It’s Not Just Roads and Bridges: Our “Civic Infrastructure” is Crumbling, and Here’s How to Fix It
This post originally appeared at NextCity.
By: HOLLIE RUSSON GILMAN & MARCI HARRIS
Places like parks and public space can strengthen civic infrastructure by bringing people together.
(Photo by SDOT Photos / CC BY-NC 2.0)
Excerpt:
“Infrastructure” is the talk of the town in Washington, DC as cracked bridges, melting cables, and maxed out electric grids make news every week.
But it is not just the roads and wires that carry our goods and information that are in need of an update. The signs of a broader decay in our public information ecosystem are everywhere: disappearing local news coverage, a lack of trust in our elections and political processes, lackluster government service delivery as illustrated with chaoticvaccine signup systems, rampant scams that make it difficult for the average American to tell legitimate government communications from phishing attacks. Our “civic infrastructure” is depleted, underfunded, and inadequate for a 21st-century democracy.
