Urban Library
“The Ghost Map”
from Urban Library
15 January 2008
Steven Johnson, 2006
Most densely populated cities in the world
“Density is our salvation,” says the landscape architect Dennis McGlade, and Steven Johnson agrees. “We now see cities as environmentally responsible communities because their energy footprints are so much smaller than other forms of human settlement…New York City,” he writes in the epilogue to The Ghost Map, “is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.” Not only that, “cities are where the action is. Cities are centers of opportunity, tolerance, wealth creation, social networking, health, population control, and creativity.”
After a dozen years of new-found American urbanity, Johnson’s is this generation’s first statement on cities. In quoting Jane Jacobs three times the author is self-conscious of this role. But what is remarkable about this edifying book is that Johnson makes his urban statement in the course of telling the story of a disease epidemic caused by over-crowded urban conditions. This kind of reverse-proof is a Johnson specialty. He quotes Walter Benjamin, “There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.” So we also learn that the very interventions against disease in mid-nineteenth century London made people sick (“The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population”); that the man partially responsible for the wrong-headed interventions is to be credited with the invention of public health; that two brothers who thought they were giving their mother a treat actually killed her.
The book is ostensibly about the Soho cholera outbreak of 1854 and how Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead, a reverend, came to discover the cause was drinking water contaminated by human waste. Aside from a handful of sloppy statements (“But at least Big Pharma is, more often than not, selling something that actually works,” e.g.), Johnson tells this story with control and a strong narrative handle. He circles every point of contention, asks questions, and gives scientific and evolutionary perspective. In this mode, one of his most interesting asides is to try understand how smart, liberal-minded people like Charles Dickens could follow the belief that disease was caused by miasma—bad odors. In overcoming this strongly held belief, Snow and Whitehead turn to systematic normative research, unearthing “genuine local knowledge,” that powerful something that makes a city neighborhood an idiosyncratic institution. For this effort, The Ghost Map describes the invention of mapping and the pleasure and reward of urban analysis.
—-NRP
