"The 99% Invisible City"

[fiefoe]

Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt co-wrote the book, and Mars narrated the audiobook. Unsurprisingly, the whole book feels like a collection of condensed podcasts.

• Every so often, though, these same posts are called upon to do something crucial but fundamentally at odds with their everyday function: they need to break easily on impact. If hit by a fast-moving vehicle, posts need to come apart in just the right way in order to reduce damage and save lives... One of the ways to get robust posts to break properly is called a “slip base” system.
• The idea of using a grand monument to ventilate a sewer may seem strange, but the city’s sewage system was a new technology for Australia at the time. On the functional side, engineers had developed two basic types of sewer vents—educt and induct. The induct drew in air while the educt allowed lighter gases back out. Pressure, odor, and disease had to be addressed in the system, so they were addressed in style, starting with the Hyde Park Obelisk’s eductive design.
• This building is, in fact, a ventilation vector for the subway line running underneath it as well as an emergency egress point for passengers should something awful happen on the train below. In this case, the building is real, but it has been gutted and repurposed. Whether they are purpose-built or adapted, such structures present a fun puzzle, a site-specific mystery like a trompe l’oeil rendered in three dimensions.
• Thanks to an abundance of cautious engineering, the air quality in the tunnel would turn out to be better than it was on many surface streets in New York City.
  These four structures are equipped with dozens of huge intake and exhaust fans that can replace the entire volume of air inside the tunnel every minute and a half.
• In fact, some substations have since been repurposed and transformed into the very houses they were designed to imitate.
• Camouflage can add more than $100,000 to cell tower construction prices, leading frugal clients to skimp on branches.
• The phenomenon of urban drilling in the Los Angeles area is neither new nor limited to posh neighborhoods. In the 1890s, what was then a small town of around fifty thousand people became the center of an energy boom. By 1930, California was responsible for a quarter of the world’s oil output. In some places, metal oil derricks pumping crude out of the ground were set so close to one another that their legs overlapped.
  Some newer operations have also moved offshore to oceanic rigs and artificial islands, including a particularly prominent chain located near Long Beach. The THUMS Islands are the only decorated oil islands in the United States, taking the scale of such camouflage to the next level.

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• Once roads or tracks are gone, the voids that remain are sometimes rendered solid in the form of new buildings, their edges conforming to the shapes of forgotten thoroughfares. The result is a kind of architectural scar tissue—as if the built environment were filling in and healing old wounds.
• Urban reuse is as old as cities. Wherever there has been long-term human habitation, there are instances of spolia, from the Latin spolia, as in the “spoils” of war. Historically, the term has been used to refer to stone that has been taken from one demolished structure and then incorporated into something new.

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• It is quite common for flags to be composed simply of the city seal on a solid blue background. These are what vexillologists would call a SOB, short for “seal on a bedsheet.” Seals are meant to be stamped on paper and contain details that can only be deciphered up close, making them a poor choice for flags that are often seen at a distance and prone to flapping in the wind.
• Audrey Marie Munson: Unfortunately for any potential acting career, her skill at evoking a mood and conveying rich emotions seemed to end the moment she broke pose. She was so stiff in front of the camera that she was given an acting double in some cases.
• In the Mission District of San Francisco, observant passersby can discover the heroic history behind a fire hydrant that sits on an otherwise ordinary sidewalk. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake that shook San Francisco, a great blaze swept through the city. Many of the water mains failed and other lines ran dry, but one hydrant continued to function. This bit of infrastructure is credited with saving the Mission District from total destruction. Today, the hydrant has been painted gold and its importance has been further memorialized with an adjacent plaque. The small marker tells a huge city-defining tale of tragedy and triumph and highlights a moment in time that reshaped a metropolis.
• Islamic architecture, which has a long tradition of distilling organic shapes into geometrical forms. The quatrefoil eventually made its way to Europe via the Silk Road in the patterns of carpets, velvets, and silks shipped to Europe as luxury objects.
  Once in Europe, quatrefoils maintained their shape but shifted in usage and meaning. They were incorporated into stone tracery around big glass windows, which conveyed a sense of wealth in part because they were challenging to craft. Churches began to incorporate quatrefoils into reliefs, tracery, and other ornamentation, lending them religious associations bolstered by geometric similarities to the Christian cross.
  “Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments,” wrote Jones, advocating instead for “conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate.” In short, abstraction is the key. When nature is rendered mathematical, something chaotic and organic is turned into something regular, comprehensible, repeatable, and ultimately beautiful.
• Instead, Japanese stoplights have been labeled blue in official documents for nearly one hundred years despite clearly being what in many languages would be called green at the outset.
• Shaw’s invention involved two reflective glass beads peeking out at drivers from inside a rounded cast-iron shell. These clever devices not only reflected light but also focused it, directing illumination back toward drivers. And they were self-cleaning—as cars drove over them in or after rainfalls, a rubber wiper pressed up against the glass and polished its surface. Poking up above the pavement, these devices also acted as reminder bumps in the road that alerted drivers who might be drifting into oncoming lanes of traffic.
  adoption was slow until the blackouts of World War II. Suddenly, nighttime road visibility was more essential than ever.
• Yellow is easy to see during the day while blue provides contrast but also functions as “the last colour to be visualised before human vision changes from colour to monochromatic shades of gray as darkness falls”
• the biohazard symbol: Even though the form was complex, it was not only easy to stencil but also could be drawn with only a straightedge and compass. Its trefoil design was another asset; a three-leafed shape with three-way symmetry can be stuck or stenciled onto a surface in any orientation and still be easily recognized if a marked barrel or box gets turned on its side or upside down.
• Designing a danger symbol that retains its meaning over time is surprisingly difficult
  Linguist Thomas Sebeok suggested a kind of atomic priesthood. In his scenario, an exclusive political group would use its own rituals and myths to preserve knowledge of radioactive areas across generations much like any religion does. Meanwhile, French writer Françoise Bastide and Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri advocated another solution involving genetically engineering bioluminescent cats that would glow in the presence of radioactivity. By creating songs and traditions about the danger of these glowing felines, the warning would theoretically be preserved by one of the oldest relics of civilization we have: culture.
• neon is enjoying a modest resurgence. There is still work for “tube benders,” craftspeople who manually heat and flex straight glass tubes into letters and other shapes.
• A few years later, he found himself in the United States collaborating with other artists on designs for the opening festivities of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. That’s when it came to him: inflatable tubes in the shape of figures that, when powered by fans from below, could dance like people did in his home country of Trinidad and Tobago.
• These placards have become a part of the cultural fabric of LA and have even starred in their own music video. To the tune of “L.A. Plays Itself” by YACHT, the viewer is driven past a series of black and yellow signs spread out across the Los Angeles area and spelling out the lyrics to the song.
• Aesthetics and art aside, there were some weightier unintended consequences to this law: advertisements, as it turned out, had been quite literally papering over some serious problems. Stripping away huge billboards alongside major roads ended up exposing poverty-stricken favelas.

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• So in 1774, the Second Continental Congress created a postal service based on a belief that communication (including a free press) should be free of government interference. As the American Revolution got underway, this network helped patriots communicate and kept the general populace informed. Before they had the Constitution or even a Declaration of Independence, Americans had the post
  The Civil War’s unprecedented death toll also helped inspire another great innovation of the US Postal Service: home delivery. It was too painful and personal for mothers and wives to receive news of the death of a loved one in public post offices.
• After all, it’s difficult to levy the taxes required to improve and expand these networks when they are unseen and underappreciated. <> To Kameda, manhole covers seemed the obvious target for a visibility campaign—a surface expression of an otherwise underground and largely invisible system.

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• Chicago is a relatively flat city, which is problematic for gravity-driven waste-removal systems. The stalled sewage issue grew worse over time as more and more people moved to the area. When a cholera epidemic brutally wiped out around 5% of Chicagoans in 1854, the problem became too big for officials to ignore.
• This created quite a spectacle—people watched from the streets and even from the balconies of the occupied buildings being raised as huge multistory structures were lifted a fraction of an inch at a time while masons stacked up new foundations below.
• A bigger, bolder solution was needed, and so an even more ambitious idea was proposed: reverse the entire Chicago River. Instead of waste from the river flowing into Lake Michigan, clean water from the lake would flow into the city. This would, once and for all, solve the pollution problem by pushing it downstream to the Illinois River, then the Mississippi, and into the Gulf of Mexico—much to the consternation of other cities along the way.

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• Scientists and historians estimate that trillions of oysters once surrounded Manhattan, and these bivalves filtered out bacteria from the water and served as a food source for the human population. Beneath the waves, these reefs also provided a less obvious benefit: vital protection against storm surges and coastal erosion. Unlike many mollusks, oysters build up complex reef systems underwater, up to dozens of feet high. Such reefs used to span hundreds of thousands of acres along the Hudson River estuary. The rough texture of these structures helped break up large waves before they reached the shore and served as a natural buffer for the city.
• Rather than trying to divide land from sea, plans to regrow oyster reefs offer a chance to mediate between built and natural environments. These reefs can be used to create a more nuanced buffer of cleaner, calmer waters along shorelines while also providing a framework for habitats. This kind of hybrid design is neither fully organic nor artificial—it is something new, part ecosystem and part infrastructure, and perhaps a step toward a better relationship between cities and the waters that surround them.
• The transformative power of these networks was profound. It had taken eight days for news of Lincoln’s election to reach the West Coast in 1860, but news of his assassination five years later was transmitted almost instantly.
• Austin's moontower: The biggest problem, though, was the maintenance—the electrodes had to be changed out about once a day, which meant that workers had to go up and down the tall towers regularly.

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• Motordom even coined a new term: jaywalking. At the time, jay referred to a person from a rural area who walked around and gawked at the city, oblivious to other pedestrians and traffic around them. So jaywalking was a natural extension of this concept—a way to vilify pedestrians over vehicles and call out people who crossed the street at the wrong place or time. The strategy worked. People started to understand roads differently. Streets were increasingly becoming the territory of cars while consideration of pedestrians took a back seat.
• “In a shallow-angle collision—a sideswiping—the Jersey barrier lets the front tire ride up its lower angled face and gets the vehicle back on the roadway with minimal damage.” In other words, the barrier not only reduces head-on collisions, but it also reduces crashes (and crash severity) on either side of the divider by keeping vehicles pointed forward.
• People spend millions of euros a year on Ampelmännchen memorabilia. The figure of the green walking man in particular has become a kind of standing ambassador for ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany).

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• The golden age of perfect security ushered in by these and other seemingly uncrackable designs lasted well into the 1800s until the American locksmith Alfred Charles Hobbs crossed the Atlantic to visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.
• Landlords predictably opted for the most inexpensive solutions they could find, like ropes and baskets that could be used to lower people down the sides of structures. Other innovators came up with even wilder ideas, like parachute hats, which looked delightful but proved rather ineffective in execution. One engineer actually suggested that archers on the ground could shoot arrows with ropes attached to them up to high floors for fleeing residents to shimmy down.
• By the early 2000s, brick theft was rampant and dozens of houses in North St. Louis were being partially or entirely destroyed each month for their building materials... Others took things a step further, setting buildings on fire to burn out anything flammable in the structure. When firefighters showed up, their high-pressure hoses would knock down the bricks, conveniently cleaning off attached mortar in the process. Once the smoke cleared, the freshly toppled bricks were easy for the arsonists to pick up and resell to brick suppliers.
• Out of their era came the Pantheon, which still holds the record as the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world, standing tall and wide without the metal reinforcement used extensively in concrete buildings today. The potential of concrete was lost for more than a millennium before it was rediscovered and iterated on by engineers over the last few centuries.
  One of the reasons Roman concrete persisted for so long was because it included regional ingredients like the volcanic dust that strengthened their admixtures.
• Taxed on their frontage rather than their height or depth, many Dutch buildings were built thin, tall, and long to minimize tax obligations for their owners.
• In simplified terms, the owner of a historic ten-story theater with permission to build fifty stories might sell their remaining forty stories’ worth of air rights to the developer of a nearby skyscraper faced with a similar fifty-floor cap but who wants to build a ninety-floor tower. While the specifics can get a bit more complex, this kind of transfer has helped save a number of old NYC theaters.
• A classic example of this conundrum is the Monadnock Building in Chicago, built in 1891. At sixteen stories, the building was exceedingly tall for its time, but to achieve that height, the walls at the base had to be six feet thick.
  In his Tower Building, the masonry, which normally supported a structure, would form a thin “curtain wall” and would provide no structural support—the bricks would be entirely supported by the steel skeleton instead. This “frame and cladding” approach would become the universal method for making tall buildings.
• Diane Hartley was an undergraduate architecture student who had been studying the building for a thesis project. In the midst of her research, she had calculated that the structure was specifically vulnerable to quartering winds blowing in from the corners.
  LeMessurier and his team reached out to Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs on the building. With the help of the New York Police Department, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a ten-block radius. Three different weather services were tasked with keeping an eye on potential windstorms. With Hurricane Ella drawing near, the city had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby as construction workers went into action. Retrofit crews welded throughout the night in secret and quit at daybreak when the building occupants returned to work.
• In Taipei 101, the enormous damper is the star attraction of the building.
  Located toward the top of the tower, a massive gold-painted orb is suspended by four bundles of thick cables. This sphere is made up of forty-one stacks of solid steel and weighs as much as 132 elephants.
• it was the tower’s relationship with the sun that has earned it other nicknames like the Walkie-Scorchie and the Fryscraper. During construction, it was discovered that the building’s concave facade could reflect and channel sunlight, raising temperatures on the streets below. The skyscraper managed to melt the plastic components of a parked vehicle, and it even lit a rug on fire in a neighboring building.
• Arrays of tall buildings can produce entrancing effects like the so-called Manhattan Solstice. This seasonal convergence aligns sunrises and sunsets with the narrow spaces framed by tall buildings on either side of city streets. While this phenomenon is not unique to New York, the picturesque impact can be particularly potent in flatter places like the Big Apple, which has largely unobstructed views out to the horizon
• Colosseum: Impressed by the sheer variety of species inhabiting the ruins in the 1850s, a British botanist named Richard Deakin decided to do a botanical survey of this unique environment. He cataloged more than four hundred different species, some of which were quite rare (or completely absent, as far as he knew), in the rest of Europe. Puzzling over how these diverse plants could all wind up in one place, Deakin formulated a theory: the burrs and other seeds of these rare plants might have been carried in the fur and stomachs of the lions, giraffes, and other exotic foreign species that had been brought to fight in the arena by ancient Romans.
• Journalist Anthony Murphy was taking drone photography when he spotted a series of dark crop marks arrayed in a large ring on an Irish field. It was later determined by archeologists that a henge erected millennia ago had once stood in this location. The site would have gone unnoticed were it not for the unusual dry spell in this famously green country. The henge had been built of wood, which had long ago collapsed and rotted away, but the depressions left behind by these posts had a lasting impact on plant growth patterns. Crops growing in the deeper soil where the ancient monument had been erected stand out as greener and healthier than their neighbors, which enhances their visibility particularly in an extreme drought.
• One such method of deconstruction involves starting at the top of a structure and working down. The Taisei Ecological Reproduction System begins with enclosing the uppermost floors of a building in an architectural shell that provides shelter as well as soundproofing for the duration of the deconstruction. A ceiling crane system is then suspended from the top of this cap to help facilitate the process.
  Even the kinetic energy generated by lowering materials can be harnessed in the process; when a batch of components is lowered, a connected motor generates electricity, which is then stored in batteries and used to power lighting and equipment for crews working on-site.
• In more recent centuries, London has used a roundabout and statue at Charing Cross as a central point of reference to measure certain distances. Metropolitan police initially served only neighborhoods within a radius of twelve miles from Charing Cross, and hansom cab drivers were obliged to take fares only up to a fixed distance from that central point. Today, London cab drivers are still tested on their knowledge of an area six miles in any direction from Charing Cross.
   Some zero stones are quite large and literal, like the one in Budapest, which is shaped like a huge zero with the letters KM (for kilometer) embossed on its base. Others are more ornate, like an elaborate marker in Havana, which originally contained a 25-carat diamond (this jewel was stolen in the 1940s, after which the city installed a replica).
• For the most part, Oklahoma’s settlers were not urban planners, however, and most of them didn’t give much thought to how a working metropolis needed to function as a whole—they were mainly interested in plotting out their own land for their own private use. By the end of the Land Rush, around ten thousand settlers had claimed basically every single square inch of the land that would become Oklahoma City, which left little room for anything else. In most places, “it was just tent flap to tent flap,” explains Anderson, “and you didn’t have any of the negative space that you really need for a city to work. You didn’t have streets. You didn’t have alleys.”
• Nineteenth-century Barcelona is a good example of how bad cities could get in the Industrial Age. At one point, nearly 200,000 people were hemmed in by the city’s historic medieval walls, and the population density reached twice that of Paris while life expectancy dropped to as low as twenty-three years old for the city’s poor (and just thirty-six for the wealthy).
• the Woodward Plan called for dividing the land into a series of triangles bisected by lines. Each triangle would have three main roads passing through it, one from each end point to the center of the opposite side. Public parks were to be placed where these paths intersected in the middle of each larger triangular superblock and at the points of the triangles. The city could grow outward indefinitely by adding more triangles that would fit neatly together into an expansive mosaic. But this triangle-based geometry didn’t play well with existing rectilinear property lines.
• A study of Vancouver real estate prices found that houses with the numeral 4 in their address sell at a 2.2% discount on average while ones with the numeral 8 (which sounds like “prosperity” in Chinese) sell at a 2.5% premium,
• A similar solution can be found in copies of the New Oxford American Dictionary, where the word esquivalience is found—“The willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities (late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, ‘dodge, slink away’).” This definition, too, is a fake.

ROAD (Rd): any route connecting two points
STREET (St): has buildings on both sides, perpendicular to avenues
AVENUE (Ave): perpendicular to streets, may have trees on one side
BOULEVARD (Blvd): wide city street with median and side vegetation
WAY (Way): small side route
LANE (La): narrow and often rural
DRIVE (Dr): long, winding, and shaped by natural environments
TERRACE (Ter): wraps up and around a slope
PLACE (Pl): no through traffic or a dead end
COURT (Ct): ends in a circle or loop (like a plaza or square)

• Today, grass is the most irrigated crop in the United States. “Even conservatively,” estimates research scientist Cristina Milesi, “there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”
• a growing sense that humans were morally obliged to care for wild species, especially those deemed peaceful and friendly. Squirrels in particular provided a level of interaction uncommon among undomesticated creatures as they flipped their tails and solicited food in a civilized-looking way.
  By some estimates, as many as a fifth of all power outages are squirrel related.
• “These are ghost streams, and they’re haunting us.” Burying urban streams is a strategy as old as cities. Waterways are often co-opted to become part of drainage and sewage systems. In some modern metropolitan cores, as many as 98% of urban streams have been pushed underground and built over,
• Historically, pigeons were birds of the aristocracy. Researchers believe they were domesticated in the Middle East millennia ago, then were spread around Europe by the Romans. Habitats for these birds were even built into the architecture of Roman houses—one common element of traditional Tuscan villas was an integrated lookout tower and pigeon house.
• Wildlife corridors, which provide habitats and pathways for animals, are a class of human infrastructure designed for nonhuman species. Such solutions vary immensely in scale, scope, and design depending on their specific purpose. There are crab bridges, squirrel wires, fish ladders, and freeway overpasses for mountain lions.
• There is always an aspect of coercion to design. In the commercial world, design is used to get you to buy things you don’t need or use your iPhone in a prescribed way. Cities use design to shape our behavior, too.
• The object that Savić considers a particular masterpiece of unpleasant design is the Camden bench.
  The complex shape of this seating unit makes it virtually impossible to sleep on. It is also anti-dealer because it features no slots or crevices to stash drugs in; it is anti-skateboarder because the edges on the bench fluctuate in height to make grinding difficult; it is anti-litter because it lacks cracks that trash could slip into; it is anti-theft because recesses near the ground allow people to tuck bags behind their legs away from would-be criminals; and it is anti-graffiti because it has a special coating to repel paint. On top of all of this, the object is so large and heavy that it can also serve as a traffic barrier. One online critic called it the perfect “anti-object.”
• The idea of lighting public spaces is nothing new—ancient Romans lit the streets of their cities with oil lanterns while the Chinese channeled volcanic gas through bamboo pipes to illuminate ancient Beijing.
  In Japan, blue lights have been tested in subway stations on the theory that their calming effect might reduce suicide rates.
• The success and official acceptance of parklets and similar projects raises questions about who is served by a given type of design approach, not to mention the fact that some demographics are less likely to be arrested for trying out guerrilla interventions in the first place.
• Guerrilla gardening has come to refer to a whole range of informal greening projects, including ongoing seed-bombing initiatives aimed at populating deserted lots, road medians, and other barren places with living plants.