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Anatomy of a City
Penguin
December 2007
On Sale: November 27, 2007
240 pages
ISBN: 0143112708
EAN: 9780143112709
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
How much do you really know about the systems that keep a
city alive? The Works: Anatomy of a City contains
everything you ever wanted to know about what makes New York
City run. When you flick on your light switch the light goes
on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go?
When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How
does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your
city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from
Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating
the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world
is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the
street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily
complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and
wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make
urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section
of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative
graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations
to answer all the questions about the way things work in a
modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the
city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the
pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the
sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel
under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the
Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the
electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that
delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long,
and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take
the curvature of the earth's surface into account when
designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge
takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you
know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the
mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form
natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under
New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the
earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its
example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries
as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis
are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in
big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped
midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around
them, and wondered, how does this all work?
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