Beyond Books: A Social Infrastructure In Need Of Support

Headline photo credit: Human City Creative

As they face similar challenges, nonprofits in the Philadelphia and the Pittsburgh regions can learn from the differences in each other’s institutional ecosystems. This article, the first in a series, focuses on the challenges of building and maintaining social infrastructure like libraries in the aftermath of the recent struggles facing the Cecil B Moore Library. 

“Libraries are L.I.F.E: Long-term learning, Instructional and historical support, Fundamental to creating Excellence in education,” community activist Cierra Freeman writes in a recent Generocity column on the struggles facing the Cecil B Moore Library. “Libraries, rec centers, and schools are the glue that keeps communities together.” 

Unfortunately, struggles like the ones surrounding Cecil B Moore aren’t unusual. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in his book, “Palaces for the People”, libraries are educationally and culturally essential but rarely receive the respect and funding they deserve.  

Libraries and other institutions form the backbone of what Klinenberg calls the “social infrastructure” essential to creating and sustaining community. Yet, as Freeman shows, they also require community to sustain—and, in the case of Cecil B Moore, even save—them. 

When we think about the infrastructure that makes a community run, we often focus on public infrastructure like roads, public transit, or free Wi-Fi; however, Klinenberg argues that we also need to pay attention to a community’s social infrastructure: things like sidewalks, storefronts, cafés, shops, parks and playgrounds, athletic fields, community gardens, churches, and barbershops. 

When designed well, social infrastructure brings diverse strangers together in ways that encourage them to interact with each other, even just for a moment. Accessible and safe, they have just the right amount of friction, slowing us down just enough to look up from our phones, make eye contact with each other, smile at each other and, perhaps, talk.  

Those fleeting moments of contact, Klinenberg contends, are the seeds of community and individual resilience.  

“When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors,” he writes. “When degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves.” 

Although all forms of social infrastructure are important, Klinenberg rates libraries particularly highly because of how they connect people from all walks of life. In fact, the expression “palaces for the people” comes from steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was justifying building hundreds of libraries across the country, including many in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. 

Libraries offer so much more than books and films; they also house social service programs, provide space for community groups, allow people connect over shared interests, develop knowledge and skills, and access information and other resources, among many other things.  

Still, libraries can struggle to live up to their potential, especially when they’re under resourced. As Andre Simms argues, libraries can’t be fully accessible when they’re in too much disrepair to open, too understaffed to offer the creative, diverse programming people—especially young people—need, or too dependent on late fees that shut out people who might struggle to pay them.  

Simms shows how underfunding can become a vicious cycle. Poor funding makes it harder for libraries to connect with their communities, which makes it easier for communities to cut funding, making it even harder for libraries to connect. 

A Different Approach

The sign on the old News-Tribune building before the building was renovated into Neighborhood North. Photo credit: Human City Creative

Breaking the cycle requires a different approach. The story of Neighborhood North Museum of Play, a children’s museum in the small city of Beaver Falls in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, offers an alternative case. 

Nestled beside the Beaver River in a largely rural part of the Rust Belt where the economy and population have been declining for decades, Beaver Falls can seem about as far removed from urban Philadelphia as a person can get. Yet, the fight to maintain and strengthen the library as a backbone of the community is a common struggle for both. 

Christine Kroger has lived in the community for 20 years, working as a community artist and program coordinator for the Beaver County Library System before becoming founder and executive director of Neighborhood North. 

Unlike the branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia, libraries in Beaver County operate independently, Kroger says. Their funding is contingent on local school districts, which means resources and programming vary widely, especially in a city like Beaver Falls.  

In addition, Kroger describes how Beaver County’s traditional, rural, white culture often put libraries at odds with the city’s increasing Black population. Library staff often left Black children feeling like they didn’t belong, overdue fines kept poorer families away, and historical inequities made the space feel alien rather than inviting. 

Those barriers meant that the library, instead of serving as social infrastructure, was increasingly operating as what Klinenberg calls “antisocial infrastructure,” creating a culture of exclusion undermining the very community it claims to serve. 

“If there’s not that sense of belonging, then you have to bridge that somehow,” says Kroger. “It’s a historic barrier that can’t be bridged through traditional means. You have to bring in something new.” 

Founded in 2019 as the only children’s museum within a one-hour radius, Neighborhood North seeks to be that something new. Kroger is clear, though, that the museum isn’t intended to replace the library. Instead, she wants to bring new energy that can reinvigorate the library’s aging social infrastructure.  

In bringing that energy, Kroger says her understanding of social infrastructure has deepened on three specific fronts:  

1. Social infrastructure is about relationships, not architecture.

Klinenberg sees the built environment as coming first. If we’re going to have community, he argues, we need to build containers for it to thrive. Just like in the movie “Field of Dreams,” if we build it, people will come. Community will grow as naturally as the grass on the field. 

Kroger thinks social infrastructure is more complex than that.  

The building is indeed important. Neighborhood North is currently renovating what it hopes will be its permanent home in downtown Beaver Falls, a building that once housed the county’s newspaper, The Beaver County Times. 

Yet, she says Neighborhood North didn’t intend to have a building at first—or even be a children’s museum. They offered pop-up afterschool programs for two years while constantly engaging community members to see what they wanted. 

“They never said a children’s museum,” Kroger said. “But they said all the things that our children’s museum does.” And that’s how the idea for a museum grew. 

Kroger’s organizing brings home an essential point: Social infrastructure needs to belong to the community. We can build all the containers we want, but if the community can’t imagine itself inside the container or claim is as its own, it will remain empty. 

“You need to have a space where the community can be a part of saying what it is,” she contends. “If they can’t speak into the space, then it can’t exist.” 

2. Social infrastructure starts from asking questions.

The bustling green space connecting Neighborhood North to the library. Photo credit: Guy Ruff III Photography

“We could have a library. We could have coffee shops. We could have museums. All these buildings. But social infrastructure is a fabric that weaves all those things together,” Kroger argues. “The library can’t be a piece of the social infrastructure if it’s not part of the culture.” 

Neighborhood North weaves the social fabric from the community itself. Kroger’s background as a community artist specializing in mosaics comes into play. Social infrastructure doesn’t start with architectural drawings but from asking questions. What do people really need? Who is already doing this work? What’s missing? Who can help? How can we collaborate? 

Those questions lead to relational complexity and often conflict. Seeing how all the pieces fit together can be hard.  

“Sometimes you just have to put all the pieces down,” she says. “Sometimes you just can’t see it for a minute. Sometimes it’s really messy.” 

3. Social infrastructure builds on trust.

The messiness Kroger describes isn’t for the faint of heart. Given the community’s history of scarcity and hardship, Neighborhood North hasn’t been the easiest thing to sell and would have been easier to launch somewhere else.  

Kroger believes in staying for the sake of equity. Beaver Falls, she says, has a long history of people moving into the city with big ideas and leaving when the going gets tough, leaving broken trust behind.  

“Beaver Falls has been historically disappointed by people coming in and making promises,” she remembers thinking. “I don’t want to make a promise that’s going to disappoint.” 

That desire to keep her promises is what drives Kroger and Neighborhood North. And Kroger’s stubbornness is paying off.  

The museum’s new home will share a campus with the library it will support. Connected by a green space where children can play and people can gather—another type of social infrastructure—Kroger hopes that Neighborhood North will activate the community to fill in the gaps for kids and families in Beaver County and beyond. 

But Kroger believes that Neighborhood North’s story starts with questions, not a grand vision. 

“Is there a need you’re uniquely able to help fill, and who around you, and who in the community is also able to do this?” she urges organizers to ask. “What in your space or society is missing from the fabric and the tapestry that’s currently building woven? 

“I’d start there.”