History as written by a "SimCity" freak

"The Ghost Map's" description of the short-term failure of London's public institutions to deal with sanitation and cholera made me think of the contemporary debate between the libertarian, small-government crowd and the old liberal ideal of government solving our problems. You seem to be saying, OK, public institutions are going to act, and they will probably get it wrong the first time, but that doesn't mean we should give up on them -- because then you can't have a city.

This story's been told before -- it's a public health classic, an epidemiology classic. One of the things I was trying to do was also turn it into a story of a certain kind of urbanism. Snow and Whitehead were both locals, and they had on-the-ground knowledge of this thing that had attacked their neighborhood, and they were able to understand it better than the authorities. Some of it came from Snow's scientific background and his training and his brilliance, but some of it came from the fact that they were connected to this neighborhood and they were able to see the patterns and get the information they needed.

And so I think we ought to have great respect for top-down public health institutions and other institutions outside the market. But we also need better systems for that on-the-ground local knowledge to trickle up. That's why at the end of the book I talk about 311, the New York system that's now showing up in a lot of different places. 311 says, listen, we're going to deputize the entire city to be our eyes and ears on the street. And if there's a pothole here, if there's a homeless person here, you can dial three numbers and you'll get it into our database. So civic top-down institutions are intervening in this open marketplace of a city, but they're feeding on information that comes from below. That's the balance you want to have.

There's a great passage in "The Ghost Map" where you describe the many different "tributaries" that flowed together in order to break the dam of received opinion and overturn the miasma theory. Isn't that similar to Thomas Kuhn's idea in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" about paradigm shifts?

One of my intellectual interests since I was in college is what happens at the transition points between those paradigms. When I was in grad school, my training was in the 19th-century novel. This is the one book I've written for which I actually have credentials! One reason I was interested in this period was to look at those transition points. We understand paradigms of research; what we don't have is the moment where you're segueing from one to the other.

So this is just a great case study in that, where you're right in the middle of a great historical transformation, the birth of a whole new way of living. No one had ever built a city like metropolitan London before. And in the middle of that you have this scientific paradigm that's been dominant, the miasma theory, that's about to crack. And you're there right at the fault line.

And of course what happens is that it's very messy. It does involve a genius: Snow clearly was just an incredibly gifted, brilliant guy. But that wouldn't have been enough. It needed to be the genius at the right time, with the right set of skills, with a whole host of other things flowing into his life. And he needed help -- he needed his Whitehead.

Something wonderful happens in "The Ghost Map" when you shift to the perspective of the cholera bacteria. I got the same feeling I had as a kid reading Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men," in which human history gets reduced to a tiny dot on an inconceivably vast timeline.

It's hard to talk about bacteria and viruses, things that we can't perceive. One way is to just weigh them -- to say, the biomass of bacteria is huge, some insane number. And the response is, my god, that's incredible. But what's more intense, and gives you that sublime moment where you're a little bit overwhelmed by it, is to think about it in a kind of systems way. That's when you say -- this is an old Lynn Margulis line -- if you eliminated all humans on the planet, in a day, basically, life on earth would continue uninterrupted, nobody would notice, the whole system would continue to work. But if you eliminated the bacteria, everything would die. The bacteria are really doing the essential work of recycling everything. So on some level you have to say, whose planet is this?

To make a planet work with life, you have to have recycling. And to make a city work, you have to have recycling. What was happening in London was this amazing unplanned project of recycling with the scavenger class who start the book -- just wading through the muck and gathering all this stuff.

It's a pungent opening to the book, with the "mud-larks" and the "pure-finders" and the "night soil men." It definitely feels like something written by someone with small children in the house. You never stop thinking about waste disposal.

I have three boys, five years and younger. I told them about the book, and the older one said, "Daddy's writing a book about poop!" They were delighted to hear that.

There were these great epic problems that everybody was wrestling with in 19th-century London -- you know, what is the role of class stratification? and, should unions organize? and so on. But they were also wrestling with the question of what are we going to do with all this shit? In many ways it was absolutely as vital and important as all these other questions. They had to solve it. But it doesn't lead the history books.

Somebody said to me about the opening sections, "They didn't include that in 'Masterpiece Theater'!" But of course it's all there in Dickens, and in Mayhew, and in Engels, all those classic books.

In "The Ghost Map's" epilogue, looking at the long-term prospects for the big-city way of life, you conclude that our cities probably have a lot more to fear from nuclear explosion than from deliberate biological assault. How did you get there?

I tried to hit as much of a balance as I could. My tone is naturally optimistic. When the subject turns to things like global pandemics, there's almost never any reporting about what the potentially positive scenario would be. Is there a way where you can imagine the next 50 or 100 years without one of these things coming along and wiping out 100 million people? And if that happens, why? I do feel it's a major fault right now in the media: We've gone from "If it bleeds it leads" to "If there's a small possibility it might bleed in the next 30 years, it leads."

Avian flu is terrifying, and it very well might erupt in coming years, and millions of people could die. But it's worth pointing out that all of this work preparing for it is preparing for an organism that, as far as we know, does not exist yet. So we're ahead on some level. We keep getting better. And there is at least an argument to be made for the fact that over the long run, the viruses and the bacteria won't be able to keep up with our technological advances.

But, you know, in the long run we're all dead! So that doesn't mean in the short run we shouldn't be concerned about it, we shouldn't continue to do the work that's making that long run possible.

The point where the final chapter is decidedly not optimistic is with the other threat to large-scale, dense metropolitan living, which is nuclear terrorism. Because no one is working on a vaccine for a bomb. Maybe they're working on dealing with radiation sickness. But you can't stop things that blow up from killing people. Obviously, it was a little timely; the book came out just in time for another player, North Korea, to join the nuclear stage.

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