Going over this module put two ideas next to each other that I had not thought to pair before: “social infrastructure” and hygge as a service philosophy. Read separately, one feels architectural and the other feels emotional. Reading them together however, they started to feel like the same argument told from two different perspectives. From one side the focus is on the buildings we build, the other about the atmosphere we build inside them.
What stuck out to me the most from the Klinenberg Q&A was his Chicago anecdote. He asks a room full of people if they have been to a library in the past month, and nearly every hand goes up. Then he connects that to something bigger: libraries were where they could vote early during a contentious moment, and thousands did. This changed how I thought about the library as a building, in my head, from “a place with books” to load-bearing civic infrastructure. His line about the “fractured societies and precarious social order we live in” resonated with me harder than I expected. It is easy to talk about libraries as nice-to-haves, and much harder to talk about them as infrastructure a democracy is quietly resting on. From my own personal experience I know libraries serve as a place where someone could read an Environmental Impact Report physically during a public comment period for something like a new transit project.
Stephens’ chapter felt like the missing interior half of that same building. He borrows the Danish idea of hygge or coziness, but also, as he quotes a librarian putting it, a togetherness and well-being that English does not quite have a word for (I have encountered this kind of scenario when talking to my mom about her native language, mandarin). He asks what it would mean for a library to be designed around comfort and belonging rather than just material collections. I loved the detail about Dokk1 in Aarhus, the library with a bell that new parents can ring from the maternity ward across town, so a child grows up literally hearing their own arrival marked by their library. That is not a service point, it is a ritual. This made me think about Jesse Shera’s phrase, which Stephens revives, of the library as a “quiet stir of thought”. A description of what the library offers that a computer, or algorithms, structurally cannot.
Social infrastructure is the argument for why libraries matter at the civic scale, and hygge is a working theory of how that matters at the human scale, one cozy game night or one bell ring at a time. A building can be structurally “infrastructure” and still fail to feel like anyone’s palace if nothing inside it is designed for belonging.
References
Gaetani, M. (2018, November 11). Q&A with Eric Klinenberg. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. https://casbs.stanford.edu/news/qa-eric-klinenberg
Stephens, M. (2019). Growing our libraries. In Wholehearted librarianship: Finding hope, inspiration, and balance (pp. 63–65). ALA Editions.
3 thoughts on “Infrastructure with a Pulse”
@chaot I really enjoyed reading your post, especially your insight about the library being a “load-bearing civic infrastructure”. It feels like an uphill battle at times for shifting perspectives about what libraries are and do for the community. Libraries do offer us so many things in addition to “place”. I feel like it is one of the last true meeting places left (like Agoras in Ancient Greece) or the “meeting houses” from America’s beginning. I think for me libraries also represent safety. They feel like the most neutral public space we have left where people can have a variety of needs met, not jut informational ones.
@chaot, I absolutely love your framing of this: “Social infrastructure is the argument for why libraries matter at the civic scale, and hygge is a working theory of how that matters at the human scale.” So good! I also love your description of libraries “as infrastructure a democracy is quietly resting on.” Yes—and as a place to actively perform democracy, even in our one-on-one interactions and at a hyperlocal level.
@chaot I really appreciate this essay and your idea about social infrastructure and Hygge going together as “the same argument told from two different perspectives.” Wowza!