History as written by a "SimCity" freak

Gifted amateurs defeated London's cholera epidemic in the 1850s, says culture/tech visionary Steven Johnson, and today a similar bottom-up approach to knowledge can improve neighborhoods, reform cities, even thwart terror.

By Scott Rosenberg

Read more: Books, London, Scott Rosenberg, Bacteria, Health Care, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

 

Steven Johnson

Oct. 30, 2006 | Steven Johnson has a knack for staying ahead of multiple curves at once. His books have been delighting literate technologists and geeky humanities majors ever since his 1997 "Interface Culture" -- one of the first and still best accounts of the cultural content of software design.

Last year, his provocative "Everything Bad Is Good for You" maintained that video games and cable-TV serials, far from rotting our brains, actually train us in useful complexity-mastering techniques. Since Johnson's previous book, "Mind Wide Open," had offered a dazzling tour of contemporary neuroscience, the "Everything Bad" argument was harder for outraged pundits to dismiss than the usual culture-wars broadside.

Johnson's latest book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World," follows a doctor and a clergyman who teamed up in 1854 to figure out why cholera had ravaged their neighborhood. It rolls together a scientific exploration and a cultural exegesis, and, like Johnson's second book, "Emergence," it examines the city as organism. But unlike all his previous volumes, it's set in the past -- and it tells a story.

"I was three chapters in," Johnson says, "and the story was really an engine, propelling me along in writing it. And I had this embarrassing moment where I realized, you know what? I think people really like books with stories! I felt like, as a writer, I had this huge weapon at my disposal for the first time. I've written five books. I can't believe I've been doing it without this!"

The story's a page-turner, but it's in service of two larger arguments: one about the rise of the city as the central organizing structure of modern life, and the other about the human mind's capacity for identifying patterns and applying those insights to clear the fog of conventional wisdom and improve the species' lot.

London in the mid-19th century was literally choking on its own excretions. The first efforts to relieve the problem -- building sewers that dumped waste directly into the water supply -- intensified it instead. The scientific establishment, in thrall to the dominant "miasma theory," believed that disease was transmitted via air, not water.

"The Ghost Map's" protagonists, John Snow and Henry Whitehead, gifted amateurs both, analyzed the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho and used their information, eventually, to overturn the expert consensus. They succeeded not only because they were smart and painstaking and open-minded, Johnson argues, but also because they were locals. Their shoe-leather knowledge of the neighborhood helped them make sense of data that the experts at London's new Board of Public Health had missed.

I talked with Johnson in San Francisco recently, on the eve of the launch of a new Web project he has conceived in tandem with "The Ghost Map": outside.in, a site that pulls together blog postings, news, reviews and events from across the Internet and organizes them by zip code. It's a venture that, in the spirit of "The Ghost Map," aims to harvest the local knowledge of amateurs in densely populated areas and harness it for wider use.

How did you end up writing "The Ghost Map"?

I wanted to write an idea book that could be wrapped around a narrative. So I needed to find some story that connected to all the themes I had in mind. I said to my wife over dinner one night, there's got to be something out there that I know, that I could take and adapt. We went to see "Seabiscuit," and we were in the theater watching it, and I remembered the Snow story, which I'd known about forever. I thought, "That's perfect!" So I literally got up and left the theater and called my agent and said, "I know what the next book is!"

One of the first ideas was that I would tell the story with three protagonists: the bacterium, Snow and the city. And I would try to tell a story that would live on those different scales at the same time. As I researched it, I realized that Whitehead was just as important. That changed it in a lot of interesting ways for me.

But I wasn't totally sure what it meant to tell the story that way. I ended up saying, OK, let's take a very short amount of time in a very finite amount of space -- these 10 days or so in this neighborhood -- and say, what is really going on here, on the level of people, on the level of ideas? But there's also this analysis of what was probably happening in terms of the population of bacteria in the bottom of the well. And then there's this broad story about the evolution of London as a city.

I've tried not to grant too much importance to any of the levels. If you emphasize one at the expense of the others, the story just becomes less true, or less fully realized. Someone described the approach by saying it had a fractal feel -- you just keep zooming in and out, and at each level there's something new.

I read your recent New York Times Magazine piece on "The Long Zoom," in which you talked about "Spore," Will Wright's new "God game," and then defined our age in terms of our ability to zoom from the microscopic level to the macrocosmic and back. And I thought, "He's basically just described the method of his book."

Well, I've been going around the country for the last year talking about video games, because of "Everything Bad Is Good for You." And people would ask, what are you doing next? And I'd joke with them, I'd say, well, the logical next thing -- cholera! You do "Grand Theft Auto," and then you do 19th-century cholera. "The Long Zoom" was the connection.

And there is a gaming connection -- the old Game of Life.

Yeah. Or "SimCity."

"The Ghost Map" read to me like history as written by a "SimCity" freak. Is it fair to assume you've spent many, many hours of your life playing it?

It's definitely my favorite game of all time. And it's the only game that I really have lost a lot of time to -- every time a new version comes out. It's my great love.

Your love for cities is clear in "The Ghost Map." You talk about how cities actually make a lot of environmental sense, and use New York, with its carbon-conserving mass transit, as an example. But outside of New York and a handful of other places, American cities, with their suburban and exurban sprawl, don't really live up to that ideal, do they?

Partially that's there because there is a history of the environmental movement being back to nature, anti-urban in general. And a lot of that is the stuff that Stewart Brand's been writing and talking about for the last couple of years. So it's there to say there is a model -- you don't have to return to nature and give up on a modern urbanized lifestyle to be green; you just need to build a certain kind of city. It's worth saying again that this certain kind of city has a certain level of density. It can't be just an automobile satellite city, that's probably the worst.

We know that centralized urban planning doesn't work in all kinds of ways. But the no-planning-at-all model has big problems, too.

My dad used to say that when "Emergence" came out. I grew up in D.C., and he'd drive around Rockville, Maryland, which is all strip malls and things like that, and he'd say, "This is totally unplanned, and it's the most hideous thing you've ever seen. How do you reconcile that with your celebration of bottom-up?"

One of the lessons of the book is the importance of moving across scales -- being able to think, OK, I have all this local activity in my life, I make these decisions as a native of the city or suburb or wherever I am, but I'm part of a larger system and pattern and that system has a life of its own, and it has huge consequences, and if you help contribute to or build the wrong kind of system it's a 100-year mistake, or a 200-year mistake. Like the Big Dig. And that's a difficult way to think. People aren't naturally land-use planners or urban planners. But being able to think that way as a citizen, I think, is increasingly important.

Next page: "Daddy's writing a book about poop!"