Is social infrastructure punching below its weight in the debate on social mobility?

This chapter provides a commentary on the overlooked role of social infrastructure in the influential research and policy domains on social mobility. Recently, research on social mobility has made major strides forward in establishing the causal effects of neighborhoods on one's development. Nonetheless, the underlying micromechanisms remain less clear. Scholars in social mobility tend to focus strongly on the characteristics of persons present in neighborhoods. However, the literature on social infrastructure also emphasizes the role of the built environment and institutions in facilitating local social interaction. This also has different policy implications: the former suggests interventions based on social mixing, while the latter warns that social mixing does not necessarily result in local social interaction when social infrastructure is not explicitly considered. This chapter concludes with future research avenues that could help understand neighborhood effects by empirically establishing the role of social infrastructure on social mobility.