Infrastructuring the Social: Public Libraries and their Transformative Capacity in Austerity Urbanism

Public libraries are long-acknowledged places for information provision and knowledge transmission, but they increasingly also function as important socio-cultural infrastructures contributing to the everyday life in cities. However, austerity pressures heavily threaten libraries’ function as spaces of encounter.

ILIT examines, through ethnography and creative approaches, how public libraries in Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands as socio-cultural infrastructures address systemic challenges in rapidly transforming societies.

It deploys the analytics of ‘infrastructuring’ and ‘librarising’ to unpack libraries’ transformative capacities to develop best-practice, community-oriented solutions for resilience in austerity urbanism.

The research goals are to 1) enhance libraries’ institutional support for libraries, 2) strengthen libraries’ capacities as local places of community and care, and 3) amplify community librarianship as innovation driver towards community-based developments.