The Works: Anatomy of a City
Read Kate Ascher's posts on the Penguin Blog.\ A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern 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...
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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?
Streets2Subway26Bridges & tunnels44Rail freight58Maritime freight68Air cargo80Markets86Electricity92Natural law110Steam116Telephone124Moving the mail136The airwaves142Water152Sewage170Garbage184
\ From Barnes & NobleMost of us are unaware of the infrastructure that makes our lives possible. We flick on a switch; a light goes on. We put out the garbage; it disappears. Without a second thought, we buy bananas from Ecuador. None of these things happens magically. To urban planning expert Dr. Kate Ascher, all these things represent real-world challenges and achievements. In The Works, she takes you into the hidden infrastructure of New York City, explaining how it manages to provide more than a billion gallons of water every day to happily oblivious city dwellers. A thoroughly fascinating read.\ \ \ \ \ Library Journal - BookSmack!\ This whale of a book ostensibly illuminates how New York City operates above and below ground. Consider common things, invisible in plain sight, e.g., what goes on under sewer grates or what agencies are involved in a traffic snarl. The "Moving People" chapter has sections on streets, subways, and bridges and tunnels; "Keeping It Clean" details garbage, sewers, and water. If that sounds dry, it's anything but. You can open to any page and find a treasure trove of factoids about parking meters, railroad yards, traffic lights, the mail, sandhogs, and the submarine used to look at leaks in aqueducts. Illustrations and diagrams show graphically "how it works." If you've ever been the curious sort, this is like a little slice of nirvana. ." Douglas Lord, "Books for Dudes," Booksmack! 10/7/10\ \
