The 99% Invisible City

A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

By: Kurt Kohlstedt, Roman Mars

Narrated by: Roman Mars

From the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast, comes a guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities. Narrated by Roman Mars, with a bonus Q&A and a Full Episode of 99% Invisible.

Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean?

Or stopped to consider why you don't see metal fire escapes on new buildings?

Or pondered the story behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships?

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.

Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.

©2020 Roman Mars (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

the ins and outs of cities

I enjoyed the book thoroughly and wood recommended to anyone with a curious mind and such

Great book and podcast

99 % Invisible is one of my favorite podcasts so I was delighted to find a book length version.

An Excellent Book for Lovers of Hidden Treasure

This book is full of small stories about the hidden or lost stories about the mundane and everyday structures and designs in the places we live.

If you are a fan of history, design, architecture, or overlooked wonder in the world around you then you will like this book. It is read by Roman Mars, one of the authors and host of the 99% Invisible podcast, and he does a great job as usual and the structure of the book makes it great as a book to absorb in little chunks, it's a good book to read while reading other books.

Interesting Overlooked Facts

When I started this book, I thought this was uninteresting trivia. But as I got into the book, it became more and more interesting. The authors did a discerning job of picking and discussing hidden facts in a concise way. Many times I wished they would have continued the discussion, but I realized that they made the right choice not to get bogged down in the weeds. Roman Mars has a wonderful, rich voice and does a great job of narrating the text. Overall, this is an excellent audio book.

So much trivial fun!

This is a fun book for anyone curious or who likes trivia. Whether you live in a big city or a smaller town, there are still many little mysteries that you may wonder about and many others that you have probably never thought about. How do emergency personnel enter a locked building without breaking down the door? What are those spray-painted numbers and letters you sometimes see on curbs? Why do you see those external iron fire escapes on some buildings and not on others? 

This book is divided into 6 sections (Inconspicuous, Conspicuous, Infrastructure, Architecture, Geography and Urbanism) which are further divided into subsections of 125 short (most about 2-4 pages or 4-7 minutes reading time) descriptions of little trivia that you don’t need to know but that are fun and sometimes eye-opening and even inspiring. How about the man driving along a dark road in rural England who saw the reflection from the eyes of a cat on a branch and realized that he was about to miss the curve ahead (and the sharp droppoff beside it)? From that frightening incident, he got the idea for attaching light-reflecting glass “dots” along the edges of roads. His idea, which he called “cat eyes” was tried but didn’t take off until WWII regulations required driving with dimmed and partially covered headlights and afterwards spread around the world in various modifications.  

To give you a few examples, did you know that some old buildings in Britain can be dated by the size of their bricks? To pay for the disastrous war against the American colonies, King George III introduced a brick tax (per brick). Predictably to us, companies made their bricks larger and when the tax was then raised due to the falloff in revenue, they were made larger still. This went on until the government limited the size of bricks and doubled the tax on anything larger than regulation. The tax was finally abolished in 1850. Oh, and there was a window tax (resulting in boarded up windows), a chimney tax (resulting in neighboring buildings sharing a chimney and at least one disastrous fire), and a wallpaper tax (resulting in an explosion in the art of stenciling). Turns out that creative tax avoidance has a long history). 

Another section gives us a short history of the traffic light and it turns out that, at the corner of Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue in Syracuse’s Tipperary Hill neighborhood, an area with Irish roots, the first traffic lights kept getting shot out because the English Republican “red” was above the “Irish” green. Finally, the city relented and changed that one light so that the  green light was on top, and it still exists that way today. 

Then there is the city of angels, the home of Hollywood and Disneyland and for pretending it’s not really a semi-desert. There were oil wells throughout the Los Angeles area but the derricks were eventually disguised to beautify the area. But that’s not all. There are four small, man-made islands off the shore of Long Beach, each named for an astronaut. They were built in the 1960s for oil extraction, but they are covered with palm trees, elaborate “Potempkin Village” facades, and neon-colored accent lighting. The partnership of oil companies paid $10 million for this “aesthetic mitigation” designed by Joseph Linesch, the architect who had previously designed the fake environments at Disneyland and EPCOT Center. Go figure.

The printed book (some would say the only one that can legitimately be called a book, but I won’t go there) is illustrated with line drawings and includes a 20-page bibliography. The recorded book includes an interview with the authors and a sample from a podcast that the authors do with a similar name but not just about cities. It’s unconscionable that the recorded version doesn’t include a PDF with the drawings as many other audiobooks do and that lowers my rating. But, no matter which one you get, I can’t imagine any possibility that you won’t thoroughly enjoy it and Google will certainly get a workout as you lookup some of the places for more information.

Great book, great narration

Love the podcast, love the book, love the soothing and engaging pace and smooth tones of Roman Mars. This book is a great go-to for when you just need something to listen to, and is easy to pick up at any point. Content-wise, it's full of wonderful information about things we take for granted, and has made me look at so many things differently. My only complaint is that it's too short, as I could just listen to this forever (which is why the podcast is so great).

gonna but the physical book!

bought the audiobook because I enjoy the podcast. now I'm gonna go buy a bunch of the physical book to give as gifts because I kept thinking "this is fascinating! so-and-so would love this"!

CMONEYWET APPROVES

Thank you. Incredible listen. I Would definitely recommend to anyone that loves to learn! YEE

99 PI is the best

The book has the typical high quality expected from 99pi. I enjoy the podcast more because of all the production around it.

like this book...love the podcast

There is nothing wrong with this book. It's really good. Fun snippets of info about different aspects of city design, layout, and infrastructure that you never knew existed or wondered why they do exist they way they do. From early concepts for nighttime city lighting called moon towers, to the weird history of squirrels in cities, It's all good.
......but. I like the podcast better. I think if I had never heard the podcast I would have liked this book more. The podcast goes more into detail about each thing they cover. There are interviews with professionals as well as great research and historical context. And they cover a broader array of designs problem/solutions.
So,I recommend this book. But if you are reading this book, liking it, and have never heard the podcast.....Listen to the Podcast. It's not just more details about things covered in the book, it's more everything. Listen to the 99% invisible podcast.