by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region
Writing a book is a lot like building a house, I suspect. Neither is done in a day, both require a plan or blueprint, and when you're done, you have a nice feeling of satisfaction, along with some nervousness as to whether the structure will actually stand up. Are the foundations solid? Have you put in a faulty beam or supposition that might cause the whole edifice to come tumbling down?
While I haven't built a house, I have completed a book recently, my second in fact, called Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities. Just released this week by Carroll and Graf, it discusses what is underneath twelve of the world's great cities - New York, Paris, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico City, Rome, Cairo, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow and Sydney - in terms of infrastructure, geology, and archeology. Or said another way, in terms of tunnels, pipes, wires, rails, rocks and ruins.
The book includes lots of interesting details, such as the fact that Ivan the Terrible's secret library of priceless medieval manuscripts is thought to be still under Moscow somewhere; that Paris has the bones of millions stuffed into its wandering catacombs; and that Beijing's underground includes hundreds of miles of tunnels dug by peasants with hand tools under the orders of Mao Tse-Tung.
But besides being a collection of interesting trivia, I hope the book also reveals important things about how cities work (to borrow the title of my first book), and how they should work.
A city's underground teaches us that commerce matters, and trumps geography. Chicago, for example, is geographically one of the worst places in the world to build a city due to its swampy soil and poor drainage. But it's a great place commercially, because its location on the edge of Lake Michigan enabled it to be a hub for the movement of goods and services in North America. And so its leaders simply figured out a way to build things like safe sewer and water systems (although it took a half century) and to even construct some of the world's first skyscrapers on this swampy, unstable soil utterly unsuited for tall buildings.
A city's underground teaches us that planning matters. Neither Chicago's sewer system, nor the water or metro systems that enabled New York and Paris to remain commercial leaders, would have happened by chance or through the marketplace. A city is a machine for living, to paraphrase Corbusier, and such machines are not constructed "organically" or by chance. They take planning and design.
Which takes us to the third and perhaps most important lesson that a city's underground teaches us, which is that government matters. The design and installation of the systems mentioned above never happen without some involvement, usually a lot of it, with that much criticized and sometimes-loathed institution, government. And usually the more government involvement, the better the systems.
For example, dig underneath the streets of London or New York, and you'll find a chaotic system of pipes and wires, some long abandoned, which makes contemporary infrastructure planning and maintenance more difficult. Dig underneath the streets of Paris, and you'll find an orderly system of water, sewer, train and telecommunication systems, laid so well that sometimes they approach beauty in their overall appearance and functioning.
Why is this so? Because Paris has more often followed the French model of having the state taking primary responsibility for designing and installing infrastructure. London and New York have often followed the Anglo-Saxon model of having private companies install infrastructure. In the 19th century in New York, a dozen or more gas companies competed to lay pipes, while London actually had competing water companies. The evidence of this competitive gold rush still lies underneath our streets. Today, Verizon and Con Edison are the contemporary equivalents of these older companies.
At 6:30 pm on Monday Nov. 13th at the Museum of the City of New York up on 103rd street and Fifth Avenue, I'll kick off the publication of Beneath the Metropolis with a short lecture and then a reception. I encourage everyone interested in the subject to be there. Details are in the calendar below.
Writing a book is a lot like building a house, I suspect. Neither is done in a day, both require a plan or blueprint, and when you're done, you have a nice feeling of satisfaction, along with some nervousness as to whether the structure will actually stand up. Are the foundations solid? Have you put in a faulty beam or supposition that might cause the whole edifice to come tumbling down?
While I haven't built a house, I have completed a book recently, my second in fact, called Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities. Just released this week by Carroll and Graf, it discusses what is underneath twelve of the world's great cities - New York, Paris, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico City, Rome, Cairo, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow and Sydney - in terms of infrastructure, geology, and archeology. Or said another way, in terms of tunnels, pipes, wires, rails, rocks and ruins.
The book includes lots of interesting details, such as the fact that Ivan the Terrible's secret library of priceless medieval manuscripts is thought to be still under Moscow somewhere; that Paris has the bones of millions stuffed into its wandering catacombs; and that Beijing's underground includes hundreds of miles of tunnels dug by peasants with hand tools under the orders of Mao Tse-Tung.
But besides being a collection of interesting trivia, I hope the book also reveals important things about how cities work (to borrow the title of my first book), and how they should work.
A city's underground teaches us that commerce matters, and trumps geography. Chicago, for example, is geographically one of the worst places in the world to build a city due to its swampy soil and poor drainage. But it's a great place commercially, because its location on the edge of Lake Michigan enabled it to be a hub for the movement of goods and services in North America. And so its leaders simply figured out a way to build things like safe sewer and water systems (although it took a half century) and to even construct some of the world's first skyscrapers on this swampy, unstable soil utterly unsuited for tall buildings.
A city's underground teaches us that planning matters. Neither Chicago's sewer system, nor the water or metro systems that enabled New York and Paris to remain commercial leaders, would have happened by chance or through the marketplace. A city is a machine for living, to paraphrase Corbusier, and such machines are not constructed "organically" or by chance. They take planning and design.
Which takes us to the third and perhaps most important lesson that a city's underground teaches us, which is that government matters. The design and installation of the systems mentioned above never happen without some involvement, usually a lot of it, with that much criticized and sometimes-loathed institution, government. And usually the more government involvement, the better the systems.
For example, dig underneath the streets of London or New York, and you'll find a chaotic system of pipes and wires, some long abandoned, which makes contemporary infrastructure planning and maintenance more difficult. Dig underneath the streets of Paris, and you'll find an orderly system of water, sewer, train and telecommunication systems, laid so well that sometimes they approach beauty in their overall appearance and functioning.
Why is this so? Because Paris has more often followed the French model of having the state taking primary responsibility for designing and installing infrastructure. London and New York have often followed the Anglo-Saxon model of having private companies install infrastructure. In the 19th century in New York, a dozen or more gas companies competed to lay pipes, while London actually had competing water companies. The evidence of this competitive gold rush still lies underneath our streets. Today, Verizon and Con Edison are the contemporary equivalents of these older companies.
At 6:30 pm on Monday Nov. 13th at the Museum of the City of New York up on 103rd street and Fifth Avenue, I'll kick off the publication of Beneath the Metropolis with a short lecture and then a reception. I encourage everyone interested in the subject to be there. Details are in the calendar below.
@RegionalPlan