![]() When Klinenberg visits a public library in New Lots, a poor enclave of Brooklyn: “The shelves, ceilings, stairwells and wall panels are wearing out. Superficially, this might appear such a simple point that it verges on the banal – but as the book explains, in America, Britain and beyond, many of these places are in sharp decline, partly due to national and local governments leaving them to wither away. Why?” His answer comes down to “diners, parks, barbershops, grocery stores… block clubs and church groups”: the shared spaces he calls “social infrastructure”. ![]() ![]() “Three of the ten neighbourhoods with the lowest heatwave death rates were also poor, violent and predominantly African-American,” he writes, “while another was poor, violent and predominantly Latino… they were more resilient than Chicago’s most affluent areas. Yet, as the US sociologist Eric Klinenberg explains in this book, other elements of the statistics were not nearly as predictable. ![]() When the deaths were analysed, they seemed to correlate with segregation and inequality in the usual ways: eight out of the ten urban areas with the highest death rates were largely African-American, and had high levels of poverty and crime. In July 1995, a tropical heatwave hit Chicago and 739 people died as a result. ![]()
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