The book concludes with an attack on Mark Zuckerberg for claiming Facebook as “social infrastructure”. One of these things is rude, I guess; the other demonstrates a total disregard for democratic principles and a disturbing shift to authoritarianism. He mentions ambitious plans by the architecture firm Big, as part of the post-Sandy response, to protect lower Manhattan from floods with barrier parks – infrastructure that would be useful and pleasurable at once. If the Internet is not to blame for people’s increased feelings of isolation and loneliness, what is?

Crime: For years, policy makers have been focusing on policing street-level petty crime, but place-based policies in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Johannesburg have shown that focusing on social infrastructure can have a positive impact. Given the world’s cultural diversity, it’s no surprise that there is great variety in the kinds of social infrastructure that people find essential.The aim of this sweeping work is to popularize the notion of ‘social infrastructure’—the ‘physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact’. The Internet has become young people's core social infrastructure because we've unfairly deprived them of access to other sites for meaningful connection. Children get more than physical exercise when they play at local playgrounds and participate in team sports. Further, he contends that as “societies around the world are becoming more fragmented, divided, and conflicted” (8), social infrastructure, which is often overlooked in favor of spending initiatives on “critical infrastructure” (transit, communications, electrical systems, etc.

In other public places, ordinary people are “the audiences, watchers of political, religious, dramatic, cin­ematic, instructional or athletic spectacles,” but in the pub, things are different.Our social infrastructure could be the key to bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides--and safeguarding democracy.