Infrastructure, Housing and Architecture
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
by Robert D. Morris
"In 1900 an average American had a 5 percent chance of dying from a gastrointestinal infection. ... [B]y 1990 it [fell] to about .00005 percent." So observes a physician and epidemiologist who warns of the potential for a modern return of the millennia-old threat posed to humankind by microbes in our drinking water. In the first half of his book, Morris vividly recounts the tenacious efforts of such 19th-century scientists as John Snow, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch to make safe drinking water a reality. The volume's last half takes a more contemporary perspective, exploring at some length Milwaukee's 1993 Cryptosporidium outbreak, which sickened more than 400,000 and killed over 100. The Milwaukee outbreak could be a harbinger of future public health catastrophes, says Morris, who points out that much of America's water delivery infrastructure is old, badly deteriorated, and ripe for microbial disaster. He concludes by recommending specific institutional and individual actions to ensure the availability of safe drinking water.
The Blue Death ... published July 31, 2007 by HarperCollins
There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification From the Ground Up
by Lance Freeman
A Columbia urban planning prof asks neighborhood residents about their reactions to gentrification, focusing his attention on Manhattan's Harlem and Brooklyn's Clinton Hill. Freeman finds that residents who preceded the inflows of new money have much to be ambivalent about regarding the gentrification process. Said he,
With gentrification you're going to see less abandoned buildings, you'll have more people coming in with money, more stores are going to open up. ... On the negative side ... [p]eople are fearful that they're not going to be able to afford to stay in the neighborhood. Or, even more telling, many people who grew up [there], even if they're not displaced, they can no longer afford to stay. ... [P]eople who've lived in the neighborhood feel like they ... stuck it out when times were bad and now that things are improving it's not improving for them and they or their offspring might not be able to take advantage of it.
Farai Chideya interviewed Freeman on NPR's News and Notes with Ed Gordon
There Goes the Hood ... published July 28, 2006 by Temple University Press
Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization by W. Hodding Carter
No, not that Hodding Carter. This book's by his son (Hodding Carter IV), the successful author of previous volumes including Stolen Water and A Viking Voyage. Here he offers both a fascinating history and a contemporary environmentalist's critique of one of the most vital elements of any society's infrastructure. We see that indoor plumbing's been in intermittent use for at least 5,000 years, and that some of its early developers included the Harappa civilization in the Indus Valley. The Greeks, it turns out, actually pioneered much of the plumbing technique for which the Romans are usually credited. Unfortunately for the West, however, early Christians proved to be considerably less tidy than either. While some of the book's necessarily tongue-in-cheek, Carter's in earnest about the fact that American sewage systems are actually pretty primitive and subject to fail catastrophically in heavy rainstorms. He shows that other societies, such as the Japanese, are developing much more efficient means of dealing with human wastes.
Carter was interviewed on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.
Flushed ... published May 23, 2006 by Atria
The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic
Major architecture fundamentally defines and shapes the societies in which it stands. But to the extent that it's discussed at all, it's usually under the aegis of "art history." Deyan Sudjic observes that stories of power and wealth behind monumental architecture are also laden with intriguing political, psychological, and social meanings -- and the role of the architect in such circumstances can be Faustian. Sudjic concludes,
Architecture exerts an abiding fascination on the most egotistical of individuals, desperate to use it to glorify themselves: the billionaire museum trustees, the skyscraper builders, and the mansion owners. Equally, it can be put to work by reforming mayors looking to transform their cities for the better. Whatever the architects' intentions, in the end they find themselves being defined not by their own rhetoric, but by the impulses that have drive the rich and the powerful to employ architects and to seek to shape the world.
The Edifice Complex ... published November 3, 2005 by The Penguin Press HC
The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher
Who knew urban infrastructure could be so darn thought provoking and entertaining? Kate Ascher did, and fortunately for the rest of us she helmed the production of this remarkable volume that both explains very succinctly and shows, through superb graphics, the nitty gritty of how New York City works. Some of the material is specific to NYC, but most of the broader concepts apply to nearly any large or medium-sized city. The Big Apple is, for example, obliged to "process 1.3 billion gallons of sewage per day." Ascher concisely details not only how such a seemingly daunting task is accomplished, but also the historical evolution of systems that developed after 1849, when residents and businesses "disposed of waste in backyard outhouses or simply dumped it into the gutters along the streets." Among the other vital functions she explains are the delivery of water, transportation, power, communications, and cleanup of many kinds. Anyone who's ever bitched about local taxes should be locked in a room with this fine book for a few hours.
The Works ... published November 3, 2005 by The Penguin Press HC