JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And our subject right now is ...

JAD: Cities.

ROBERT: So far, we've tried to pin down the character of a place with math or with a story or with some music. But it's like trying to take a snapshot of something that's growing and ...

JAD: Changing.

ROBERT: All the time.

JAD: And that feeling that Sxip had up on the rooftop, like the city was breathing? Well, maybe the city really is.

ROBERT: Like a living thing.

GEOFF WEST: Well, yes. In some ways, that's exactly right. They evolve, they grow.

ROBERT: Think about it, says Geoff West, everyday, every minute becomes energy and ...

JAD: Food.

ROBERT: Trucks.

JAD: Water.

ROBERT: People. Out goes ...

JAD: Garbage.

ROBERT: Ideas, songs.

JAD: Stories, people.

ROBERT: Energy in, energy out. Energy in, energy out.

JAD: That's just what a city needs to do, says Geoff.

GEOFF WEST: Metabolize food, so to speak. Because without that, organisms and cities and so on will simply decay.

ROBERT: So how does a city stay alive? What does it really take for a city to grow?

JAD: Well, that question got me thinking about New York, and led me to a place I'd been wanting to go for awhile.

JAD: I'm starting to hear the reverb a little bit.

ROBERT: Where are you?

JAD: Underground. A hundred feet underground. So this is the sound of one of New York City's water tunnels. I'm standing in it. It's exactly what you would imagine: a big tube that's about nine feet wide, nine feet up, perfectly polished cement. And it seems to just go forever.

JAD: So this is basically, you might call it a smaller artery inside the city's circulatory system. When this is online in a couple of months, it will pump up to 290 million gallons a day. Something like that, which is an awesome thought in the literal sense of the word.

CATHERINE MALLEN: When you walk through the streets of Manhattan ...

JAD: This is Catherine Mallen from the Department of Environmental Protection.

CATHERINE MALLEN: These water tunnels are anywhere from 200 to 800 feet below your feet. They're silently there. And when you turn on your tap ...

JAD: And when you take a drink, you are basking in a daily convenience that is born from blood, sweat, and death. To explain, you really have to go back to a time when there were no tunnels.

DIANE GALUSHA: This would be 1790, 1800 or so.

JAD: Around that time, says historian Diane Galusha, New York's population ...

DIANE GALUSHA: Was booming. It tripled in 20 years.

JAD: And you suddenly had 100,000 people all getting their water from the same spot.

DIANE GALUSHA: A large freshwater pond called The Collect. And they had pigs running around by the hundreds, and the chamber pots on the streets. And there were livestock in Lower Manhattan at the time. People had cows for milk, and so when they died, they had to do something with them, so ...

JAD: Often, she says, they'd throw their dead cows and everything else ...

DIANE GALUSHA: In the pond.

JAD: The same pond that they were drinking from?

DIANE GALUSHA: Right.

JAD: No way!

DIANE GALUSHA: [laughs]

JAD: Not surprisingly ...

DIANE GALUSHA: As the city grew ...

JAD: ... people got sick.

DIANE GALUSHA: In 1798, there was a yellow fever epidemic. Killed a couple of thousand people. And cholera and typhoid.

JAD: City officials were like, "This has to change."

DIANE GALUSHA: And as if to accentuate the point, in 1835, there was this huge fire.

JAD: The fire department rushes out to put out the fire, but they can't.

DIANE GALUSHA: It was in December, and the rivers froze and they couldn't get water to the fires.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: If you don't have water to fight the fire, the city burns down.

JAD: It's pretty simple.

DIANE GALUSHA: Yeah, 700 buildings.

JAD: That's our starting point. A New York City that could not grow. And by the way, the guy we just heard?

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: John "Chick" Donohue.

JAD: He's a sandhog. Part of the long line of guys who blasted New York out of its poopy pond phase and into its future.

JAD: Can I ask you a question? Why are you guys called sandhogs? Why wouldn't you be called tunnel blasters or earth movers or something that's more—do you have any idea where that name comes from?

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Yeah, it comes from the dictionary. Really. And I love the look on people's faces when they ask me that and that's the answer. It's described in Webster's Dictionary as ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: A laborer who digs or works in sand.]

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: The original sandhogs were the soft ground guys. Compressed air. That's where you ...

JAD: To back up for a second, when the city decided to scrap the pond in favor of clean water from upstate, it faced a couple of challenges. And this was also true when they decided to build the ...

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Subway system.

JAD: Namely, nature. Like, how do you, for example, build a tunnel under a river?

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Well, there were sandhogs. You send them down, they dug. Literally dug with what we call mucksticks, shovels, under the river. 60, 50, 100 feet under the bottom of the river.

NIK SOKOL: Men with shovels, excavating ground.

JAD: That's Nik Sokol.

NIK SOKOL: I'm a tunneling engineer. Generally, it's a dark, dank place.

JAD: Now the obvious engineering problem is that the river bottom, which is now above their heads, is soft.

NIK SOKOL: Sands and silts and gravels.

JAD: How do you keep that from not falling on your head?

NIK SOKOL: That's when compressed air started being used.

JAD: The basic idea, says Nik, is that these huge pumps would basically pump air into the tunnels at such pressure that it would basically push the ceiling up.

NIK SOKOL: Exactly. So the mud doesn't cave in on you.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: The compressed air holds that thing from collapsing in on you.

JAD: Usually. The engineers on the shore had to get the pressure just right, says Chick, because if they didn't, you'd get this absolutely terrifying situation that is maybe the best cocktail party story ever.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: We used to give an award. We haven't given it in many years. We call it the Marshall Maybe award. They were doing one of those tunnels to Brooklyn. The men were up in the face of the tunnel, they're digging away.

NIK SOKOL: And then very suddenly ...

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: There's a blow out.

JAD: In the face of the wall, a puncture hole develops. Tiny at first but it quickly becomes ...

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Bigger and bigger.

JAD: Until it's the size of ...

NIK SOKOL: Sort of like an eye.

JAD: Then a whole head. And all the compressed air rushes into that hole.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: It would be like if you shot a hole through an airplane. All the air would—pshooo!

JAD: Hats are flying into this hole. Lanterns, shovels. Then a guy goes into the hole.

ROBERT: A guy?

JAD: Yeah, a human being into the hole! And another guy, then a third.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: The third guy must have been the luckiest sandhog in the world.

NIK SOKOL: This is an article from the New York Times. "As I struck the mud, it felt as if something was squeezing me tighter than I'd ever been squeezed before."

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: He blew through all that 60 feet of muck, then through the river, up to the surface. The pressure blew him right up into the air.

NIK SOKOL: "They tell me I was thrown about 25 feet above the water when I came out, but I don't remember that." That's remarkable. [laughs]

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: And he came back down and landed right alongside a police boat.

JAD: In the water?

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: In the water. So they took him, they cleaned him up. He went home, he came to work the next day.

JAD: What?

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: That's why they gave him the award. That's why the award is ...

JAD: You're kidding me!

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: No, I'm not kidding you.

JAD: In the early days, no one kept track of how many people died building New York's tunnels. The number is probably in the thousands.

JAD: So wait, this right here, this plaque that we're looking at ...

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: This plaque was donated.

JAD: This is Ritchie Fitzsimmons. He's the current head of the Sandhogs Union, and we're standing in front of a big stone plaque with two dozen names on it.

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: It's in memory of all the people that we lost in tunnels in New York City since 1970, you know, since we started keeping records. Some more of the photos, come on.

JAD: Later, he showed me a picture which really underlined the point. It's a picture of him on his first compressed air job.

JAD: Oh wow, look at that!

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: This is myself.

JAD: He's 19. He's huddled with five other guys, and they're in this crowded tunnel and they're all black with soot. And he points to each guy in turn.

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: Dead, dead, dead, dead, had cancer, is still alive, still alive.

JAD: If you ask any of the sandhogs why they do this, mostly they'll tell you, "Well, we've got to. The city can't grow without its tunnels." But you also get answers like this from Chick.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: [coughs]

JAD: He says when you're down there, and it's pitch black and you're just walking along ...

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: You're 600 foot under Manhattan, you're at approximately 30th Street or something. You're in the middle of the greatest city in the world, nobody even knows you exist. Nobody has a clue. It's just beautiful. It's a weird place. It's like being on a planet somewhere.

JAD: He says when he's literally in this rock that is half a billion years old, he sometimes feels very humbled.

JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: You're in the middle of the Earth. You want to see nature? Here it is.

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: That's a romantic way of saying it. The human reality of it is ...

JAD: Here's Ritchie's take.

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: Remember when you were a kid, and they used to give you the ant farms and the ant farms were big? We are ants. The ants, there's so fricking many of them that if you gotta squish a few, if they've gotta use each other to step over each other to keep that whole thing, that's it.

JAD: That doesn't sound very grand the way you're putting it.

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: That's reality.

JAD: Our job is conquer nature, he says, plain and simple.

RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: We're builders. Human beings are builders. And collectively, there's nothing that we can't do. Nothing.

JAD: October 14, 1842.

DIANE GALUSHA: Oh, it was a huge celebration.

JAD: Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lined Broadway.

DIANE GALUSHA: There was firing of cannons and the ringing of church bells. Fireworks even.

JAD: And at the end of it all, says Diane, everybody gathered in City Hall Park.

DIANE GALUSHA: And they turned a big fountain on and ...

JAD: Water shot 50 feet into the air. New York City would never be the same. It could finally be a city. But here's where you start to wonder a little bit about the real legacy of cities. What you see almost immediately after this moment, according to Diane, is that water usage ...

DIANE GALUSHA: Skyrocketed.

JAD: Suddenly, you had indoor plumbing.

DIANE GALUSHA: All the new buildings were being outfitted with water closets and ...

JAD: Kids were playing in the hydrants all day long. And to make a long story short, just 10 years later, the city is out of water again. So they gotta build more tunnels and then more, and if you follow the water in those tunnels back upstate, you see that the city is gobbling up reservoirs.

DIANE GALUSHA: One after another.

JAD: Dozens. Which meant it had to kick people off that land.

DIANE GALUSHA: A thing called imminent domain.

JAD: Their villages would have to be ...

DIANE GALUSHA: Bulldozed and burned.

JAD: Cemeteries.

DIANE GALUSHA: Uprooted.

JAD: Do you see what's happening? I mean, you could see this city that we live in as a kind of monster. It's just always hungry. Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat!

ROBERT: Well, wait a second! Because, like, there is another logic available here. If you took all the people in New York City, all those New Yorkers ...

JONAH LEHRER: You know, if you have every inhabitant of New York City suddenly left New York City and moved to small towns all across America, you would need a ton of resources to make that possible.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer again, by the way.

JONAH LEHRER: So in a sense, New York City saves lots of forests.

ROBERT: Saves lots of water. And the reason why? Well, that takes us back to Geoff and Luis's ideas about cities.

GEOFF WEST: Well, I suppose ...

ROBERT: Because it all started years ago. Geoff at the time was studying, this time it was living things.

GEOFF WEST: Let's go back to biology for a moment.

ROBERT: He looked at a huge variety of creatures, and for each one, he collected data.

GEOFF WEST: Everything from its metabolic rate to length of its aorta. How quickly it breathes.

ROBERT: And he discovered something kind of fascinating about creatures as they grow bigger and bigger.

GEOFF WEST: If you double the size of an organism, you double the number of cells that need to be sustained. You would therefore expect that the energy you need to supply would double. You'd double the number of customers, so to speak.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Yeah.

GEOFF WEST: No.

JAD: No?

GEOFF WEST: That is not the case. Instead of doubling, it needs less energy per unit cell to sustain the whole organism. So there is a kind of ...

ROBERT: So wait a second. That means that the cell is somehow doing more with less?

GEOFF WEST: Right.

JAD: Does that also mean, though, that an elephant cell somehow is more efficient than a mouse cell?

GEOFF WEST: That's correct.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT: And Geoff says the way they do that is pretty simple. They just move slower.

GEOFF WEST: They process energy at a slower rate.

ROBERT: So if you take a mouse cell, a cell that lives in a mouse and does its work, brings in resources, spits out the waste, brings in more resources, spits out the waste, it does this to a particular beat. But now, says Geoff, if you listen to an elephant's cell, bringing in stuff and then pumping out the waste, it's moving obviously slower. So it's using less energy in a given moment which makes it more efficient.

JAD: And what does that have to do with cities?

ROBERT: Turns out, cities work kind of the same way.

JONAH LEHRER: In cities, you see the same kind of efficiency when it comes to infrastructure.

GEOFF WEST: Electricity.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Length of roads.

GEOFF WEST: Water.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Length of pipes. Length of electrical cables.

GEOFF WEST: Gasoline.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: How much gas is consumed.

GEOFF WEST: Here's the point. The bigger the city, the less roads you need per capita.

JAD: What does per capita mean anyways?

ROBERT: Per person.

JAD: Per person.

GEOFF WEST: The less electrical cable lines you need per capita, the less gasoline stations you need per capita, et cetera, et cetera.

JONAH LEHRER: So every unit of pipe carries more water or more sewage. Every line of electrical wire carries more ...

JAD: All right, all right. Geoff, does that mean then that if I move to a bigger and bigger city, do I, in a sense, become greener the bigger the city I live in?

GEOFF WEST: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a very interesting ...

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Yeah, it's a very good question.

JAD: And this is where Luis and Geoff ...

LUIS BETTENCOURT: I think the case is still a little bit out.

JAD: And even Jonah.

JONAH LEHRER: It gets complicated when you ask, "Are people more or less efficient?"

JAD: This is when everybody starts to throw in all these caveats and qualifications.

GEOFF WEST: All these other variables.

JAD: And quivocations and ambivalations and prognostications and dipilations. Let me just tell you what I think.

ROBERT: I think you'd better.

JAD: All right, we all love to talk about how green we are when we live in cities. This is something everybody in the city talks about, right?

ROBERT: Because we are. Because we take the subway and the bus. We don't drive and driving is the most energy-consuming thing.

JAD: Right, but listen to me. The analogy that you just gave me?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: It does not work. Okay, you said that cells, as they go from small bodies to big bodies slow down.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Well ...

JONAH LEHRER: Cities, the opposite happens of course. As cities get bigger, each individual unit in that city moves faster.

JAD: Thank you, Jonah. We speed up.

ROBERT: That's true.

JAD: We learned this earlier—and this is not trivial, okay? Because as we speed up, we bump into more people, we have more ideas, we invent new things, we want more things. We want more.

GEOFF WEST: More of everything.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: New tastes, new ideas.

JONAH LEHRER: More interactions, more human friction.

JAD: More!

ROBERT: More choices.

JAD: Yeah, a better life. That's what a city's all about.

ROBERT: Is there anything wrong with that?

JAD: No, not at all, but all I'm saying is there's a cost to it that we don't acknowledge.

JONAH LEHRER: West and Bettencourt did this back of the envelope calculation, where it's long been known that a body at perfect rest, if you lie in your bed all day in a coma, you will consume about 91 watts of electricity.

GEOFF WEST: That's called your basal metabolic rate.

JONAH LEHRER: If you're a hunter-gatherer living in some tribe in New Zealand, you will consume about 240 watts of electricity every day.

GEOFF WEST: The energy just simply to stay alive, plus the energy you need to hunt and gather.

JONAH LEHRER: However, if you are living in America, the wattage required to drive your car, run your computer, make your clothes ...

GEOFF WEST: Heat, air conditioning, being able to go to movies.

JONAH LEHRER: On and on and on.

GEOFF WEST: All of the various things that constitute our life. If you add all those up ...

JONAH LEHRER: Your lifestyle requires about 11,000 watts of electricity every day.

ROBERT: Whoa!

JONAH LEHRER: That's more energy than a blue whale requires.

ROBERT: Now some of you listening, particularly if you're an engineer, you may think, "Wait a second, why are you calling these watts when it's power through a system? Power through a human? Call them joules. That's the technically correct word." And then you'd be right, wouldn't you? But the numbers are the same, so we'll just call them watts.

JONAH LEHRER: So one way to look at what cities have enabled us to do is basically live like 300 million blue whales in America.

ROBERT: Are you sure that cities are causing this development? That it begins and ends with cities?

JAD: Yeah, I can't assign it all to cities, but that psychology of wanting more, that's a city psychology. That's why people come to cities. And then the lifestyle that grows up around that gets broadcast out on TV and radios and movies—which are city industries—out to the country. And if you just take a historical look at this, like, the last 300 years have seen more and more consumption, right? And that trend, says Jonah ...

JONAH LEHRER: It's grown in neat parallel with the growth of cities. Cities have enabled that kind of growth.

ROBERT: Even if you guys are right, and we know that half the planet already is living in cities ...

JAD: Eighty percent of America.

ROBERT: So yes, there are more people. I'll agree with that.

JAD: More choices.

ROBERT: Asking for ...

JAD: More consumption, more energy, more, more, more, more, more.

ROBERT: [laughs] Even if that's so, cities, because they also are ingenious and they come up with all these new ideas, maybe cities will solve the problem. Right now, Jad, someone somewhere in Calcutta is about to invent the super light bulb elevator telephone pipe that will make it possible for another 200 catrillion people to live together in peace, harmony and beauty—until the next round.

JAD: All right, you go ahead and cling to that optimism.

ROBERT: And you, of course, can go hang yourself in the corner. So we'll be right back. I'm Robert Krulwich, that's Jad. This is Radiolab.

[LISTENER: Hey, this is John calling from the city of brotherly love. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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