The Ghost Map: A Street, An Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks

by Steven Johnson

But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure.

Strictly speaking not true, e.g. Rome, Constantinople etc

When John Nash designed Regent Street to connect Marylebone Park with the Prince Regent’s new home at Carlton House, he planned the thoroughfare as a kind of cordon sanitaire separating the well-to-do of Mayfair from the growing working-class community of

Soho. Nash’s explicit intention was to create “a complete separation between the streets occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrower Streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community.… My purpose was that the new street should cross the eastern entrance to all the streets occupied by the higher classes and to leave out to the east all the bad streets.”

Folklore and superstition were also on the side of the miasmatists: the foul inner-city air was widely believed to be the source of most disease.

By the time the epidemic wound down, two years later, 50,000 people were dead.

Londoners living south of the Thames were far more likely to drink water that had originated in the river as it passed through Central London. Londoners living north of the river drank from a variety of sources: some companies piped in water from the Thames above Hammersmith, far from the urban core; some drew from the New River in Hertfordshire to the north; others from the River Lea.

Eventually, these first agricultural societies achieved

what may still be the sine qua non of civilization: a large class of people liberated from the day-to-day

Almost certainly the other way around, as Jane Jacobs shoes. In other words, no surplus before cities because there was no need for it.

Brewed tea possesses several crucial antibacterial properties that help ward off waterborne diseases: the tannic acid released in the steeping process kills off those bacteria that haven’t already perished during the boiling of the water. The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust.

Squatter cities lack most of the infrastructure and creature comforts of developed metropolitan life, but they are nonetheless spaces of dynamic economic innovation and creativity. Some of the oldest shantytown developments—the Rocinha area in Rio de Janeiro, Squatter Colony in Mumbai—have already matured into fully functioning urban areas with most of the comforts we’ve come to expect in the developed world: improvised wood shacks giving way to steel and concrete; electricity; running water; even cable television. The main road in the squatter village of Sultaneyli in Istanbul is lined with six-story buildings, bustling with the commerce of ordinary city life: banks, restaurants, shops. And all of this has been accomplished without title deeds, without urban planners, without government-created civic infrastructure, on land that it is, technically speaking, illegally occupied. The squatter communities are not, by any measure, sinkholes of poverty and crime. They are where the developing world goes to get out of poverty.

We now see cities as environmentally responsible communities because their energy footprints are so much smaller than other forms of human settlement. In a sense, the environmentalists are learning something that the capitalists learned a few centuries ago: There are efficiencies to urban living that outweigh all the annoyances. City dwellers spend less money heating and cooling their homes; they have fewer children; they recycle their waste more economically; and most important, they consume less energy moving around day to day, thanks to the shorter commutes and mass transit that density enables. “By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world,”