Social infrastructure and public life – notes on Finsbury Park, London

Abstract

Cities need social infrastructure, places that support social connection in neighborhoods and across communities. In the face of austerity in many places, the provision of such infrastructures are under threat. To protect such infrastructures, it is important to have robust arguments for their provision, maintenance, and protection. Through a case study of a dispute about the appropriate use and provisioning of an everyday park located in London, UK, this article examines what social infrastructure is and why it matters. The dispute has brought to the surface a number of critical questions about how to fund and provide collective, public social life. It has also raised questions about what types of social and collective life should be valued. To examine the dispute a sixfold typology is developed to explore the different registers of sociality afforded by social infrastructure: co-presence, sociability and friendship, care and kinship, kinesthetic practices, and civic engagement.

Street-Level Workers and the Construction of Social Infrastructure in Suburban Neighbourhoods

“…As with all infrastructures, social infrastructures are formed, shaped, and sustained by politics, networked systems, and governmental arrangements. The outcomes of social infrastructures depend partly on the physical spaces but also on the funding, management, regulation, and cultural norms practised around them (Layton & Latham, 2022).…”

Geographies of running cultures and practices

“…Secondly, whereas there is much debate about walkability in planning, this is less the case with running (though see Deelen et al., 2019; Ettema, 2016; Latham & Layton, 2020; Layton & Latham, 2022; Shashank et al., 2022). Geographers could formulate research‐based ideas about runnability and design principles that will make streets, parks and forests as well as events more runnable and inclusive.…”

Whose city? Which sociality?

“…It’s what we always do when it’s very hot or very cold here” (Klinenberg, 2013 ). The concept of social infrastructure usefully captures both the ways in which social ties are facilitated by infrastructural forms, and the ways in which such ties extend and reshape the “capacities” of citizens, together (Latham and Layton 2021 ). As the contributors to this special issue highlight, with clarity and urgency, the absence or presence of such socially mediated capacities can play a pivotal role in justice and well-being.…”

“…Regarding the first, building upon Kleinberg’s framing where sociality is oriented around cohesion and support, we might identify different modalities of coming together or supporting others. In their own empirical contribution to this special issue, exploring the social infrastructure and public life of Finsbury Park, North London, Latham and Layton ( 2021 , p. 3) argue that it “is essential to think carefully about the different registers that make up the social in social infrastructure”. In surveying the different uses of Finsbury Park – which, in different cases, unfold separately to one another, reinforce one another, or clash – they name six distinct “registers” of sociality: “ co-presence; sociability and friendship; care and kinship; kinaesthetic practices; carnivalesque and collective experience; and civic engagement ” (2021, p. 11, Emphasis in original).…”

“…We see the potential in further specifying how “sociality”, as imagined by theorists of social infrastructure, overlaps with or breaks from other dynamics, within physical and imaginative space. In this issue, just as Prytherch contrasts circulation and sociality, Latham and Layton ( 2021 , p. 3) argue against only seeing public space “through the frame of the political”. If “circulation”, “politics”, and “sociality” are being framed as different domains, how do these domains map onto and break from one another?…”