Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community

The measurement of what was lost, decade by decade, and the argument about what caused it.

Robert D. Putnam (2000). Simon & Schuster.

Primary reading — read it before the lecture that sets it.

League bowling collapsed while the number of people bowling rose. Putnam stacks up decades of data on clubs, unions, churches, dinner parties and card games and finds the same shape in all of them. His account of the causes — television, suburban sprawl, two-career households, generational replacement — is still argued about, and the generational finding is the one that has held up best.

Week 8 asks you to count what your own suburb lost, using whatever record survives: old directories, council minutes, a newspaper archive, an aerial photograph. Read Putnam for the method rather than the headline. The interesting question is not whether things got worse but how you would know, and this book is an extended answer to that.