Latham and Layton recast urban public life through the concept of social infrastructure, drawing attention to places and facilities whose social effects exceed their formal programme. Libraries, laundrettes, parks, cafés, schools, swimming pools and sidewalks are treated not simply as containers for interaction but as material and institutional conditions through which encounter, familiarity and collective life become possible. Their contribution is to expand the category of public space beyond municipally owned plazas or streets and to recognise the public dimensions of ordinary commercial and semi-public environments. Methodologically, the paper proposes an infrastructural orientation: rather than asking only whether a space is formally public, it asks what forms of sociality, access, mixture and support it affords. This operation is crucial for cafés because it makes their social value analysable without romanticising them as inherently inclusive. It also places the politics of provision, access and exclusion inside the same frame as everyday conviviality, connecting urban geography with debates on third places, neighbourhood life and social reproduction.