These are Places in Our Neighborhood: Rediscovering Spaces that Build Connection

by Daniel P. Aldrich
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4 books
These books have helped me recognize the importance of both the social ties that we have to each other and to the places that help maintain those ties. Most of us take our friendships - what researchers call social capital - for granted. And we may ignore our neighborhood libraries, parks, restaurants, and places of worship. But when COVID-19 forced us to distance ourselves from each other physically, many of us had our eyes opened to the importance of our ties to others and the facilities that help keep those ties active. These books touch both on our ties and our collective spaces that help knit together our social fabric.
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Encounterism

The Neglected Joys of Being In Person
Andy Field, 2023
This book is an extended love letter to the often short moments in our lives when we interact with people beyond our housemates and spouses. COVID-19 shut down the normal encounters that helped improve our mood, give us new information, and make us feel that we’re connected to larger things. So, if you’ve been feeling a bit antisocial, this book can nudge you to enjoy the haircut, the random encounter in the park, and the movie theater again.

Palaces for the People

How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
Eric Klinenberg, 2019
Eric’s earlier book Heatwave was a masterful autopsy of the 1995 Chicago disaster, which killed hundreds, and this book uses those same skills to show how the places and spaces in our communities are often overlooked but critical. His discussion of the importance of libraries and the myriad of benefits they bring (well beyond lending our books) was especially excellent.

The Design of Childhood

How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids
Alexandra Lange, 2018
All of us live somewhere—in dense urban skyrises, cutter-cutter suburbs, or rural farmlands. But most of us don’t think much about the history behind how and why those spaces were created. This book, looking at kindergartens, jungle gyms, toys, and even theme parks like EPCOT Center in Florida, pushes us to reexamine the assumptions designers make when designing everyday things and places.

Liars and Outliers

Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
Bruce Schneier, 2012
Why do we accept wrinkled pieces of paper and plastic as currency? Why don’t we ask our dentists, doctors, and mechanics to prove that they have sufficient training to carry out the services we pay them for? Societies build almost all of their transactions on trust, that is, the ability to believe that our colleagues, service workers, and providers will do what they are supposed to. This book uses a calculating and game theory-based framework to illuminate the ways that we maintain our economic and governance systems.