Why Write About Infrastructure? by Kate Ascher

(View entire post here)

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.

It’s hard to believe, but the framework that I had in mind then didn’t change at all as I found an agent, a publisher, a researcher and then a team of graphic artists. I decided to stay away from anything that might be considered “infrastructure” whose workings were either visible or obvious. So systems like buses and ferries, and institutions like hospitals and jails, were ignored in favor of the more complex and often invisible systems that keep a city alive: power, water and sewers, subways, freight terminals, telecom, etc. – a fairly arbitrary distinction, but one that helped produce a more manageable universe of topics to be studied and illustrated.

If I had it to do all over again, I’m not sure I’d change any of the topics in the book. There are of course many more systems in a city like New York that deserve explanations also – schools, criminal justice, parks, social services to name but a few – but I will leave that task to someone more knowledgeable in those fields than me to pursue.

View more information on The Works: Anatomy of a City

Kate Ascher

The Works

New York

operations

infrastructure

utilities

urban life

cities

sewage

subway

systems,

Penguin Books

books