The 99% Invisible City Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  The 99% Invisible Field Guide to the Cover

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Inconspicuous

  Ubiquitous

  Camouflage

  Accretions

  Chapter 2: Conspicuous

  Identity

  Safety

  Signage

  Chapter 3: Infrastructure

  Civic

  Water

  Technology

  Roadways

  Public

  Chapter 4: Architecture

  Liminal

  Materials

  Regulations

  Towers

  Foundations

  Heritage

  Chapter 5: Geography

  Delineations

  Configurations

  Designations

  Landscapes

  Synanthropes

  Chapter 6: Urbanism

  Hostilities

  Interventions

  Catalysts

  Outro

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH

  The 99% Invisible Field Guide to the Cover

  Fig. 1 • EMERGENCY BOXES: Small safes affixed to urban architecture allow emergency personnel to quickly access buildings using a master key, saving time and lives in critical situations. Instead of breaking glass and risking injury or causing damage, firefighters can walk right in. Advanced versions of these boxes also allow responders to control gas and sprinkler systems.

  Fig. 2 • ANCHOR PLATES: Small metal circles, squares, and stars affixed to building exteriors are visible parts of wall anchoring systems designed to hold old buildings together and to prevent bricks from falling off of facades.

  Fig. 3 • THOMASSONS: As cities change, sometimes useless remnants are left behind. Some of these artifacts are eventually demolished, but others persist, and some are even actively cleaned and repaired despite no longer serving their original purpose. A Japanese artist dubbed them “Thomassons,” referencing a baseball player whose career took a turn, leaving him well paid but mostly on the bench—useless, but maintained.

  Fig. 4 • TRAFFIC LIGHTS: Most of the world’s traffic signals are arranged with the red light on top, yellow or amber in the middle, and green at the bottom. This convention is inverted, however, at one exceptional crossroads located in an Irish neighborhood of Syracuse, New York.

  Fig. 5 • ELECTRICITY METERS: Before modern systems were developed to track energy usage, utility customers were billed based on the available metrics, such as how many light bulbs were present in their households. Later, as home solar panels reversed the direction of energy flow, meter dials designed to track incoming electricity were found to turn backward as well.

  Fig. 6 • FIRE ESCAPES: Fire has long been one of the greatest existential threats to buildings and their occupants. Before contemporary interior fire staircases became standard, metal step and ladder systems were commonly attached to buildings. These ultimately proved insufficient, but were a big step up from mobile ladders on fire trucks with limited reach.

  Fig. 7 • MANSARD ROOFS: When the city of Paris introduced new building height limits a few centuries ago, the new measurement system contained a loophole. Property owners discovered they could build up attic levels above the cornice line, creating extra space behind steeply sloped “French roofs.” This style has since spread around the world.

  Fig. 8 • TRASH PANDAS: Among the largest, most clever, and persistent urban synanthropes, raccoons have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt in built environments. These puzzle-solving creatures have inspired increasingly sophisticated systems for locking up waste containers, which has raised some concerns about further training these fast-learning animals.

  Fig. 9 • DISCOMFORTING SEATS: Armrests can be an amenity, but they can also serve as a form of dissuasion, a kind of hostile architecture. Some public benches feature armrests that are shaped and spaced to keep people from getting too comfortable, lying down, or sleeping in public spaces. Such defensive design strategies can be very controversial.

  Fig. 10 • CURB CUTS: At street corners, graded ramps smoothly connect sidewalks and streets for accessibility reasons and are often topped with a layer of tactile paving to assist the visually impaired. This ramping approach gained traction after activists smashed conventional curbs with sledgehammers in acts of awareness-raising intervention.

  Fig. 11 • CANNON BOLLARDS: Early curbside bollards were generally made of wood, but over time metal bollards emerged, including ones made from old ship cannons. The shapes of cannon bollards have inspired other, similar-looking traffic bollard designs over time as well. It can be hard to tell the real cannons from the fakes, but they are all real bollards.

  Fig. 12 • NEON SIGNS: The element neon was named from the Greek neos, meaning “new.” Shortly after its discovery, an inventor began putting this material to use in commercial neon signs, at first associated with bright and bustling cities, then later with seedy establishments. Red has long been a popular color choice because it is the natural hue of burning neon. While some signs use other gases to achieve different colors, they are all still generically called “neon.”

  Fig. 13 • CHECKERED PATTERNS: The “Battenburg” pattern used on police vehicles and uniforms in and beyond the UK was developed to be both highly visible and recognizable. One of its precursors, the “Sillitoe Tartan,” is not actually a tartan as such, but rather a checkered pattern adapted from Highland precedents by a British chief constable for police use in Glasgow.

  For all you plaque readers and curious urbanists

  Copyright © 2020 by Roman Mars

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mars, Roman, author. | Kohlstedt, Kurt, author.

  Title: The 99% invisible city : a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design / Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt. Other titles: Ninety-nine percent invisible city : a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020023323 (print) | LCCN 202002332 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358126607 (hardback) | ISBN 9780358396369 | ISBN 9780358396383 | ISBN 9780358125020 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns—Miscellanea. | Public works—Miscellanea. Classification: LCC NA9050 .M29 2020 (print) | LCC NA9050 (ebook) | DDC 720—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023323

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023324

  Cover design by Raphael Geroni

  Illustrations by Patrick Vale

  v2.0920

  Introduction

  The world is full of amazing things. Walk around any major city and you will find soaring skyscrapers that inspire awe, bridges that are marvels of engineering, and lush parks that provide respite from the concrete landscape. There are travel guides for all of that. This, however, is a guide to the overlooked and ordinary: the boring stuff. The truth is that the mundane objects we pass by without noticing or trip o
ver without thinking can represent as much genius and innovation as the tallest building, the longest bridge, or the most manicured park. So much of the conversation about design centers on beauty, but the more fascinating stories of the built world are about problem-solving, historical constraints, and human drama.

  This has always been the worldview of the 99% Invisible podcast. Since 2010, we have told stories about all the thought that goes into things most people don’t think about. Our name references the everyday objects that are invisible because of their everydayness, but it also refers to the invisible parts of things you do notice. In the case of something like the Chrysler Building, the aesthetics and architecture of the massive Art Deco tower are only 1% of the story. It’s our mission to tell you the hidden parts of the story: the speed of its construction, the building’s place in the great Manhattan skyscraper race, the iconoclastic architect who designed it, and his daring, secret strategy to beat out the competition at the last possible moment. As beautiful as the Chrysler Building is, the 99% Invisible part is the best part.

  In this book, unlike the podcast, we get the opportunity to show you pretty images (illustrated by Patrick Vale) that help tell the hidden history and development of these designs. That said, this guide is not meant to be an encyclopedia that provides a few rote paragraphs about the inventor and origin story of each object. You have Wikipedia for that. This is about breaking down the cityscape into its more fascinating subparts. Rather than tell you about the first traffic light, we’d rather tell you about the most interesting traffic light in the world: the one in Syracuse, New York, that has the green light above the red light as a display of Irish pride. Instead of recounting the construction of the jaw-dropping Brooklyn Bridge, we introduce you to the aesthetically mundane Can Opener bridge in Durham, North Carolina, which has an uncanny history of shearing off the tops of tall trucks trying to pass underneath. The Brooklyn Bridge represents an incredible advancement in engineering, but Durham’s Norfolk Southern-Gregson Street Overpass illustrates the perils of sclerotic modern transit bureaucracy, something citizens bang their heads against every day.

  Like the best-intentioned urban planners, we have laid out a path for you as we walk together through this inevitably incomplete guide to the city. We take you through the things you never noticed as well as the things you always notice but might not understand—from massive top-down municipal infrastructure made by trained planners at their desks to bottom-up citizen interventions created by urban activists. However, there’s no reason why you can’t pick and choose the path through this book that suits your own journey—create a personal desire path, a favorite subject in the 99% Invisible universe. Desire paths emerge when people trample on the grass to cut a route to the place they want to go when urban planners have failed to provide a designated paved walkway. These spontaneous trails are shaped by pedestrians who are effectively voting with their feet. Most of the desire paths you encounter in a city trace the shortest distance between two points, often to cut corners, but many others are there just because people want to take a path less traveled. Once a desire path is created, it frequently becomes self-reinforcing: others begin following these newly formed routes, which increases their visibility and perpetuates their usage.

  So as you make your way through your own city or one you’re visiting, carry this book with you, flip through, find a story, and settle in. If you are in a city, you will probably find some analog to the thing we’re talking about even if the specific example being discussed is in London or Osaka or beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

  This is your guide to decoding the built world in whatever city you find yourself. Once you learn about all the designs in this book, you will look at the world in a radically different way. You will exalt in curb cuts, shake your fist at bench armrests, and tell the person walking next to you that the orange spray-painted markings on the street mean there are telecommunication lines just below the surface.

  You are

  about to see

  stories everywhere,

  YOU BEAUTIFUL NERD.

  Spray painted utility codes to mark underground hazards in Oakland

  Chapter 1

  Inconspicuous

  There is a hidden world of design all around you if you look closely enough, but the cacophony of visual noise in our cities can make it hard to notice key details. There are street markings that protect you from being blown to bits, tiny safes affixed to building exteriors that can help save occupants in a fire, and ornamental flourishes that may seem like mere decoration but actually work to hold entire brick buildings together. Amid all of this, there are also myriad incremental odds and ends that simply accumulate through people forever reshaping a city to fit their needs. Decoding these more subtle aspects of the cityscape can also help you gain insight into the people who make cities what they are, most of whom are just trying to live their lives, but some of whom are actively trying to save yours.

  Sidewalk markers, a breakaway post, and emergency access box

  Ubiquitous

  Once you start to see them, you’ll never understand how you hadn’t noticed them before. On any given city street, there are design details scattered everywhere that are meant to establish boundaries or protect you on an everyday basis and in cases of emergency. Even obscure notations created and used by specialists contain layers of information written onto the built world that can be read by anyone who knows how to decipher them.

  Official Graffiti

  Utility Codes

  Careless or uninformed digging around cables and pipes can cause everything from major utility outages to gas leaks—or, as in the case of a 1976 incident in California, a gigantic explosion that leveled half a city block. One fateful day in June of that year, workers were excavating a stretch of Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles when someone accidentally cut into a hidden petroleum pipeline. The pipe ruptured, and pressurized gas ignited into a fireball that engulfed passing cars and adjacent businesses. More than two dozen people were killed or injured as a result of this error. This wasn’t the first or last tragedy of its kind, but the enormity of this particular disaster helped catalyze the codification of critical color-coded utility markings that are so omnipresent today. If you are in a US city, look down and you will see colorful official street graffiti everywhere; these markings are a guide to the networks of pipes, wires, and tubes crisscrossing below you.

  The Los Angeles explosion spurred the creation of DigAlert, a nonprofit designed to help prevent future such tragedies in Southern California. Today, excavators in the region are required to mark out their work areas with white paint, chalk, or flags, and reach out to DigAlert; the organization then identifies and contacts companies with utilities running through the site so their technicians can go out and mark off potential hazards. Locators sent out by these companies can employ cable avoidance tools to establish or confirm the positions and depths of things below the surface. Ground-penetrating radar and devices to detect metals or magnetic fields help pinpoint concrete pipes, plastic tubes, and metal cables. Potential subsurface hazards are then highlighted using standardized colored-coded markings.

  Over the decades, services similar to DigAlert have formed across the United States. To simplify things, the FCC designated 811 as a federal phone number in 2005 to connect excavators with these organizations. In general, anyone excavating on public property is required to contact a regional alert organization before proceeding, though private property owners are encouraged to reach out as well. According to a recent DIRT (Damage Information Reporting Tool) report, tens of thousands of accidents could be avoided each year if everyone called when planning to dig, drill, blast, or trench.

  For clarity and consistency, US utility companies rely on Uniform Color Codes developed by the American Public Works Association when mapping out subterranean utilities on surfaces above. On city streets today, you can see the spectrum of safety colors that have been formalized and revised over the decades by the America
n National Standards Institute:

  RED: electric power lines, cables, and conduit

  ORANGE: telecommunications, alarm and signal lines

  YELLOW: gaseous or combustive materials including natural gas, oil, petroleum, and steam

  GREEN: sewers and drain lines

  BLUE: potable water

  PURPLE: reclaimed water, irrigation, or slurry lines

  PINK: temporary markings, unidentified facilities, or known unknowns

  WHITE: proposed excavation areas, limits, or routes

  While the use of different colors provides general information about what’s below, notations including lines, arrows, and numbers are also needed to keep track of details about the locations, widths, and depths of specific hazards. Here, too, standards are helpful, and there are organizations dedicated to helping coordinate and disseminate these. Among other functions, the nonprofit Common Ground Alliance maintains an exhaustive best practices guide for “underground safety and damage prevention.” Documents like this one also provide useful explanations and diagrams for curious urbanists looking to decode street markings.

  Some enthusiasts take things a step further and create more expansive guides. Artist Ingrid Burrington’s book, Networks of New York, contains more than one hundred pages on just one color category of utility in one city: the orange that designates network infrastructure in the Big Apple. Her volume dives deeply into the history of competing telecoms, but it also lays out practical examples for identification like an arrow flanked by the letters F and O, which together indicate the path of a fiber optic line directly below a stretch of pavement. In the wild, such markings are sometimes accompanied by numbers indicating depths, names identifying associated utility companies, and abbreviations referring to the types of materials in play, such as PLA for plastic pipes.