I’m walking down Budapest’s Népszínház Street. Leaving behind Blaha Lujza Square, one of the city’s major public transportation hubs, I’m entering Józsefváros, a district that was, until not so long ago, stigmatised for its unconcealed poverty and infamous for prostitution and street crime. I am traversing a peculiar landscape: the street – defined by spectacular art deco buildings, some designed by famous architects who, in their own ways, aimed to redefine the relationship between buildings and the city –diagonally crosses an otherwise rectangular urban fabric, thereby creating singular situations in its encounters with side streets connecting at various angles.
As some recent experiments in creating green oases demonstrate, each non-rectangular corner carries a variety of possibilities: this is where Népszínház Street transforms into small squares, offering strollers the space and time to slow down, lean against the wall of a building or sit on a bench, and contemplate street life. Not that the street itself lacks unhurried places: every few metres, one encounters small groups gathering in front of tobacco shops, Chinese restaurants, South Asian delis, Nigerian cybercafés, second-hand bookstores, furniture sellers and repair shops, basement pubs or recently opened hipster bars and co-working spaces, the adjacent park and the market hall.
For several centuries, Népszínház Street has been the quintessential street where marginalised communities, freshly arrived immigrants and the bourgeois-bohème found their home; as such, its social infrastructures reflect a great diversity of ways to socialise. While the local municipality has been reluctant to interfere with the street’s fragile balance, the physical regeneration of the area feels more and more timely and raises a crucial question in today’s urban planning: how to improve life quality in a neighbourhood without automatically bringing about displacement and further marginalisation through gentrification, commercialisation and touristification?
While displacement is primarily enacted in the housing domain by means of rising rents, evictions, or the decimation of affordable housing units, it is further accentuated by the disintegration of local social networks due to the disappearance of spaces of sociability that hold together a neighbourhood through casual acquaintances, interpersonal and inter-family relations, and mutual help and care. In order to improve the physical fabric of the city without impairing its social fabric, it is important to understand better what the elements of a neighbourhood that act as connectors are – turning strangers into neighbours and weaving an informal welfare net.
Defining social infrastructure
Infrastructure is often conceived as a means to mediate our connections to nature, energy and information, in the form of sewage systems, electricity networks and broadband internet cables, for instance. However, we also need mediators between humans and humans; this set of connectors is often called social infrastructure. This term was popularised by the American sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who investigated the deadly 1995 heat wave of Chicago in his influential book “Palaces for the People”. Combining data on the number of casualties and socio-economic conditions in various Chicago neighbourhoods, Klinenberg established the hypothesis that areas with stronger social capital are more resilient to various kinds of challenges, including heat waves and pandemics, and that such social connections largely depend on the existence of suitable social infrastructure, namely spaces that allow for encounters and sociability.
While Klinenberg’s research methods have met with significant criticism throughout the academic community, his analysis offers aninspiring optic to explore urban space through its potential to generate human connectionsand local social networks.Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as “the physical conditions that determine whethersocial capital develops. When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbours; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves.”(Klinenberg 2018:5) For Klinenberg, it is the everyday use of social infrastructure thatmakes a difference between well-connected and fragmented communities: “People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures–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.”(Klinenberg 2018:5) These are the spaces of social infrastructure that enhance empathy, exchange and cooperation. Spaces that enable “local, face-to-face interactions–at the school, the playground, and the corner diner–are the building blocks of all public life ”where“ social cohesion develops through repeated huma ninteraction and joint participation in shared projects.” (Klinenberg 2018:11)
Measuring sociability
As seen in the definitions above, social infrastructure is a matter of architectural constellations (spaces that enable encounters) and institutional forms (public facilities that invite people to spend time and communicate with each other). There are different ways to assess these places’ community-building potential, through their spatial arrangements, affordances (the capacity of a space to generate interaction), or public institutions (that offer welfare services that connect people).
Social sciences have long been trying to understand the conditions that enable social interaction and enhance sociability in a neighbourhood. While there is no single “universal” tool to measure sociability in an urban area, there are several metrics that enable researchers to understand the potential of a neighbourhood to generate new acquaintances. Furthermore, these metrics help us understand the building blocks that constitute sociability and the architectural, urbanistic or institutional aspects of social interaction.
Certain methodologies explore the physical layout of neighbourhoods, trying to understand how compactness and the availability of public spaces might determine the possibility of social interactions. The Social Interaction Potential (SIP) concept, for example, developed in the domain of urban planning and design, assesses the possibility of social encounters through indicators like spatial layout, visibility, accessibility and amenities. Other methods are less interested in spatial constellations than existing interactions and social networks. In order to appraise the strength of social connections and relationships, the Social Cohesion Index (SCI) examines the factors of trust between neighbours, participation in civic activities, perceptions of safety, and sense of belonging to a place. Community Vitality Indicators (CVIs) are a set of metrics exploring levels of volunteerism, participation in local organisations and attendance of community events to assess the health and vitality of local communities.
While many of these methods offer quantitative metrics to measure sociability, they are often blind to the architectural and institutional qualities that would enable not only social interactions but also social inclusion and inter-class or inter-ethnic exchange – crucial elements of social cohesion in places like Népszínház Street in Budapest. Therefore, it is important to explore the actual spaces and institutions that serve as anchors of local communities: these can be conceived as cornerstones of improving the quality of life in urban neighbourhoods without displacing less affluent residents and less-competitive businesses.
The different spaces of social infrastructure
If Klinenberg mentions the school, the playground and the corner diner as cornerstones of social infrastructure, it is by no means a normative list of facilities needed in every community. On the contrary, different social groups use different strata of spaces and services: public spaces and green areas can serve as connectors just as much as public institutions, community venues or commercial establishments. Modes and times of socialising might differ in front of tobacco shops, Chinese restaurants, South Asian delis, Nigerian cybercafés, second-hand bookstores, furniture sellers and repair shops, basement pubs or recently opened hipster bars and co-working spaces, the adjacent park and the market hall. Therefore, for urban planners working on the renewal of an area, it is important to understand the value of each and every space of sociability to comprehend their role in nourishing local communities.
In his book reviewing 25 years of urban regeneration in Brussels, the sociologist Mathieu Berger describes the great variety of architectural interventions conceived in the Neighbourhood Contracts framework. Aiming to improve life in disadvantaged neighbourhoods by developing connections between social groups and anchoring individuals in the broader society, these interventions can have many different forms: “The sports hall is a place of convergence and shared activities for young people in particular; the day nursery is providing visibility to the family and children as well as animation and security for the neighbourhood; the Maison de quartier and the community centre are spaces that nurture a collective identity that is flexible and open to whatever one wishes to introduce there; the business centre is a sign of hope and economic revitalisation.”(Berger 2019:90)
Different elements of social infrastructure offer different ways to connect with each other. Playgrounds or dog parks can become the site of new friendships through regular but unplanned encounters of parents or dog owners. Local shops can act as part of a neighbourhood-scale welfare net that keeps an eye on the wellbeing of regular customers. Community spaces, in turn, have the capacity to generate cooperation deliberately. When a cultural centre’s restaurant is open only for one hour at lunchtime, it will encourage its customers to meet each other over a meal and share their thoughts and plans. When freelancers in a co-working space bump into each other around the coffee machine, they might take a moment and update each other about their projects. It is often in these limiting physical settings that new collaborations are born.
Public spaces as social infrastructure
John Paul II Square, with its vast lawns, is as much a space for conflicts between dog owners, families and homeless people as a place for spending time together. Similarly, Teleki Square, another important park in the neighbourhood, does in fact consist of two different ideas of public space: one conceived through a participatory design process dominated by white middle-class women and resulting in a beautiful green garden for quiet, almost sterile contemplation, and another one designed for children and youth (of mostly Roma origin) where social activities are understood as animated and potentially loud.
While different designs and spatial constellations might enhance or determine different kinds of behaviour in public space, it is important not to confuse aesthetics with actual use. A decade and a half ago, as an intern at New York City Department of City Planning, I had the task of overseeing the use of privately owned public space, also known as POPS, a peculiar policy instrument that allows developers to build more floor space in exchange for creating designated public spaces that should, in theory, be accessible for all. POPS were seen as a way to involve private funding in the creation of public amenities in areas where public space is scarce and much needed.
In my work evaluating the accessibility of POPS, however, I found a body of research that suggested that this policy was not as efficient as it seemed: while most POPS complied with regulations in terms of the proportion of seating, vegetation, sunny and shaded areas or water features, many of them were not designed to be attractive for use (Németh 2009). On the contrary: while these public spaces were designed to be appealing to the eye, they used features such as wind, sun, shade, water and materials as a means to repel users by making (metal) benches too hot or cold to use, or always flooded by the adjacent upwind fountain. These instances were not accidental flaws in design: research demonstrated the existence of specific design guidelines, instrumentalised by banks and insurance companies in particular, that saw good-looking but deserted plazas in front of their offices and headquarters as more fitting to their image than as lively public spaces packed with people of all kinds. (Smithsimon 2008)
The “spectacularisation of urban space” (Bélanger 2000) has been a product of neoliberal logics of urban transformation, associated with the securitisation and sterilisation of public spaces. While claiming an appreciation of street life and community values, urban regeneration based on beautified streetscapes often looks at public spaces as mere aesthetic phenomena, partly ignoring their social, economic and ecological dimension. (Zukin 2011)
This spectacularisation of public space is not limited to the domain of neoliberal urban development: representative squares that subordinate use to the conveyance of political messages of history and identity also disenfranchise users by delegating them to the role of mere spectators. In her book “Se réunir”, the philosopher Joëlle Zask reminds us of the “contradiction between the space of the spectacle and the space of freedoms” that are a necessary component of democratic life, calling for a rethinking of historical European squares dominated by “centrality, symmetry, rectilinear layouts and minerality.” (Zask 2022:30) Often turned towards a central object, these historical squares are dominated by power, as opposed to places “where democratic sociability and its accompanying set of ‘virtues’ can be experienced.” (Zask 2022:64)
While public spaces, i.e., universally accessible street corners, squares, parks and gardens, perform well in certain sociability and interaction indexes, they do not automatically serve as integrative social infrastructure. The new parklet in Népszínház Street, opened by NGOs and the municipal company RÉV8 exploring the neighbourhood’s identity and cultural heritage, still needs the locals to become accustomed to it as they are not used to sitting among cars and don’t see the street as anything more than a means of transportation. In turn, the sidewalks in front of internet cafés and tobacco shops where marginalised groups gather need to be accepted and appreciated in the eyes of urban planners as genuine public spaces, despite not belonging to the contemporary aesthetics of placemaking. It is important for planners to put aside their prejudices and explore neighbourhoods on foot to understand how different streets and squares invite different groups to spend time together: such observations – building on a long tradition connecting Holly White (White 1980) with Jan Gehl (Gehl 2013) and many other placemakers – can inform the design and programme of future public spaces and influence the social composition of a neighbourhood.
Local commerce as social infrastructure
Legally belonging to a different domain than public spaces, the ground floors of buildings nevertheless have a great impact on the public realm of cities. The street feels different and strollers behave differently in front of bars, libraries, flower stores or bicycle repair shops. The grocery shop and the second-hand bookshop with their colourful shelves outside, the pastry shop for passengers of long tram rides, the Kashmiri restaurant making use of a scaffolding for advertisement, internet cafés attracting members of the African diaspora or the bars offering cheap drinks – all influence Népszínház Street and interact with its public spaces.
Local commerce affects diversity: instead of large, monolithic commercial blocks that might attract a homogenous group of clients, a diverse retail composition might address a greater variety of shoppers. Analysing the success of New York’s SoHo district in terms of urban fabric, street dynamism and public spaces, the architecture scholars Anne Mikoleit and Moritz Pürckhauer note that small, specialised shops are essential to maintaining a district’s vitality: “they provide a dense concentration of products, capturing the interest of different types of customer, and keeping the sidewalks busy throughout the day.” (Mikoleit and Pürckhauer 2011:40) Such vitality also impacts walkability: if foot traffic is not concentrated in specific periods of the day but is somewhat evenly distributed from morning until evening, it makes an area safer, always watched by strollers and their “eyes on the street.”
Local commerce, the most banal of social infrastructures used by most inhabitants on a daily basis, can also act as a key welfare net for a neighbourhood. Mostly designed for brief encounters, local shops can nevertheless serve as a place where neighbours can exchange information, offer or look for services, leave their keys or pick up their packages. For many elderly people, the daily shopping exercise is an important moment of socialisation. Shopkeepers that know their clientele well; they might notice if someone has missed their daily routine shopping and might call them to check if everything is alright.
It is by no means a surprise that cities like Barcelona recently began taxing supermarkets that replaced humans with automated cashiers. Other cities like New York use micro-zoning to exclude certain kinds of commercial activities (hotels, banks, insurance companies) from lively neighbourhoods, with the aim of increasing foot traffic and reducing the presence of retail units that serve more as advertisements than for daily use.
The city of Paris, which considers retailing to be part of its community infrastructure, supports shops that act as an important welfare net and are part of the social fabric of a neighbourhood. Having identified a variety of shops as representing social and cultural values important for Paris, the city’s public company SEMAEST supports shopkeepers with joint infrastructure such as online shops, home delivery services and storage. This allows shops that are important building blocks of the local social fabric to be more competitive against online shopping and e-commerce, which eliminate human encounters. This approach helps individual businesses to share resources and build networks to become more resilient and competitive, both individually and collectively, reducing costs and lowering operational thresholds for them.
Through ownership of some ground-floor properties and with their regulatory powers, many municipalities have leverage over retail composition and, therefore, also the impact of local commerce on streetscapes and public spaces. If the district of Józsefváros has recently begun to use its ground-floor property stock as a means to steer urban transformation and launched programmes to offer incentivised rent to initiatives that are estimated to have a revitalising effect, it is only the beginning of the long-term process of retail planning. While fine-tuning the retail composition of Népszínház Street and the surrounding blocks might take years, it could be a powerful instrument to protect some of the key commercial activities that catalyse sociability, and to attract new ones to the neighbourhood.
Public and community venues as social infrastructure
In Budapest’s continental climate, public spaces and sidewalks in front of shops allow for sociability and exchange from late spring until early Autumn. In turn, indoor community venues provide continuity in colder months or accommodate social gatherings with specific infrastructural needs. As important nodes in their local civic ecosystems (Polyák et al. 2021) community spaces stand at the centre of connections and collaborations: by creating encounters between people and groups that rarely meet outside their walls, they enable the “reconstruction of social relations and forms of coexistence through physical spaces.” (Cellamare 2020:29)
Community spaces play an important role in local social infrastructure: by mobilising resources to meet the needs of their surroundings, by confronting new ideas to spark innovation, and by generating new economic flows with the participation of many local partners, they can become important nodes in their ecosystems that stand at the centre of connections and collaborations. Once these spaces that are “capable of anchoring processes of empowerment and political capabilities as well as social activation” (Ostanel 2017:11) take a position in the development of their neighbourhood or city – begin to act on their surroundings and embark on “rewiring” the society around them – they become “trigger spaces (…) that collect social energy and at the same time become co-design laboratories and spaces for the production of collective services.” (Ostanel 2017:42)
The spaces reclaimed for community functions not only differ from each other in their physical attributes but also in their organisational and management principles, accessibility, financial sustainability and political dimension. What links them is that they all address the lack of existing facilities for community gathering, social activities, welfare services, independent work and cultural exchange, thus taking a position in the discourse about wellbeing, solidarity and accessibility. Many community-run spaces manage social and cultural activities like “language schools for foreigners, local nurseries and playrooms, cinema forums, employment agencies, study rooms, or services such as those related to sports activities, dance schools, theatre schools.” (Cellamare 2020:69) By connecting such a diversity of services that the public sector is unable to provide and by opening their doors to a variety of social groups and activities, these community spaces also change the nature of these services.
For the past decade, the neighbourhoods around Népszínház Street have become epicentres of newly established cultural and social venues, not only catering for local residents but also attracting visitors from across the city. Many of these new venues address specific communities organised around contemporary art (ISBN), visual arts and cinema (Dobozi 21), soft mobility and short-chain food distribution (Cargonomia), circular economy (Repair Café), or creativity and visual culture (Kästner Community). While these new venues act as nuclei of progressive thought in the city and contribute to the symbolic desegregation of certain Józsefváros neighbourhoods by opening them up to the wider city, they also plausibly accelerate the district’s gentrification, symbolised by new coffee houses and pastry shops, hotels and co-working spaces, as well as innumerable Airbnb postings.
However, many of these venues, especially the underground cultural centres Auróra and Gólya or the intercultural centres Mandák ház and Míra ház, have also put an emphasis on attracting local Roma and other ethnic minority groups and refugees through their facilities, targeted services or musical programming. Adding to these the inclusive programming of municipal cultural centres such as H13, Kesztyűgyár and Dankó udvar, the desegregation programme of local kindergartens and schools, the social rental agency offering affordable housing to key workers, as well as public spaces sensibly designed for different social groups, we can see a widespread ambition to counter the tendencies of gentrification, touristification and commercialisation that threaten to homogenise these neighbourhoods.
Planning social infrastructure
Social inclusion and integration do not only play out in educational and welfare institutions: different social groups also build connections in public spaces, community venues or local shops. As Michela Murgia, an important human rights thinker suggests about civic spaces, “it is not important that they are squares or bars, libraries or museums. The category of intended use does not apply to what can be done in these spaces, but to who goes there and transforms the act of going there into a civic experience.” (Murgia 2016:59)
Recognising the importance of social infrastructure may prove to be a key competence for urban planners when conceiving the future of our cities and neighbourhoods. Future urban regeneration processes need to build on integrative experiments, understanding the integrative value of unusual suspects as well: unusual locations and activities whose intergenerational, interethnic or intercultural potential is not obvious at first sight.
It is therefore more important than ever that planning urban transformation is based on thorough observation of street life as well as the meticulous study of demographic change and the transformation of economic and social activities in the neighbourhoods in question. For example, analysis of mobility patterns through the biographies of residents and local workers or surveys of residents’ needs can inform policies in order to support certain commercial activities, prioritise specific actions in public grants, subsidise specific non-profit organisations, or experiment with new types of public spaces. Only such an integrated notion of social infrastructure that connects concepts of public space and housing with those of social services and local economy can inspire public policies across fields of expertise and municipal departments.
References
Bélanger, A. (2000) Sport venues and the spectacularization of urban spaces in North America: the case of the Molton Center in Montreal, “International Review for the Sociology of Sport” 2000, vol. 35, no 3, p. 378–397;
Berger, M. (2019) The Lifetime of a Policy, Brussels: CIVA
Cellamare, C. (2020) Abitare le periferie, Rome: Bordeaux Edizioni
Klinenberg, E. (2018) Palaces for the People, New York: Penguin Random House
Mikoleit, A. and Pürckhauer, M. (2011) Urban Code. 100 Lessons for Understanding the City, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press
Murgia, M. (2016) Futuro interiore, Turin: Einaudi
Németh, J. (2009) Defining a Public: The Management of Privately Owned Public Space, “Urban Studies” 2009, vol. 46, no 11, p. 2463–2490.
Ostanel, E. (2017) Spazi fuori dal Comune, Milan: Franco Angeli Edizioni
Polyák, L., S. Bod, L. Bródy (2021) The Power of Civic Ecosystems, Vienna: Cooperative City Books
Smithsimon, G. (2008) Dispersing the Crowd: Bonus Plazas and the Creation of Public Space, “Urban Affairs Review” 2008, vol. 43 no 3, p. 325–351.
Zask, J. (2022) Se réunir, Paris: Premier Parallèle
Zukin, S. (2011) Naked City, New York: Oxford University Press
This article was written by Levente Polyák, and first appeared in Autoportret Magazine
