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I woke up one morning with an outline of The Works: Anatomy of a City in my head. It wasn’t long after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had come down -- late in 2001 or early in 2002. If you remember, there was article after article in the papers about what happened to our city’s infrastructure that day -- why the Con Ed substation failed, what happened to Verizon and its telecom connections, how the #1 subway path was obstructed, the impact on the slurry wall under the Trade Center, etc. Many of these articles had fabulous, accompanying graphics -- to show lay readers what things really looked like underground and how they worked.

Now I knew much of this stuff from a previous career at the Port Authority, but seeing these articles made me realize how little people who don’t work for public agencies, or who aren’t involved at all with what lies beneath city streets, know about how things work in a big, complicated city like New York. So I woke up that morning with the idea of doing a David Macaulay (author of the terrific book The Way Things Work)-like book about the way New York City’s infrastructure works, and before I even reached for coffee I had jotted down the half dozen chapters that would feature in it.

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Kate Ascher is our guest blogger during the week of December 17th. If you have any questions for Kate Ascher, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Works: Anatomy of a City:

Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.

About Kate Ascher

Kate Ascher received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in government from the London School of Economics and her B.A. in political science from Brown University. She formerly served as assistant director of the Port at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and worked overseas in corporate finance, before her previous position as executive vice president of the Economic Development Corporation for City of New York. She is currently the director of development at Vornado.