Amid a war on public knowledge, libraries are pushing outward, enlarging the commons through new configurations of civic and creative life.

October 2025

Library Newsroom Project, Sunset Park branch, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, 2025. [Arpan Somani]

Twice a month, they gather over Chinese food at the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library: a romance book editor, a photographer, an environmental activist, tech workers, high school students, retirees. They are the co-creators of the Library Newsroom. Teens bring their friends. Parents invite their adult children. Some days more than twenty people show up. Drawing inspiration from tenant newsletters and community noticeboards, they assess the neighborhood’s needs, map its landmarks, study its governing bodies and civic institutions, and discuss journalistic ethics and skills. 1 They ask, what are we curious about? Then, how can we learn more?

At the Library Newsroom, neighbors ask, what are we curious about? Then, how can we learn more?

Soon they publish the first issue of the Sunset Park Sun, with a welcome message in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Judith C.’s investigative piece on renovations to the local rec center is accompanied by a list of resources she used in her reporting. There is an explainer on ranked-choice voting, a summary of new trash and composting rules, a guide to the Newsroom’s methods and standards, and an invitation to attend future meetings. 2 In later issues, Diana M. recounts childhood memories of the library, and Ciel J.P. introduces a community archive initiative. Other writers profile local businesses, compile resources for immigrants, and review a photo exhibit on the lives of street vendors.

It’s a “social project” as much as a newspaper, said organizer Terry Parris, Jr., a veteran of nonprofit newsrooms at *ProPublica *and The City, now an editor on the solutions journalism desk at The New York Times. He helped start the first “Open Newsroom,” six years ago, in an effort to “understand how information finds its way to and through a community” in an age of epistemological collapse. 3 People want to know what’s going on in the world, but how do they decide what news is important or useful or trustworthy? 4 The library — where “meaning is made,” where “information is both generated and shared,” according to Brooklyn’s former chief librarian, Nick Higgins — seems like a good place to sort that out. 5

Library Newsroom assignment board with Terry Parris, Jr., at the edge of the frame, 2025. [Shannon Mattern]Library Newsroom staffers discuss layout and rehearse interview skills, 2025. [Terry Parris, Jr.]

It’s not the only place, of course. Heather Chaplin, director of the Journalism + Design lab at The New School, studies communities that lack “formal news infrastructure,” where information flows through nail techs, barbers, and WhatsApp groups. 6 “Wherever you look, there are people doing the work of journalism, but in informal ways,” Chaplin said. They are collecting news, framing it, amplifying it. So, she wondered, “Could we identify these people and provide them with tools and training to increase their reach and formalize their roles?” Community colleges, faith groups, youth centers, and libraries are “anchors” to build around: “If we could connect all these organizations and people and spaces together and support the ways they share information about what’s happening locally, we’d have something overflowing with potential.” 7

Information flows through nail techs, barbers, WhatsApp groups. People are collecting news, amplifying it, framing it.

That’s an optimistic response to a real crisis. In the past two decades, nearly a third of the newspapers in the United States have folded, and most of the rest have lost subscribers and influence. More than 3.5 million people live in counties that do not have a single professional news outlet. Researchers have identified many causes (shifts in advertising, corporate consolidation, strangulation by hedge funds like Alden Global Capital) and effects (declining civic engagement and public trust). And as the industry contracts, the void is filled by a political cult that seeks to replace truth with spectacle and propaganda. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won 91 percent of those counties. 8

In 2025, there are 213 counties (yellow) with no professional news outlets and 1,524 counties (lavender) with only one. [Medill Local News Initiative]

Yet the void also inspires efforts to revitalize local media. 9 In urban, suburban, and rural areas across the country, nonprofit and worker-owned newsrooms are rising to the challenge. The basic tools of journalism are simple and accessible: the notepad, the phone, the search bar. And, sure, it’s not hard to start a newsletter or stream video on social media. But sustained, deep investigations take skill, experience, time, and resources — often a whole team of people to develop sources, vet documents, deal with fabrication and obfuscation, fend off legal threats, and build trust with readers. Healthy media ecosystems include an engaged public that values that work.

With more than 17,000 U.S. locations open to the public, libraries are (almost) everywhere we need them to be.

One way to promote the critical use of information media is to teach people how it’s made. “It’s a new kind of grassroots infrastructure,” Chaplin said. “If things get better, great, we’ve just created pipelines for more diverse voices to get involved with traditional newsrooms. If things don’t get better, we’re creating underground networks to keep reliable news and information flowing … [and] keep the sparks of democracy alive.” 10

Here civic infrastructures — especially libraries — can play an important, stabilizing role. Libraries are founded on the core journalistic values of openness and truth, and they’re widely accessible. With more than 17,000 U.S. locations open to the public, and another 100,000 in schools and universities, they are (almost) everywhere we need them to be. 11

The “parasol patrol” defends Drag Queen Story Hour at Olney Public Library, Maryland, after Proud Boys attacked a similar event at a nearby branch, 2023. [Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The War on Public Knowledge

Yes, libraries don’t always live up to those professed ideals. They can be places of exclusion and injustice, not impervious to market forces. 12 As Susan Orlean wrote, “Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.” 13 But in a world of competitive individualism, rapacious profiteering, and AI slop, libraries might be our best hope. They index and care for what we hold in common.

Libraries index and care for what we hold in common.

Perhaps inevitably, they are asked to hold too much. Libraries backstop child and elder care, public health and education, job training, legal assistance — “everything that a robust, socialist public good system could have,” according to librarian Luke Sutherland. “I think that’s why libraries live in the imagination of leftists … because all parts of our life could be like this.” 14 In a 2014 article on Places, I celebrated the capaciousness, creativity, and versatility that make libraries an essential public infrastructure. I also questioned whether it was feasible to expect them to do so much. “Should we welcome the ‘design challenge’ to engineer technical and architectural infrastructures to accommodate an ever-diversifying program,” I asked. “Or should we consider that we might have stretched this program to its limit?” 15

Perhaps inevitably, they are asked to hold too much.

But libraries never stopped stretching. They opened food pantries and vaccine stations at the height of the pandemic. They hosted book talks in the face of armed protests and bomb threats. And for their efforts, they were heralded as saviors of civil society, as antidotes to poverty and homelessness and addiction and gun violence, as civic sponges for trauma and injustice. 16 In my decade on the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, I have been constantly reminded of how flattering — and unfair — these expectations are. 17

Dorothy Alling Memorial Library, Williston, Vermont, 2020. Librarians pose with Covid supplies provided by the state library and Institute of Museum and Library Services. Five years later, Donald Trump is dismantling the IMLS. [Vermont Library Association/Susan U. Larson via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]Cooling center and wi-fi provider. Crown Heights branch, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, 2024. [Shannon Mattern]Drug test strips, driver’s manuals, citizenship test materials. Sunset Park branch, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, 2024. [Shannon Mattern]

“Increasing poverty? You’re going to feel it at the desk,” said Emily Drabinski, a former president of the American Library Association. “Limited access to mental health resources can walk through the door in your library. Opioid addiction devastating your community is going to walk through the door and want to use the printer.” 18 Some libraries now have social workers on the floor, helping people in distress, making referrals. 19 I’ve had heartrending discussions with staff who say the compounding crises demand resolve and improvisation, transforming their jobs and the institution as a whole — and taking a toll on their own minds and bodies. 20 Many want to get back to basics.

As *Book Riot’s *Kelly Jensen affirmed:

Public libraries are not play places. They are not cooling centers or warming centers or mental health clinics. Public libraries are not bars, nor are they essential services. Public libraries are places of information and access to information. They are places that ardently defend the rights of every person to seek out that information. This is fundamental and yet not highlighted or underlined enough. Public libraries are cornerstones of democratic and civic engagement, not safety nets for broken systems elsewhere. They might take on those roles, but that’s not their purpose. 21

And that core mission, being a place of information, is getting harder. In 2025, librarians worry about rampant book bans, access restrictions, militarized immigration officers patrolling the aisles. 22 They are targeted by hostile boards who seek to privatize knowledge and politicians ideologically opposed to public things. 23

Librarians worry about book bans, access restrictions, militarized immigration officers. And now MAGA is coming for interlibrary loan.

On top of everything, MAGA is coming for interlibrary loan. Two months after retaking office, Donald Trump issued an executive order to dismantle the Institute for Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that provides vital support to state libraries (which in turn filter money to city, county, and tribal libraries; and resource-sharing programs like interlibrary loan). 24 This is a direct attack on a service that exemplifies the best, most generous inclinations of humankind. Even before the printing press, books were being passed between European monastery and cathedral collections, and between different parts of the Islamic world. Early U.S. libraries had casual exchanges, and in the late 19th century, state consortia formalized the practice. In 1919, the ALA approved codes for interlibrary loan, so that rural libraries could benefit from the collections of larger urban institutions, small colleges could share the wealth of research universities, and readers everywhere could access specialized collections.

“No library, regardless of its size or budget, is completely self-sufficient,” the ALA states. Some are “net borrowers” and others “net lenders,” but “all libraries have something to contribute and should be willing to lend if they are willing to borrow.” *From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. *The International Federation of Library Associations extends this obligation across political borders. 25

Infrastructure of interlibrary loan. Clockwise from top left: Robert E. Kennedy Library, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California; flyer by Connie Karlen and Kate Roarty, Macalester College Library, St. Paul, Minnesota; University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver; Morris County Library, New Jersey. [Flyer photographed by Shannon Mattern; other photos by Kennedy Library, Edna Winti, and Morris County Library via Flickr under Creative Commons licenses]

Importantly, these are not ad hoc exchanges but robust sociotechnical infrastructures, with nation-building effects. Hannah Wiemer has shown how interlibrary loan contributed to Germany’s postwar reconstruction, as new catalogs and logistical models structured an “interconnected system” dependent on “ongoing works of preservation, maintenance, and stabilization.” 26 In the U.S. these interstitial, coalitional services depend on the IMLS funding that Trump has cut. We are only beginning to see the consequences. North Idaho has dissolved its Cooperative Information Network, and interlibrary loan is currently shut down in the entire state of Florida. Tariffs have also stranded internationally loaned books — a revealing example of how Trump’s politics of chaos chips away at public systems. The dysfunction is the point. 27

The arcane, technical architecture of interlibrary loan needs our defense. But so, too, does the social architecture of extralibrary loan.

And let’s be clear about the larger stakes. 28 The Trump regime doesn’t want people sharing books (and other resources) through public institutions for the same reason they don’t want state health experts coordinating on vaccines or attorneys general comparing notes on civil rights. The mutualism enacted through organized, open exchange between communities wealthy and poor, small and large, across borders, beyond walls, is an existential threat to Trump’s doctrine of stupidity and control. The advocacy group EveryLibrary has made an urgent plea for “library sector solidarity” in response to legislative threats, since an attack on one is an attack on all. 29 But if we take that idea a step further, we find that the “library sector” includes the reading public — you, me, all of us.

The library is not meant to be an on-demand service provider, a node in the just-in-time-economy that puts a rights-restricted copy of *Abundance *in our AirPods. It’s meant to be an accessible portal to our government, our collective holdings, the place we go to access shared information, knowledge, wisdom, and to contribute our own resources to that pool, to make meaning with others. We loan books from the local library, or we loan books through it from a library far away. But we also lend ourselves to the library — committing our attention, our time, our presence at board meetings, our tax dollars and donations — enlarging the commons and participating in the political project of making an informed society. The arcane, technical architecture of interlibrary loan needs our defense. But so, too, does the social architecture of extralibrary loan. 30

Public programs at various branches of Howard County Library, Maryland. Top row: observational drawing, 2024; movie special effects workshop, 2023. Middle row: home wiring basics, 2025; Rock on with Bollywood, 2025. Bottom row: Hacking tournament, 2024; DIY furniture workshop, 2025. [Howard County Library System via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The Future of Media

The seeds of the *Sunset Park Sun *were planted in late 2019, when The City’s Open Newsroom — in collaboration with interns from the Engagement Journalism program at the City University of New York — held meetings at library branches in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Red Hook, and East New York. Prompted by questions like “What’s your favorite thing about your community?” and “What does good news mean to you?” participants identified topics important to them: affordable housing, tenants’ rights, access to transportation and fresh food, education, block associations. 31

This vibrant exchange recalls an earlier era of collaborative public education and civic dialogue: the Federal Forums of the New Deal.

These listening sessions shaped *The City’s coverage and inspired plans to create art and theater that would reflect insights back to the neighborhoods. But when Covid erupted, the Open Newsroom moved to Zoom. Advocates on those calls encouraged the paper to focus on crisis resources: how to navigate unemployment, secure emergency rental assistance, find mutual aid. 32 As quarantines eased, The City *pushed out into the world again, launching a Civic Newsroom that held Voterfests at parks and branch libraries. And it partnered with other nonprofit newsrooms — including ProPublica and Chalkbeat — to host library events that matched journalists with experts on topics like mental health in public schools, climate change, and environmental cleanup. 33

This vibrant exchange recalls an earlier era of collaborative public education and civic dialogue: the Federal Forums of the New Deal. As a school superintendent in Des Moines in the early 1930s, John Studebaker organized free, public discussions on topical issues, bolstered by coverage at the city’s two daily newspapers, a weekly radio program, and reading lists at the public library. 34 Then, as federal Commissioner of Education, Studebaker used the Works Progress Administration to spread this model across the country, convening forums in schools, churches, synagogues, labor halls, museums, parks, broadcasting studios, settlement houses, hotels, private homes — and, again, libraries. 35

Federal Forum Project Application, 1937, with flyers designed by the Works Project Administration for public events in Des Moines, Iowa, 1940 and 1941. [Library of Congress]The Philadelphia Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression meets at the Cecil B. Moore branch, Free Library of Philadelphia, 2024. [Joe Piette via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]Librarians at the Grove Hall branch, Boston Public Library, collected community tips and stories for the multimedia documentary Planet Takeout. The segment aired in 2012 on WGBH, which has a studio at the Central Library. [Todd Van Hoosear and Planet Takeout/Kelly Creedon via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

Library newsrooms go further. Instead of gathering communities to talk about news of the day, they invite people to make the news. Or, rather — and this is an important distinction — to make public knowledge. Neighbors decide together how research is done, how statistics are derived, how knowledge is framed and shared. The models here include citizen journalism workshops and public access television. Newsroom projects have popped up in libraries across the country, in Albany, Cleveland, Madison, Kansas City, and Houston, and smaller towns like McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and Weare, New Hampshire. In San Antonio, the news channel NowCastSA broadcasted government meetings from the library; and in Boston, the public radio station WGBH has a studio at the library. In Dallas, the library connects teen journalists with the *Dallas *Morning News and public radio station KERA to produce equity-focused coverage of the North Texas art scene. 36

Neighbors decide together how research is done, how statistics are derived, how knowledge is framed and shared.

Many libraries, though, have struggled to sustain newsrooms when grant funding expires. The Albany project was started by Library Futures, a think tank embedded in the law school at New York University, which won a grant from the Google News Initiative to collaborate with the social impact consultancy Hearken and design consultancy MakeWith. It was apparently a successful pilot, funding the co-production of eight articles with Albany’s Times Union. But “it still feels a little unfinished,” said Erica Smith, an editor at the daily newspaper. “It feels like we did the thing, we talked about it, and then stopped — which I think is something we often do as an industry.” (It’s also characteristic of Google’s philanthropy.) Smith’s comment was reported by Kate Harloe, in a story that asked, “Are Libraries the Future of Media?” 37

Harloe concludes:

These varied experiments suggest the glimmering possibility of something larger. In their imprints, it’s possible to see a different world: one in which the collective resources that people love are protected and expanded, and in which people might actually own the stories produced about them and their communities. … What these humble, imperfect, but very cool partnerships suggest is that an entirely different way of sharing stories and information — and thus understanding our world — is possible, and that pieces of that possible future are already here.

For their part, the organizers of the Brooklyn Library Newsroom are creating a toolkit to share what they’ve learned. They emphasize the importance of having cross-institutional buy-in and paid staff, while relying on the stable infrastructure of branch libraries for meeting space and resources. Ultimately, communities need to take the project into their own hands. Parris was so inspired by the partnership, he decided to get a library degree and dedicate himself to coalition-building work. 38

Media production facilities. Top row: digitizing vinyl records, Brooklyn Public Library, New York. Middle row: community archiving workshop, Kodiak Public Library, Alaska; beatmaking, Multnomah County Library, Oregon. Bottom row: recording studio, St. Louis Public Library, Missouri; letterpress, John M. Kelly Library, University of Toronto, Ontario. [Photos by Brooklyn Public Library, Community Archiving Workshop, Multnomah County Library, Nick Normal, and Sarah Severson, all via Flickr under Creative Commons licenses]

Libraries in Local Media Ecosystems

Libraries are engines of cultural production. Music critic, poet, and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib has described the wonders of the Livingston branch library in East Columbus, Ohio, where as a child in the 1990s he discovered bands like The Clash through CD shuffles loaded in spaceship-like listening pods. 39 Now libraries are creating their own streaming platforms to compete with Spotify. In Mood Machine, Liz Pelly reveals how the commercial music industry shortchanges artists and flattens culture through playlists of algorithmically tuned “content” that promote passive, uncritical listening. But she also presents an alternative: librarians and others in Iowa City, Seattle, Austin, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Copenhagen, Eau Claire, Chapel Hill, Madison, Edmonton, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Ann Arbor who are building streaming services that celebrate and validate local musicians and scenes, pay a fair licensing fee, and commit to preserving the work. These platforms are rooted in discovery, thoughtful and attentive engagement, privacy, integrity, and sustainability, rather than surveillance, extraction, distraction, and monetization. 40

We need to build and care for infrastructures that scaffold the production, storage, preservation, and distribution of cultural works.

Media-making programs and tools are a big draw for public libraries. The Info Commons at Brooklyn’s Central Library hosts classes on music production, street photography, coding, and more. There is a recording studio; workstations with video, audio, and design software; equipment to digitize audio cassettes, vinyl records, and VHS tapes. And the library has partnered with BRIC (Brooklyn Information & Culture) to host media education programs with illustrious local creators. Across the country, many libraries have created podcasts connecting their collections and services to the community. At least one library, in Westport, Connecticut, runs its own record label. 41

Can libraries afford to stretch their mandate in this way? Can they afford not to? “On a collective level, we have to be active participants in the cultural economies we want to see flourish,” Pelly writes. “We have to validate the culture we want to see in the world.” 42 If we appreciate information and media as public goods, we need to build and care for infrastructures that scaffold the production, storage, preservation, and distribution of cultural works. Libraries are uniquely positioned to help — sometimes by making those infrastructures and sometimes by hosting them, drawing in local partners and cultivating coalitions.

Annie Gotwald Makerspace and STEM Lab, Westfield Washington Library, Indiana, 2025. [Tom Britt via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]Graphic Novel Making Contest awards, City Hall, sponsored by by the San José Public Library, California, 2025. [San José Public Library via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

That includes applying public values and resources to information technology. 43 Many libraries have digital equity programs that provide internet access to marginalized communities and teach skills like recovering passwords, finding reliable sources, and avoiding scams. This essential public service is now at risk, especially in red states and rural areas, as the Trump regime cancels equity programs and siphons resources to donors. Underserved communities will get a glitchy Starlink connection controlled by Elon Musk. 44 But libraries that have strong local funding can broaden their commitment to technology access and privacy; the Info Commons has “Burner Phone 101” classes for people who want to stay safe when attending protests or crossing a border. 45

Libraries must also reject false claims about the ‘inevitability’ of AI and hold open the possibility of principled refusal.

And, of course, our embattled public libraries are now compelled to develop public literacy and critical frameworks around “artificial intelligence” and its effects on cultures, politics, economies, environments, and human psychology. 46 Here, too, we see libraries extending themselves through partnerships with colleges and civic groups. The Boston Public Library joined with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics to host an AI workshop for teens; the Queens Public Library and New York University’s Center for Responsible AI launched a five-week course; and LibraryLinkNJ, in New Jersey, recruited 20 librarians to be AI Ambassadors who could train and advise their colleagues and patrons. 47

Although collaborations bring new resources, skills, and community relationships, libraries need to be wary of partnering with tech firms eager to capture users and their data, or sanitize reputations. 48 Libraries must also reject false claims about the “inevitability” of AI and hold open the possibility (for themselves and their patrons) of principled refusal. Given the infuriating disrespect for the skills and sensibilities of cultural producers, the dismissal of creators’ and subjects’ rights, the relentless crawling that overwhelms archival collections, the environmental harms, the lying and hallucination, the founders’ egomaniacal delusions and eugenicist commitments — for all those reasons and more — many people are opting out of AI. (I’m one.) What better place than the public library to have an inclusive, intergenerational discussion about it? 49

Public programs at various branches of Birmingham Public Library, Alabama. Top row: remote session with Saladin Ahmed, writer of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and youth at the Central Library, 2022. Middle row: “Barbershop Talk,” a space for men to discuss social issues, with free haircuts, 2024; genealogy class using Ancestry.com, 2023. Bottom row: art market with vendors selling books, zines, prints, and crafts, 2024; Slide City Chair Aerobics, 2024. [Birmingham Public Library via Flickr under license CC BY 2.0]

Distributed Collections and Solidarity

More than half the U.S. population has a library card, and the way people use the library is changing, with e-readers like Libby drawing in members who love the convenience of borrowing digital books. But Libby is run by a commercial vendor owned by a private equity firm. Libraries that have leaned into this software (that is, most of them) now struggle to cover the ballooning costs. They are forced to license, rather than own, much of their collection, and they don’t always control what’s in the subscription packages. Progressive technologists are working to develop alternatives — Briet, for example, allows publishers to “sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access” — though those systems are not yet deployed at scale. 51

Books Unbanned provides free digital library cards to teens anywhere in the country, allowing them to access censored resources.

Still, digital collections allow libraries to encompass larger publics, beyond borders and paywalls. 52 As organized book banning campaigns fan out from Texas and Florida across the United States — blocking access to thousands of titles that examine race, racism, gender identity, and sexuality — well-resourced libraries in politically safe areas can step in as the “defenders of an open pluralist society, the hidden but essential infrastructure of democracy itself.” 53 The Books Unbanned program — started by the Brooklyn Public Library, and now including libraries in Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego — provides free digital library cards to teens anywhere in the country, allowing them to access resources censored in their own communities. In the first three years, 10,000 young people from 52 states and territories checked out over 330,000 books. 54

Year after year, libraries keep stretching and stretching. Their publics expand through digital lending and online talks and workshops. Their mandate grows. Libraries create a commons of conviviality and solidarity, and when you make available something that is uplifting and enlightening, more people want in. All those new people engaging with that commons — here, taking from is a means of contributing to — demonstrate a demand that signals the need for generous support to keep it going. It’s a virtuous cycle. As Emily Drabinski puts it, “The public goods that survive are the public goods that everybody uses.” 55

When you make available something that is uplifting and enlightening, more people want in.

This spring, I had the great honor of serving as Kluge Chair of Modern Culture at the U.S. Library of Congress. My time on Capitol Hill coincided with the first few months of Trump’s reign, and I befriended library staff who watched in horror as federal colleagues were fired — first workers at the National Archives; then their own beloved leader, the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden. Inexperienced, ignorant, reckless tech bros wreaked havoc across the government through information management practices (and sheer malevolence) that are antithetical to library work. Still, these librarians were committed to their mission, stewarding the largest collection of public knowledge in the world.

I was reminded of an idea shared with me years earlier, a vision of the Library of Congress as a D.C.-based branch library of all the nation’s other library systems. Early steps in that direction can be seen in LOCal, a new collaboration between the Library of Congress and library systems in Eastern Oklahoma and Cleveland to curate digital installations that will connect local communities with materials in the federal collection. 56

Detail, naranjas en la copa de los árboles, by Tatiana Arocha, mural at the Sunset Park branch, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, installed in 2023. [Photo by Shannon Mattern]

New Architectures for the Civic Turn

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that societies are defined by their libraries — by what we hold, what we lend, what we borrow and return, the knowledge we create, the values we defend. Many U.S. libraries today are deepening their roots, even amid the stresses of the political environment. But lone trees will not survive. Trunk-and-branch was never an accurate image of the library’s physical presence, let alone its digital activities. And in times of drought and conflagration, the metaphor is fatal. 57 The institutions and resources that have sustained this beautiful forest — from the IMLS to the First Amendment — are breaking. To survive, libraries are making new infrastructures: symbiotic, mycorrhizal, mossy. 58 Call it a mesh network. 59 Or call it extralibrary loan.

Societies are defined by their libraries — by what we hold, what we lend, what we borrow and return, the knowledge we create, the values we defend.

Public programs like newsrooms and media commons are not a distraction from the library’s core mission but a restatement of it. At each step in the library’s evolution — from the private collection, to the reading room, to the lending card, to interlibrary loan — the library becomes more open and more useful. Tactically, the next move is not a retreat but another push outward, exploring new configurations and solidarities with other public bodies and creative communities. In my book The City Is Not a Computer, I asked readers to “imagine a network of public infrastructures for the creation, storage, and dissemination of public knowledge: universities, libraries, broadcasting, print media, the postal service, telecommunications, local data intermediaries, and digital infrastructures working together, as a public epistemological ecology.” 60 There are many precedents for the clustering of civic resources, from the Athenian acropolis to Frederick Law Olmsted’s Pittsburgh to the feminist communal kitchen. In a talk about “civic adjacencies,” the week after the 2024 election, I spoke about the spatial, programmatic, and political bonds that form between like-minded civic institutions. 61 The role of libraries here is an old one: cross-referencing.

Public programs like newsrooms and media commons are not a distraction from the library’s core mission but a restatement of it.

Communication scholar Victor Pickard has called for public media centers that would integrate libraries, newsrooms, and municipal broadband programs. 62 Why not add community colleges, seed libraries, community kitchens, tool exchanges, and makerspaces? The U.S. post office, which once acted as a nonprofit bank, could be liberated from its impoverished role delivering physical mail and parcels and reconceived as a logistics hub for public communication in all forms. Katherine Victoria Coffield, in a master’s thesis in historic preservation, calls for the creative rehabilitation of thousands of deaccessioned post office facilities. 63 One intriguing case study is the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, which encompasses a radio station, community newspaper, makerspace, zine library, and other activist and arts programs in an old downtown post office building. In Istanbul, a former British post office has been transformed into a collectively designed and maintained community space with a library, podcast booth, co-working studio, event venue, rooftop garden, café, and fair trade shop. 64

Royal Oak Public Library, Michigan, 2025. [Corey Seeman via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]Bike repair skillshare, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, 2017; open jam with New Jersey Acoustic Music in the Park, Princeton Public Library, New Jersey, 2023. [Brooklyn Info Commons/Gregg Richards and Princeton Public Library via Flickr under Creative Commons licenses]Lending library for assistive technology, Independent Living Resource Center of San Francisco, 2023. ILRCSF is a disability rights advocacy and support organization near Yerba Buena Gardens, surrounded by supportive housing, museums, and arts organizations. [Liz Henry via Flickr under license CC BY-ND 2.0]Top: Antes del amanecer, by Tatiana Arocha, mural at the Sunset Park branch, Brooklyn Public Library, New York installed in 2023. Below: Resources at the Sunset Park and Sheepshead Bay branches, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, 2024. [Shannon Mattern]

Last year I dreamed about what somebody could do with the Bronx General Post Office at 558 Grand Concourse, which was for sale. The popular Cuban restaurant on the building’s roof and small postal facility could be joined by a public library, public access television, college radio, a stationery shop, a mail-art studio, media production facilities, a digital infrastructure and digital equity lab, a solar network hub. Well … it’s fun to dream. The property finally sold to Madd Equities, and there are plans to incorporate a community college campus. This same group is redeveloping the Kingsbridge Armory, farther north, as a multipurpose community center, in collaboration with the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. 65 These sites already include cultural anchors that could be the base for entire ecosystems of local public knowledge. 66

Thinking about civic adjacencies can help us imagine how public institutions and programs can be more deeply rooted in their communities and less vulnerable to attack.

Two decades ago, the Ballard branch library in Seattle was built next to a “little city hall,” where people can “get pet licenses, pay utility bills, and apply for passports and city jobs.” In 2021, a new library opened in Missoula, Montana, including a family education center, science center, university research lab, demonstration kitchen, makerspace, and media resource room with tools for producing programs for public access television. Coming soon in Taichung, Taiwan, the Green Museumbrary, designed by SANAA, will combine an art museum and public library. And just last year, the New York Public Library opened the Inwood branch in a fourteen-story building with 174 units of permanently affordable housing; an Activities, Culture, and Training Center; a STEM center; universal pre-K and childcare; a teaching kitchen; and a rooftop garden. 67

We don’t need fancy, new buildings to create civic synergies or build community news networks. But thinking spatially and programmatically can help us imagine what’s possible, which partners should be invited in, how the logistics of sharing are structured, what spaces of exception and refuge will be carved out. We should think, too, about topologies of fortification: how these allied institutions and partnered programs can be more deeply rooted in their communities, and, through their entanglement and embeddedness, less vulnerable to isolated attack. Banding together, they demonstrate the value of civic adjacencies. And scaling up — to an urban or regional-logistical scale — they form new networks of solidarity: improvisatory extra-institutional loans, systems of sharing, fugitive infrastructures, shadow libraries, joint trusts, collective practices of hope, expansive undercommons necessary in this dark era.

LGBTQ+ History Month Identity & Independence Zine Workshop, co-hosted by University of the Arts London Libraries at Darkroom Bar, 2023. [Sophia Nasif via Flickr under license CC BY-ND 2.0]

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Author’s Note

Thanks to Josh Wallaert and Nancy Levinson for patient and astute edits; to David Giles, Jessica Harwick, Nick Higgins, Tambe-Tysha John, Rakisha Kearns-White, Eliana Miller, Alex Mouyios, Alicia Pritchard, Lisa Shankweiler of the Brooklyn Public Library; to Antonia Bruno in the New York State Education Department; and to the board and staff of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, with whom I observed the importance of library solidarity during my decade of service.

Notes

1. This account of the Brooklyn Library Newsroom’s activities is drawn from personal communication with Nick Higgins, Eliana Miller, and Terry Parris, Jr., April 8, 2025; and from my own observations at several Newsroom meetings this spring at Sunset Park. We were joined by branch manager Roxana Benavides, who’s been an enthusiastic supporter of the project, and her colleagues. Also present at those meetings was Miller, the Brooklyn Public Library’s manager of executive projects, who told me the program helps the library build stronger connections to its community.
2. The issue included a field guide that encourages others to adopt the Newsroom’s observational and investigative methods: mapping local places that matter, striking up conversations at bus stops and laundromats, attending community board meetings, chatting with local shop owners, and conducting ethnography in public spaces.
3. See Mekdela Maskal and Terry Parris, Jr., “How Can News Better Serve You? Join the Open Newsroom,” The City, June 28, 2019. In addition to his current role as public square editor for the Headway initiative at The New York Times, Parris, Jr., is a John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University.
4. The Newsroom organizers discovered that “most people were not learning primarily from news outlets, but from an informal network of local information sources and personal connections,” according to Elise Czajkowski, who reported on the project in a post shared by Melissa DiPento, coordinator for the Engagement Journalism program at The City University of New York. “More official news sources were often inaccessible, in either form of delivery or language.” See Czajokowski, “Rethinking Local News in New York City by Collaborating with Residents and Libraries,” Engagement Journalism, Medium, March 30, 2021.
5. Personal communication, April 8, 2025.
6. Miles Kohrman, interview with Heather Chaplin, “How Informal Networks Can Strengthen Local News,” Journalism + Design Lab blog, May 12, 2025. My former students at the University of Pennsylvania, Madison Gordon and MaTaeya McFadden, examined the role of barbers and nail techs as embodied forms of local media and shared their work in our Philadelphia Local Media Field Guide (2024).
7. Kohrman, op cit. See also J + D Lab, “Community News Networks.” The lab was recently awarded a $1.5 million grant from Press Forward to connect community colleges in New Jersey, New Mexico, and Ohio with local news networks. For similar efforts, see the Institute for Local News, at the State University of New York, a new program that empowers students and faculty advisors at a dozen colleges to work with local media partners (Ashley Mowreader, “SUNY Expands Local News Collaborations for Student Learning,” Inside Higher Ed, August 28, 2025); and the Center for Community News, at the University of Vermont.
8. Paul Farhi and John Volk, “In News Deserts, Trump Won in a Landslide,” The State of Local News Project, Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative, December 5, 2024. See also the 2024 and 2025 editions of Medill’s “The State of Local News Report.” In the 2024 edition, the researchers identify 206 counties that lack a source of professional news, where 3.5 million people live. In the more recent edition, that number rises to 213 and the researchers further emphasize the 1,524 counties “with only one local news source remaining, usually a weekly newspaper,” where nearly 50 million people live. For more, see Diana Moscovitz, “We Need a New Deal to Save Local Journalism,” *Defector, *January 17, 2025; and ongoing coverage of “news deserts” in NiemanLab. I would like to see the industry move away from that t