The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

by Roman Mars

the mundane objects we pass by without noticing or trip over 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.

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.

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 American 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

In the end, though, car design and construction are just a few variables within a larger safety equation. The engineering of things people crash into plays a less conspicuous but critical role in our safety as well.

As commercial cellular towers began to sprout up in the 1970s, diagrams depicting their coverage areas looked like blobby plant or animal cells pressed up against one another—hence the name “cell phones.”

Camouflaging towers as trees is clever, but there is arguably something simple, honest, and clear-cut about more functionalist tower designs. Things don’t have to look natural to be beautiful. But setting aesthetic judgments of functionalist industrial chic and ungainly faux greenery aside, it can be fun to keep an eye out for the fakes.

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. As with metal stretcher railings or cannon bollards, such reuse can be driven by practicality. After all, why manufacture something new when one can loot it from the felled ranks of one’s vanquished foes?

There are five key principles of good flag design according to Kaye, many of which can also be applied to all kinds of other designs: (1) keep it simple, (2) use meaningful symbolism, (3) use two or three basic colors, (4) no lettering or seals, and (5) be distinctive or be related.

“If you need to write the name of what you’re representing on your flag,” asserts Ted Kaye, “your symbolism has failed.”

No city wants to be the next Pocatello, thrust into the spotlight for bad flag design. Still, it can be hard to get municipalities on board. When city leaders say that they have more important things to do than worry about a city flag, Ted Kaye responds to them with the argument that “if you had a good city flag you would have a banner for people to rally under to face those more important things.”

It’s important to note that plaques and historical markers don’t always tell the full and literal truth. In James Loewen’s book Lies Across America, the author points out that historical markers often say as much or more about the era they were dedicated in as they do about the specific times, places, and people they are ostensibly there to commemorate. Many markers in the American South that whitewash slavery are very much products of the turn of the twentieth century when the backlash against progressive Reconstruction was in full force. Markers in the West and elsewhere often ignore the perspective of Native Americans in favor of white colonialists’ points of view.

The edict “always read the plaque” is a great way to engage with the built environment and all the stories embedded in it, but it doesn’t mean every story embossed in metal is the real or entire story—curious plaque readers should keep a critical eye on the (proverbial) fine print.

“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. Given the proliferation of the quatrefoil, he may have been onto something.

Regardless of what “grue” or “bleen” says about a place and its people, the lines humans draw on color wheels are not fixed, inevitable, or universal. It may seem surprising that Syracuse and Japan would flout the usual red, yellow, and green convention when it comes to their traffic lights, but from another perspective, it’s more surprising that there is any conformity at all.

Meanwhile, some advertisements have been reintroduced to São Paulo, but the city is taking things slowly and carefully this time around. Interactive search-engine ads were installed at some bus stop shelters to allow residents to look up weather conditions for their destinations. The idea was that businesses that want to advertise also need to provide a useful public service. In addition, the advertisers had to agree to take care of the shelters.

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, so mail carriers started delivering letters directly to families so they could read the bad news in the privacy of their own homes.

Water is often a driving force behind the locations of cities, but it also shapes and limits their physical boundaries. As the climate changes, this fluctuating relationship will have a profound effect on the lives of city dwellers that will be increasingly impossible to ignore.

Some of the city’s detritus made its way out to the two-mile mark in Lake Michigan, then flowed back into the new water intake system. There was talk of pushing intakes out even farther, but ever longer intake tunnels would never be enough to keep up with the city’s growth. 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.

Then, in 1861, East and West Coast networks in the United States were connected across the Great Plains to form a transcontinental telegraph. 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.

Long dividing lines, wide lanes, and clear vistas help reinforce the illusion that drivers are traveling at a reasonable pace along a highway, even if that velocity is incredibly high compared to the speeds at which humans historically moved through the world. Visual cues can not only make higher speeds feel normal, they can encourage drivers to speed up. This phenomenon isn’t only limited to lines—the presence or absence of objects alongside a road can change drivers’ perceptions of time and distance and inform their sense of speed.

In many prewar suburbs, roadside trees were arrayed along verges between car-filled streets and pedestrian sidewalks. In postwar suburbs, some planners were concerned about the collision risks posed by this roadside greenery and began to experiment with putting trees on the other side of the sidewalk. Clearing out objects that could cause damage in collisions seems sensible on the surface, but it can have certain unintended side effects, like creating the visual impression of a wider paved area for drivers. More open roads encourage faster travel thanks to reduced “edge friction” from peripheral objects. A reduced number of obstacles also exposes pedestrians to increased danger when speeding vehicles swerve off roads. All of this points to a larger traffic engineering issue: people tend to use what’s given to them. Presented with wide open spaces, drivers will go faster.

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.

It’s hard to look at Jersey barriers and see much more than a lump of concrete formed into a commonsense shape, but everything about them is highly engineered. No single inventor made these dividers what they are today—they are a product of a lengthy and ongoing design process.

Historically, the side of the road that people walk, drive, or ride on has varied and shifted. When horseback was a primary mode of transit, people usually rode on the left side so their right hand remained free to greet or attack oncoming riders, depending on what the situation called for.

It would be easy to argue that more verges means more green space, which is a net good, but some truly wonderful cities rely on the absence of verges to foster density, walkability, and other more intangible aims.

Second only to water, concrete has become one of the most consumed products in the world. Unfortunately, concrete takes a ton of energy to make and is composed of materials that may seem abundant but are actually limited.

“Wood is one of nature’s most innovative building materials,” writes Becky Quintal for ArchDaily. “The production has no waste products and it binds CO2. Wood has low weight,” she notes, but it also offers “a very strong load-bearing structure compared to its lightness.” Fire is still a problem, but not as much as one might imagine, as wood actually performs well under heat stress. It can be “more fire resistant than both steel and concrete,” notes Quintal, in part because wood contains water, the evaporation of which can delay a blaze. In a fire, wood chars on the outside, which protects the wood on the inside. While steel heats up quickly and buckles, wood first drops water weight and then burns slowly from the outside in.

A chart of timetables published in 1857 lists a dizzying array of more than one hundred different local times across the United States, many just a few minutes apart from one another. For most people, time was a local phenomenon, and they saw no need for it to be otherwise. So when railroads banded together in the late 1800s to form the General Time Convention and pitch standardized times, the public was slow to get on board.

time had worked just fine for thousands of years before it was sliced up into a twenty-four-piece spherical pie with a few rough edges and exceptions. The entire system was a subjective imposition on reality that reflected an unprecedented and permanent shift toward global interconnection.

Even applying simple rectilinear grids to a round planet can be hard to do. But letting cities grow more organically can lead to a whole mess of problems and conflicts, so as difficult as it is, some planning is usually necessary. In the end, though, most cities are the product of various layers of planning that get imposed across generations; and their layouts often need to adapt and change as the needs of a city evolve.

Busta Rhymes Island can’t be official until the rapper passes away, but if the name stays in use until it becomes eligible, that will count in its favor should O’Brien submit it again. For now, the place may not be federally recognized, but it does have its own Wikipedia page, which seems like a notable start. Woo hah!!

For better or worse, the act of renaming has become a harbinger of gentrification. In the end, neighborhoods change. Their names can change, too, but whether a new name sticks or fails to catch on is generally up to the people who actually live there, not the real estate agents trying to make a buck.

It’s easy to make light of lawn-related rules, but the ramifications can be quite stark for people who cannot meet the exacting standards imposed on them. Over a decade ago, a homeowner in Hudson, Florida, was jailed for having a brown lawn. He was later freed in part because press coverage raised awareness of his plight, which led area residents to take up his cause and resod his lawn. This retiree had tried to satisfy his homeowner’s association by replanting three times, but each new yard failed to take, and a warrant was eventually issued for his arrest.

modern lawns are derived not from ancient gardening traditions but from idealized landscape paintings created by Italian Renaissance artists. English elites became enthralled with these, which led life to imitate art as landed aristocrats began to emulate these picturesque scenes right in their own backyards. Grass was nice and soft to walk on, but lawns were also about showing power and privilege. Only a rich person could afford to let their fields be unproductive and hire scythe-wielding peasants to keep their lovely but useless grass nice and short.

Aside from their water usage, lawns displace other types of plants that support key natural ecosystems and insect species vital to humans, including pollinators. “If we can’t provide for the nature that literally sustains us at home, how can we ever hope to steward that nature beyond our front door into parks and farm fields and marshes and deserts and forests and prairies?” asks Nebraska author and garden designer Benjamin Vogt.

When the sweeping Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was hung up in the House of Representatives, disabled demonstrators left their wheelchairs and crawled up the marble steps of the Capitol building to make sure the bill was passed by physically demonstrating the challenges they faced in a built environment that excluded them.

even where parklets are technically public, they “may not appear at all welcoming or accessible to those who are unwilling or unable to buy something.” A parklet near a coffee shop that aesthetically matches the business can look and feel more like a private extension than a public amenity, something built by and for latte-sipping elites rather than being equally open and inviting to everyone.

For better or worse, all city-reshaping projects come with cultural implications and associations. When it comes to evaluating these kinds of urban interventions, Douglas suggests maintaining a “critical eye on the social qualities of the spaces we are building, on who benefits and who is excluded.” Among other things, this means truly involving impacted communities in design processes.

If you imagine a solution, “chances are that other people probably have as well, and temporarily testing it out is a great way to meet those people, and start organizing for more permanent changes.” There’s no one right way to shape a city, but taking action, observing results, sharing knowledge, and engaging in collaborative advocacy with other citizens is a good place to start.