Isolation, Community, and Hospitality: The Importance of Social Infrastructure in an Atomized Age

We all need community. In fact, numerous studies over the years have shown that healthy, close relationships help nourish our emotional, spiritual, and even physical wellbeing.

This ability of community to positively affect the health and wellbeing of individuals has come to be known as the “Roseto Effect,” and it is one reason sociologists like Harvard’s Robert Putnam have been so alarmed by the breakdown in the Unites States over the past forty years of our communal fabric, or what they call, “social capital.” Fewer and fewer people today enjoy the type of relationships required for a flourishing life. What can be done to help reverse this trend and build community?

One answer is what urban planners call, “social infrastructure.” In his book, Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as:

The physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops. Social infrastructure includes public institutions such as libraries, playgrounds and parks; community organizations that have physical gathering spaces such as churches; and “third spaces” such as cafes and other commercial establishments.

In short, social infrastructure consists of those places where people can gather, interact, and rediscover a sense of community. Such places have become even more important in our modern culture where individuals increasingly feel isolated and alone: trapped in a virtual world, and bereft of the traditional ties and relationships that once defined life, and gave it meaning.

As Klinenberg points out:

Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local face-to-face interactions-at the school, the playground, the diner  - are the building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructure - not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow. 

This is why at Cambridge House one of our guiding values is hospitality.  We strive to be a warm, inviting home-away-from home, where students, faculty and community members can gather, and begin to rediscover community; where they can bask in the warm glow of new friendships, revel in the give-and-take of stimulating conversations, and savor the smell and taste of a hot coffee.

In short, we want to be the type of social infrastructure that helps repair our fraying social fabric and builds community. In our increasingly fractured agenthis may likely be the most effective form of apologetics in which we can engage. It's also being obedient to Christ's call to be peacemakers, to be salt, and light, in a bland and darkening world...