Earthquake in China I: The Unseen Infrastructure of Cities
by Sandy Ikeda
Fri, 13 Jun 2008 at 7:36 PM
The enormity of the May 12th earthquake in China, which has so far killed some 50,000 persons, boggles the mind. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina tragically left 1,836 dead along the Gulf Coast and destroyed some 220,000 homes. Now, from MSNBC we read "China's Quake Aftershock — 5 million Homeless."
As monstrous as this number seems, it actually understates the hardship these displaced survivors are suffering or will suffer. Clean water, food, and shelter are the immediate concerns, of course. But what about the survival prospects for the uprooted communities (i.e., the hard-hit neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities) to which they belonged?
A thriving community consists of the set of public relationships, the social capital, that members either enjoy directly or use to foster productive interaction in the future. Thus, when Robert Moses used eminent domain in the 1950s to level "slums" in lower Manhattan, he was not only razing a bunch of old buildings and closing off a few streets but he was also cutting the ground from under the social networks (e.g., neighborliness, church activities, social clubs, sidewalk life) that enriched the lives of the working poor who lived there. Social capital isn't exclusive to the poor, of course, but it can constitute a large part of their wealth.
Cities, then, consist not only of its physical infrastructure — e.g., of transport, conduits for water, power, and communication — or public services of police, fire protection, and judiciary. There is an intricate, unseen infrastructure of social networks within its districts and neighborhoods that enable social capital, trust, and reciprocity to emerge locally. But as Jane Jacobs emphasized, the "built environment" can profoundly affect the level of productive social capital.
At the risk of over-generalizing, communities in China are especially reliant on strong ties that bind them together, making social capital extraordinarily important for their pursuit of happiness. Although to some degree these networks have been exploited to maintain political control, they're nonetheless a historically embedded and crucial part of the culture. (A clear if imperfect discussion of this phenomenon is in Francis Fukuyama's book, "Trust"; a rigorous but highly readable treatment of the importance of social networks is Mark Granovetter's pathbreaking 1973 article, "The Strength of Weak Ties," which you can link to at the bottom of this Wikipedia entry.)
The earthquake's terrible physical destruction has therefore left 5 million survivors much worse off than any measure of material deprivation can show. And even if the government keeps the members of the myriad of uprooted communities together, it remains to be seen whether they will still function as a living community in the new settlements to which they're transplanted. (I will talk about this in a later post.)
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