim against the current a little bit and find a way to make it for yourself.

[Becca Rashid]

That's all for this week's episode of how to Talk to People. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudina Bathe. Fact Check by Enna Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirciak.

[Megan Garber]

If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to Season four, How to Talk to People. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Next up in our special Best of collection, we'll look at the ways we think about productivity, culture and where we invest our time.

[Unknown]

You're not committing to it for the whole of the rest of your days. You just have to take a bit of your time now or very soon to do something that matters to you. Even if it's only 10 minutes, even if you are not confident that you're going to be able to do it every day for the next month or anything like that, but to just do some of it.

[Narrator]

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