*Structural constraints.* The framework derives that a population's face-to-face civic infrastructure is constitutive of its capacity for mutual recognition at scale, not a discretionary subsidy: dismantling or privatizing the base out of existence violates the constraint on the same logic by which privatizing the justice system violates [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>), and while specific designs are underdetermined, the requirement that an adequate base exist is a structural constraint on every acceptable design. That base is constrained in turn by the structure of the contact it supplies, because the sign of contact tracks its structure ([§9.2.3](<9.2.3 What is Predicted.md>), [§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)): civic infrastructure has to be designed to furnish equal-status, cooperative, sanctioned contact rather than merely to co-locate populations, and infrastructure that produces unstructured, unequal-status friction fails the constraint even where it exists in quantity. Distributional equity belongs to the same requirement rather than sitting atop it: equitable access across populations, including disability access, interpretation, childcare-friendly design, and transit access, is a structural condition of the base, since a stratified base produces stratified recognition ([§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)), so equity is part of what makes the base a base rather than an accommodation added to it.

*Cross-domain couplings.* The base does not stand alone; it couples constitutively to the domains around it. It couples to representation ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)), since direction-recognition can read only the conditions the base makes available and representation reform built on an eroded base reads a degraded signal, so base maintenance and representation reform have to be designed together. It couples to the mediation layer ([§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>)), with which it is jointly constitutive: the mediation layer carries recognition beyond direct encounter, but only on the ground-truth the base supplies, and the consequences of offering the mediation layer as a substitute for the base are developed at [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>), so neither domain's reforms succeed in isolation. And it couples to the membership register ([§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>)), for the face-to-face base is what membership-recognition runs on once the people who must coordinate number in the millions; the substrate-extension obligation the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) root derives is discharged, at the base layer, through exactly the infrastructure this subsection-cluster specifies.

*Bounded field-engagement.* The framework's engagement with the field is deliberately bounded. It grants that mediated communities and overlapping consensus produce real recognition (Benkler 2006; Shirky 2008; Rawls 1993), and confines itself to the narrower claim that neither replaces the face-to-face base for population-scale direction-recognition; it is this bounded form, not the stronger nostalgic claim it is sometimes mistaken for, that the framework defends. Nor does it pick among civic-infrastructure architectures: municipal funding models, library-system designs, community-center models, deliberative-venue formats, and integration-policy designs can each satisfy the constraint, and the framework derives only that an adequate, equitably distributed, productive-contact-structured base must exist. What it accordingly leaves open is the specific funding architecture, the deliberative-venue formats and the questions directed to them, the integration-policy designs that supply productive-contact conditions, the pace and sequencing and division of labor of substrate extension across receiving and originating communities (redirected to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)), and the precise calibration of the distributional-equity thresholds the base must meet. All of this is derived under the engagement [§9.2.1](<9.2.1 What is Disputed.md>) conducts at section length with the cyber-utopian / networked-community defense (Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks* 2006; Shirky, *Here Comes Everybody* 2008) and with Rawlsian political liberalism (Rawls, *Political Liberalism* 1993), and applies under that engagement.

Taken together, the five subsections of [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) come down to a single thesis: mutual recognition at political scale requires a maintained face-to-face base, because the base is the one place recognition stays tethered to the actual conditions of actual people, and everything representation ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) and the mediation layer ([§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>)) do depends on that tether holding. Civic infrastructure is therefore collective investment of the same kind as the legal and public-health systems, and its maintenance, equity, and productive-contact structure are not policy preferences but structural conditions of political community.


---

← [9.2.4 What is Confirmed](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [9.3 Representation](<9.3 Representation.md>) →
