These are technologies that thrive in urban centers, because they grow more valuable the more densely populated the environment is. A suburban cul-de-sac is unlikely to have a significant number of Web pages associated with it. But a streetcorner in a big city might well have a hundred interesting links: personal stories, reviews about the hot new bar around the corner, a potential date who lives three blocks away, a hidden gem of a bookstore—perhaps even a warning about a contaminated water fountain. These digital maps are tools for making new kinds of sidewalk connections, which is why they are likely to be less useful in communities without sidewalk culture. The bigger the city, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to make an interesting link, because the overall supply of social groups and watering holes and local knowledge is so vast.
Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won’t be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there’s an entire button-store district. Subcultures thrive in big cities for this reason as well: if you have idiosyncratic tastes, you’re much more likely to find someone who shares those tastes in a city of 9 million. As Jane Jacobs wrote:
Towns and suburbs… are natural homes for huge supermarkets and for little else in the way of groceries, for standard movie houses or drive-ins and for little else in the way of theater. There are simply not enough people to support further variety, although there may be people (too few of them) who would draw upon it were it there. Cities, however, are the natural homes of supermarkets and standard movie houses plus delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, foreign groceries, art movies, and so on, all of which can be found co-existing, the standard with the strange, the large with the small. Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large.
The irony, of course, is that digital networks were supposed to make cities less attractive, not more. The power of telecommuting and instant connectivity was going to make the idea of densely packed urban cores as obsolete as the walled castle-cities of the Middle Ages. Why would people crowd themselves into harsh, overpopulated environments when they could just as easily work from their homestead on the range? But as it turns out, many people actually like the density of urban environments, precisely because they offer the diversity of Viennese bakeries and art movies. As technology increases our ability to find these niche interests, that kind of density is only going to become increasingly attractive. These amateur maps offer a kind of antidote to the scale and complexity and intimidation of the big city. They make everyone feel like a native, precisely because they draw upon the collective wisdom of the real natives.
City governments are exploring these new mapping technologies as well. Several years ago New York City rolled out its pioneering 311 service, which may well be the most radical enhancement of urban information management since William Farr’s Weekly Returns. Modeled after the on-demand tech-support lines that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg built into the computer terminals that made him rich, as well as on a few smaller programs in cities such as Baltimore, 311 is ultimately three distinct services wrapped into one. First, it is a kinder, gentler version of 911; in other words, 311 is the number New Yorkers call when there’s a homeless person sleeping near the playground—and not the number they call when someone’s breaking into their apartment. (During the first year of 311’s operation, the total number of 911 calls decreased for the first time in the city’s history.) The 311 service also functions as a kind of information concierge for the city, offering on-demand information about all the city’s services. Citizens can call to find out if the concert in Central Park has been canceled due to rain, if alternate-side parking is in effect, or the location of the nearest methadone clinic.
But the radical idea behind the service is that the information transfer is genuinely two-way. The government learns as much about the city as the 311 callers do. You can think of 311 as a kind of massively distributed extension of the city’s perceptual systems, harnessing millions of ordinary “eyes on the street” to detect emerging problems or report unmet needs. (Bloomberg himself is notorious for calling in to report potholes.) During the blackout of 2003, many diabetic New Yorkers grew increasingly apprehensive about the shelf life of room-temperature insulin. (Insulin is traditionally kept refrigerated.) The city’s emergency planners hadn’t anticipated those worries, but within a matter of hours, Bloomberg was addressing the topic in one of the many press conferences broadcast over the radio that night. (Insulin, it turns out, remains stable for weeks at room temperature.) The insulin issue had trickled up the city’s command chain thanks to calls into the 311 line. Those diabetics dialing in during the blackout got an answer to their question, but the city got something valuable in return: the calls had made them aware of a potential health issue that hadn’t occurred to them before the lights went out.
Already 311 is having an impact on the city government’s priorities. In the first year of operation, noise issues dominated the list of complaints: construction sites, late-night parties, bars and clubs spilling out onto sidewalks. The Bloomberg administration has subsequently launched a majority quality-of-life initiative combating city noise. Much as the COMPSTAT system revolutionized the way the police department fought crime by mapping problem areas with new precision, the 311 service automatically records the location of each incoming complaint in a massive Siebel Systems call-center database that feeds information throughout the city government. Geo-mapping software displays which streets have chronic pothole troubles and which blocks are battling graffiti.
Increase the knowledge that the government has of its constituents’ problems, and increase the constituents’ knowledge of the solutions offered for those problems, and you have a recipe for civic health that goes far beyond the superficial appeal of “quality of life” campaigns. When people talk about network technology revolutionizing politics, it’s usually in the context of national campaigns: Internet fund-raising, or political blogging. But the most profound impact may be closer to home: keeping a neighborhood safe and clean and quiet, connecting city dwellers to the immense array of programs offered by their government, creating a sense that individuals can contribute to their community’s overall health, just by dialing three numbers on a phone.
All of these extraordinary new tools are descendants of the Broad Street investigation and its maps. The great promise of urban density is that it thrusts so many diverse forms of intelligence, amateur and professional, into such a small space. The great challenge is figuring out a way to extract all that information and spread it throughout the community. The information that Snow and Whitehead sought revolved around the terror and senselessness of a deadly outbreak, but their approach has survived to tackle a vast array of problems, now augmented by modern information technology. Some of these problems are equally life-threatening (“When will my insulin go bad?”), but most of them involve the small concerns of everyday life. Add up enough of those small concerns, though, and you get a genuine transformation in your lived environment, not to mention a renewed sense of civic participation, a sense that your street-level understanding of your neighborhood can make a difference in the larger scheme of things. When Snow and Whitehead took their local knowledge of the Soho community and transformed it into a bird’s-eye view of the outbreak, they were helping to invent a way of thinking about urban space whose possibilities we are still exploring today. It was an act with profound implications for the medical establishment, of course, but it was something else as well: a model for managing and sharing information that has implications that extend far beyond epidemiology.
The model involves two key principles, both of which are central to the way cities generate and transmit good ideas. First; the importance of amateurs and unofficial “local experts.” Despite Snow’s advanced medical training, the Broad Street case might well have been ulti
mately ruled in favor of miasma had it not been for the untrained local expertise of Henry Whitehead. Cities are invariably shaped by their master planners and their public officials; Chadwick and Farr had a tremendous impact on Victorian London—most of it positive, despite the miasma diversions. But in the last instance, the energy and vitality and innovation of cities comes from the Henry Whiteheads—the connectors and entrepreneurs and public characters who make the urban engine work at the street level. The beauty of technologies like 311 is that they amplify the voices of these local experts, and in doing so they make it easier for the authorities to learn from them.
The second principle is the lateral, cross-disciplinary flow of ideas. The public spaces and coffeehouses of classic urban centers are not organized into strict zones of expertise and interest, the way most universities or corporations are. They’re places where various professions intermingle, where different people swap stories and ideas and skills along the way. Snow himself was a kind of one-man coffeehouse: one of the primary reasons he was able to cut through the fog of miasma was his multidisciplinary approach, as a practicing physician, mapmaker, inventor, chemist, demographer, and medical detective. But even with that polymath background, he still needed to draw upon an entirely different set of skills—more social than intellectual—in the form of Henry Whitehead’s local knowledge.
WHEN SNOW PROPHESIED TO HIS FRIEND THAT THE TWO OF them might not live to see the waterborne theory vindicated, he was only half right. Snow died before his ideas could change the world, but Whitehead lived another four decades, long enough to see London fend off the Hamburg outbreak of 1892. Whitehead remained at St. Luke’s until 1857, and then for the next seventeen years was a vicar at various parishes around the city, spending much of his time working on the problem of juvenile delinquency. In 1874, he left the city to serve on a series of ministries in northern England. Shortly before he left, his fellow investigator from the East End outbreak of 1866, John Netten Radcliffe, wrote of Whitehead’s role in the Broad Street case:
In the Broad Street outbreak of cholera not only did Mr. Whitehead faithfully discharge the duties of a parish priest, but by a subsequent inquiry, unique in character and extending over four months… he laid the first solid groundwork of the doctrine that cholera may be propagated through the medium of drinking water.… This doctrine, now fully accepted in medicine, was originally advanced by the late Dr. Snow; but to Mr. Whitehead unquestionably belongs the honour of having first shown with anything approaching to conclusiveness the high degree of probability attaching to it.
Henry Whitehead died in 1896, at the age of seventy. Until death, a portrait of his old friend John Snow hung in his study—to remind him, as Whitehead put it, “that in any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for ‘something to be done,’ but by patient study of the eternal laws.”
How much would Henry Whitehead recognize were he to stroll down the streets of Soho today? The visible signs of the Broad Street outbreak would be long gone. Indeed, it is the peculiar nature of epidemic disease to create terrible urban carnage and leave almost no trace in the infrastructure of the city. The other great catastrophes that afflict cities—fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, bombs—almost invariably inflict vast architectural damage alongside the human body count. In fact, that’s how they tend to do their killing: by destroying human shelter. Plagues are more insidious. The microbes don’t care about buildings, because the buildings don’t help them reproduce. So the buildings get to continue standing. It’s the bodies that fall.
The buildings have changed nonetheless. Almost every structure that stood on Broad Street in the late summer of 1854 has been replaced by something new—thanks in part to the Luftwaffe, and in part to the creative destruction of booming urban real estate markets. (Even the street names have been altered. Broad Street was renamed Broadwick in 1936.) The pump, of course, is long gone, though a replica with a small plaque stands several blocks from the original site on Broad Street. A block east of where the pump once stood is a sleek glass office building designed by Richard Rogers with exposed piping painted a bold orange; its glassed-in lobby hosts a sleek, perennially crowded sushi restaurant. St. Luke’s Church, demolished in 1936, has been replaced by the sixties development Kemp House, whose fourteen stories house a mixed-use blend of offices, flats, and shops. The entrance to the workhouse on Poland Street is now a quotidian urban parking garage, though the workhouse structure is still intact, and visible from Dufours Place, lingering behind the postwar blandness of Broadwick Street like some grand Victorian fossil.
But there is much that Whitehead would recognize in the streets of Soho today, even though the buildings have been replaced and the rents have risen. The coffee shops are now mostly national chains, but the rest of the neighborhood is thick with the small-scale energy of local entrepreneurs. The mineral-teeth manufacturers have given way to video production facilities, hipster music stores with vinyl records in the window, Web design firms, boutique ad agencies, and “Cool Britannia” bistros—not to mention the occasional sex worker, a reminder of Soho’s sordid days in the seventies. Everywhere the neighborhood is thriving with the passions and provocations of dense metropolitan living. The streets feel alive, precisely because they are animated by the intersecting paths of so many separate human lives. That there is safety and energy and possibility in those intersections—and not a looming fear of death—is part of the legacy of the battle fought on those streets 150 years ago. Perhaps it is even the most important part.
On Broad Street itself, only one business has remained constant over the century and a half that separates us from those terrible days in September 1854. You can still buy a pint of beer at the pub on the corner of Cambridge Street, not fifteen steps from the site of the pump that once nearly destroyed the neighborhood. Only the name of the pub has changed. It is now called The John Snow.
VIBRIO CHOLERAE
Epilogue
BROAD STREET REVISITED
SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD, RIGHT ABOUT NOW, A VILLAGER is moving her family to a city somewhere, or an urban dweller is giving birth, or a farmer is dying—and with that local, isolated act, the global scales will tip decisively. We will enter a new era: a planet whose human population is more than 50 percent urban. Some experts believe we are on a path that will take us all the way to 80 percent, before we reach a planetary stabilization point. When John Snow and Henry Whitehead roamed the urban corridors of London 1854, less than 10 percent of the planet’s population lived in cities, up from 3 percent at the start of the century. Less than two centuries later, the urbanites have become an absolute majority. No other development during that period—world wars, the spread of democracy, the use of electricity, the Internet—has had as transformative and widespread an impact on the lived experience of being human. The history books tend to orient themselves around nationalist story lines: overthrowing the king, electing the presidents, fighting the battles. But the history book of recent Homo sapiens as a species should begin and end with one narrative line: We became city dwellers.
If you time-traveled back to the London of September 1854 and described to some typical Londoners the demographic future that awaited their descendants, no doubt many would react with horror at the prospect of a “city planet,” as Stewart Brand likes to call it. Nineteenth-century London was an overgrown, cancerous monster, doomed to implode sooner or later. Two million people crowded into a dense urban core was a kind of collective madness. Why would anyone want to do the same with twenty million?
To date, those fears have proved unfounded. Modern urbanization has thus far offered up more solutions than problems. Cities continue to be tremendous engines of wealth, innovation, and creativity, but in the 150 years that have passed since Snow and Whitehead watched the death carts make their rounds through Soho, they have become something else as well: engines of health. Two-thirds of women living in rural areas receive some kind of prenatal care, but in cities, the number i
s more than ninety percent. Nearly eighty percent of births in cities take place in hospitals or other medical institutions, as opposed to thirty-five percent in the countryside. For those reasons, as you move from rural areas to urban ones, infant mortality rates tend to drop. The vast majority of the world’s most advanced hospitals reside in metropolitan centers. According to the coordinator of the United Nations Global Report on Human Settlements, “Urban areas offer a higher life expectancy and lower absolute poverty and can provide essential services more cheaply and on a larger scale than rural areas.” For most of the world’s nations, living in a city now extends your life expectancy instead of shortening it. Thanks to the government interventions of the seventies and eighties, air quality in many cities is as good as it has been since the dawn of industrialization.
Cities are a force for environmental health as well. This may be the most surprising new credo of green politics, which has in the past largely associated itself with a back-to-nature ethos that was explicitly antiurban in its values. Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether—there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree—but they also perform the crucial service of reducing mankind’s environmental footprint. Compare the sewage system of a midsized city like Portland, Oregon, with the kind of waste management resources that would be required to support the same population dispersed across the countryside. Portland’s 500,000 inhabitants require two sewage treatment plants, connected by 2,000 miles of pipes. A rural population would require more than 100,000 septic tanks, and 7,000 miles of pipe. The rural waste system would be several times more expensive than the urban version. As the environmental scholar Toby Hemenway argues: “Virtually any service system—electricity, fuel, food—follows the same brutal mathematics of scale. A dispersed population requires more resources to serve it—and to connect it together—than a concentrated one.” From an overall ecosystems perspective, if you’re going to have 10 million human beings trying to share an environment with other life-forms, it’s much better to crowd all 10 million of them into a hundred square miles than it is to spread them out, edge-city style, over a space ten or a hundred times that size. If we’re going to survive as a planet with more than 6 billion people without destroying the complex balance of our natural ecosystems, the best way to do it is to crowd as many of those humans into metropolitan spaces and return the rest of the planet to Mother Nature.
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