city life
i just read a book that closes with the argument that city living is the future of human existence, not simply because overpopulation is cramming us together, but because cities are actually becoming healthier and more sustainable places to live. here is an interesting quote from the epilogue, attributed to the new yorker’s david owen:
By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite comsumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.
now, this is a rather skewed little presentation that privileges our recent obsesssion with energy use and carbon footprints and kind of forgets about all the environmental damage that big cities had to muck through to get to where they are now, but it’s still interesting, and actually, the whole bit about what cities had to muck through is the point of the book as a whole.
the book, you see, is called The Ghost Map, and it’s about what was arguably the deadliest cholera epidemic in london’s history – an outbreak which took place over the course of a single week in 1854, killing thousands with a vicious rapidity that cholera had never exhibited before. many of the victims died within twelve hours of infection, and several families were entirely erased from history within the span of a few days.
cholera was (and is) such a devastating and terrifying enemy because cities in europe in the mid 19th century were (and are, in the developing world today) growing more quickly than they could manage their waste, and one consequence of poor waste management tends to be a contaminated water supply. cholera is a bacteria that is spread by the ingestion of its victims’ waste, and this happens most often by drinking contaminated water.
The Ghost Map tells the story of how the london epidemic of 1854 helped a certain committed doctor by the name of john snow finally begin to convince the establishment of the waterborne nature of transmission, and it argues that the very features of the city that lead to the large-scale horror of infectious diseases such as cholera are also the features that enable society to overcome them. cities cram people together, which makes them more susceptible to disease, but they also make trends more visible, foster deeper and more rapid intellectual exchange, and, in the long term, keep everyone healthier through proximity to hospitals and specialty shops and services of all sorts.
the story of the cholera outbreak was chosen because it can be seen as the point where the balance began to shift for cities on their journey from risky and precarious to beneficial and stable places for humans to live. once we got the whole “build sewers and don’t empty them into the water supply” thing down, apparently things just started looking up.
the book is by steven johnson, who is a bigwig in pop science tomes these days, having written things like Interface Culture (which my fellow IU HCIers and i read for jeff bardzell’s class first year, remember?), Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (which is referenced in the radio show that i cited in my last post), and Everything Bad Is Good for You (the title of which makes people chuckle and mysteriously crave chocolate). on the whole, i find his books to follow a similar pattern: Interesting! -> Engaging! -> interesting (i think)… -> repetitive -> annoying -> self-important -> ok, interesting -> masturbatory -> cheesy -> good grief, it’s over. since you can read them about as quickly as a spy novel, though, the interesting bits can be worth the time.
i was thinking about all this today and decided to write a post about city life. moving to portland from bloomington has reminded me of things i both like and dislike about living in cities, and portland isn’t even very big. the idea that having more people in cities might make us smarter is interesting, for a minute, but as i tried to come to a conclusion i realized that spending the energy to formulate such an opinion actually strikes me as a rather tremendous waste of time. i like lots of things about cities. i like lots of other things about small towns. if we end up all streaming into the cities, i bet we’ll be able to look back and point to some interesting stuff that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. the same, however, will be true if we all decide to live in quoncet huts.
people do interesting stuff, yo, and their environments fuel them in amazing ways. i think a lot of books out there today (and a lot of my blog posts as well, it’s true) try way to hard to find handy endings. everybody seems to be looking for something to point at to tell us that either THAT is the problem with the world or that actually, everything is going to be ok after all if we just hold out and THIS is why.
i kinda think we should just shut up already, and get down to the business of living.