During the July 1995 heat wave, Chicago saw over 700 people die in a single week.

Many of these deaths were in two South Side neighbourhoods: Englewood and Auburn Gresham. They experienced the exact same microclimate and extreme heat conditions. Both were roughly 99% African American with comparable proportions of elderly residents living alone. Both faced high poverty rates, high unemployment, and elevated levels of violent crime.

Despite sharing almost identical demographic and vulnerability profiles, the heat deaths were not equally distributed.

Englewood recorded a heat mortality rate of 33 per 100,000, making it one of the deadliest areas in Chicago.

Auburn Gresham, on the other hand, recorded a mortality rate of 3 per 100,000—lower than the city average and safer than several wealthy, largely white North Side neighbourhoods.

At the time, Eric Klinenberg was a 25-year-old doctoral student at whose childhood on the border of Chicago’s Gold Coast and the Cabrini-Green housing project had already alerted him to the inequities of his hometown. When the heatwave struck and hundreds of isolated, elderly residents died behind locked doors, Klinenberg recognised that the tragedy wasn’t merely an extreme weather event, but a manifestation of everyday urban neglect. Compelled to uncover why one neighbourhood survived while an adjacent one collapsed, he ignored what everyone else was fixated on—the weather—and studied the places themselves.

Klinenberg demonstrated that the difference lay in the physical and institutional ecology that supported—or hindered—everyday contact between neighbours. While official narratives focused on temperature spikes, a critical factor was people simply not knowing one another.

Between 1960 and 1990, Englewood suffered severe disinvestment, losing around 50% of its population and the vast majority of its commercial base. This left empty lots, abandoned housing, and broken sidewalks, which amplified fear and led older people to retreat into locked, un-air-conditioned homes. Auburn Gresham, meanwhile, maintained a much denser commercial corridor with active sidewalks, corner groceries, diners, parish networks, and community organisations.

Because Auburn Gresham had spaces that encouraged people to gather, elderly residents regularly stepped outside into air-conditioned public spaces. Crucially, neighbours, church members, and shopkeepers quickly noticed if someone failed to appear for their daily routine, intervening before heat stroke turned fatal.

You’ll sometimes hear people say place doesn’t matter. Usually, that comes from a position of privilege where income or social standing allows someone to simply buy the help or safety they need in a crisis. If they live in a neighbourhood that starts to decline they can simply move.

However, place does matter.

Three-quarters of the people who died in Englewood and Auburn Gresham were over the age of 65, and most were on very low incomes. Those living in a place that made it hard for humans to connect faced an eleven-times higher chance of dying during that hot summer in Chicago.

In the UK we’re just off the back of a stifling hot summer ourselves, and I’ve been thinking about community resilience. Community is often dismissed as a fluffy, “nice-to-have” concept – but connection and resilience will become vital as we brace ourselves for more unpredictable events in the future.

In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg expanded the lessons of the Chicago heat wave into a broader theory, arguing that our shared physical environments—which he terms ‘social infrastructure’—are just as critical to a functioning society as hard infrastructure like roads, bridges, and power grids.

It isn’t fluffy at all.

In a new post, Chris Bolton puts a different spin on this by looking at NATO Article 3, which requires members to maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack:

Referencing the resilience of the Ukrainian people, Chris writes:

“Whole of society preparedness doesn’t happen overnight. That capacity does not appear by magic in a crisis. It is built beforehand in community groups, local businesses, voluntary networks, public servants who know their patch. Trusted communications, practical skills and relationships that cross organisational boundaries. It lives in the neighbour who checks during a storm, the food bank volunteer, the local mechanic, the council officer who knows who to phone, and the community WhatsApp group that is useful rather than terrifying.”

The common thread here is resilience built through ‘people who know each other.’ Relational density is a core structural asset. It is infrastructure.

I often hear people imploring public service institutions to “stick to the basics”—to just do what it says on the tin and leave the rest alone. But that assumes community connection is an optional extra. It isn’t. If we want to have places that can actually withstand the crises of the future, bringing people together isn’t a distraction from the basics.

It is the basics.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash