Three, water-related bits of information floated into my mind recently and got me thinking. I read that Mexico City could run out of water by late June, as climate change has accelerated the depletion of the city’s already low and poorly managed water table. I read a similar article about Scottsdale Arizona last year. The level of the Colorado River, which provides water to millions of people and farms in Southern California and the Southwestern states, has been dropping to historic lows at the same time that people have been flocking to Arizona for cheap houses with lawns, golf, and a variety of other water-hungry activities. In 2023, for the first time, Scottsdale cut the water supply to several suburbs, forcing them to rely on private water delivery. Also last week, my friend
sent me a highly entertaining article by David Grann (who we are obsessed with. Grann Stanns stand up.) profilings NYC sandhogs. A sandhog is a term for a construction worker who works underground, in this case on NYC Water Tunnel No. 3, an immense subterranean channel to bring more drinking water to the city. Grann calls the tunnel, which is nearing completion, “the greatest construction project in Western civilization….” and virtually no one knows it exists. The tunnel is meant to relieve pressure on the city’s previous, hundred-year-old water tunnels, parts of which are beyond repair. If one of these tunnels were to fail before the completion of No. 3, an engineer quoted in Grann’s article describes the scenario as an “apocalypse.” It could potentially be years before running tap water was restored.Sometimes a threat brings the fragile balance of city life into sharp relief. The most essential systems in a city are often ones we’re privileged enough to ignore. I write a lot about things like neighborhood character, design, and vibrant streets. I think these are essential to our quality of life, but the foundational goods and services that allow large groups of people to cluster together in cities are much more basic — food, healthcare, water, trash removal, and electricity must arrive on time and in adequate supply. Think about getting an ambulance to a person having a heart attack. This task starts years or months before the incident with the regular training and hiring of EMS staff (something NY is currently struggling to do). The speed of the response is determined by communications technologies like 9-1-1, the amount of traffic on the day, the distribution of hospitals, and the design of the streets the ambulance has to drive over. The quality of these elements has life and death stakes. When Michael Bloomberg was New York City’s mayor he used to hold regular press conferences to tout improvements in the yearly Mayor’s Management Report, the document that collects performance data from city’s agencies such as 9-1-1 response times, snow removal times, and processing times for welfare. I had my issues with Bloomberg but he understood that a huge part of running a city was delivering nuts and bolts foundational services… and he was generally pretty good at doing so (our current mayor… needless to say does not hold similar press conferences). These are monumental tasks. In addition to responding to all the heart attacks, New York City has to dispose of 14 million tons of solid waste a year, enough to reach the moon and back several times. If you drained the city’s drinking water tunnels you could walk comfortably through them from Manhattan 70 miles north into the Catskill Mountains where the reservoirs are. The Dept of Environmental Protection uses an 800-pound submarine to swim through the miles of tunnels looking for cracks.
These are engineering feats of insane scale, but, beyond technical wizardry, how we provide basic services says as much about our politics and culture as it does our technical skills. Water specifically has a foundational role in city-building. The geographer Matthew Gandy writes that:
“ The history of cities can be read as the history of water… Water is a multiple entity: it possesses its own biophysical laws and properties, but in its interaction with human societies it is simultaneously shaped by political, cultural, and scientific factors.”
In late 1700s New York, the city’s public wells were so inadequate that fires raged without enough water to fight them. The wells were also filthy, spreading cholera epidemics that caused substantial numbers of citizens to flee The lack of water threatened growing industry, and speculators wanted to fill in the Manhattan pond where most people got their water so they could build housing over it. The public health and economic impact of water meant improving the supply became a political platform. Scores of unemployed sailors also roamed the streets, ready to be put to work on large infrastructure projects. At first, the city turned to private interests to solve the problem. Chase Bank can trace its roots to the corporation set up by Aaron Burr to lay water pipes in the late 1700s. Burr’s company hastily constructed a cheap system of pipes and wells, then charged exorbitant rates for water that wasn’t much cleaner than the public sources. By the early 1800s other cities had started to create publicly owned water systems paid for by taxpayers and New York followed suit. Creating a public water utility was controversial among city leaders who feared the political impact of raising taxes. But when the issue was put to a city-wide referendum New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly for it. Water, waste disposal, and the generation of power are things individual households used to provide for themselves —the trudge to the well, throwing your slop into the street, burning your own firewood. Now we provide these things collectively at low individual cost, but as New York’s history shows, It took decades for this to become the norm.
What’s interesting about many of these goods is how generating them often forces cities to reach beyond their boundaries. The boundaries of New York City may end where the five boroughs do, but its impact ranges far north to upstate reservoirs and west to garbage dumps as far away as Ohio into what Gandy calls a city’s “ecological frontier.” David Grann’s article briefly describes the imperial way in which New York City transformed the upstate region to create its water supply:
Twenty-five thousand acres of land, including hundreds of homes around the area of Shokan, which is just south of Woodstock were taken. Nine villages were torn down, some burned to the ground, and nearly three thousand residents driven out; even cemeteries were dug up.
The woods and reservoirs today look like pristine patches of nature. But, for a drop of rain falling on an upstate tree to end up in your cup requires a highly protected and engineered system. Picturing the city as a living organism would reveal a vast circulatory system, with tendrils snaking out across the country in search of nutrients and others running in the opposite direction to deal with waste. For years NYC cooked a portion of its organic trash into a sludge that acted as a fantastic crop fertilizer. The city shipped this sludge at great cost to farms in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and citrus groves in Florida which grew crops that inevitably ended up back in NYC.
These supply chains are infinitely complex, and when something has a lot of parts it increases the chance of failure (Consider the inability of cities like Flint MI to remove lead from their aging water pipes). Many of these systems are laden with externalities. We drink more water than we can capture and make more trash than we can dispose of. A vast system of farm irrigation, hydropower, and drinking water was built around the Colorado River. It worked great until the fundamental balance was upset by too much demand and climate change limiting the supply of water. When I worked as a consultant on a planning project in the Middle East, the drinking water supply for the district we were building was meant to come from oil-powered plants that filtered the salt out of seawater from the Persian Gulf and piped it almost 300 miles inland. It doesn’t take a trained planner to appreciate the absurdity of this arrangement and wonder about its long-term impact on the environment. The strangeness goes beyond natural resources and garbage to services as well. The UK is currently dealing with a chronic shortage of nurses. For years the country relied on nurses from Eastern Europe who would accept low pay. Brexit scrambled that calculation forcing the National Health Service to look to countries like the Philippines for cheap replacements while struggling to attract and train nurses from the UK itself. The ability to provide healthcare became dependent on a supply chain of cheap labor that spanned the globe, and when that chain was disrupted nothing replaced it.
Is the answer to providing foundational goods and services more complexity and technical wizardry, looking ever farther away for a place to dump trash, extract water, and hire nurses? The experimental planning and architecture firm Terreform has an ongoing project considering what it would take for New York City to become self-sufficient within its boundaries. Could you grow food, extract water, generate power, and dispose of waste without looking outside the city for answers? To generate enough food for example our entire landmass would have to be turned over to vertical farms and rooftops of chicken pens. Crops would grow in the highway medians and parks. A huge chunk of the population would work at least partially in farming. Our restaurant scene would disappear, as there would be little variety in our ingredients and many would only be available seasonably. We would have plenty of chicken but probably little to no beef. The project’s authors acknowledge that these steps are absurd. We may not want 100% of our city to be devoted to food production but what would even 5% do? Would we still have food deserts? Would the price of certain groceries stabilize? What would it do culturally and socially for a greater number of people to know what it took to grow food? The Terreform project is worthwhile because it shows what’s possible if we look closer to home. After all, the same water that falls in the Catskills falls in New York City. The non-profit Grow NYC estimates there are 140 rainwater capture systems active in the city now irrigating urban farms, community gardens, and parkland. Each of these is one less sprinkler attached to a pipe that reaches out to the city’s ecological frontier. Maybe the future looks less like a decade-long construction project and more like a barrel sitting on your roof collecting rain.
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We live next to the town of Neversink in the Catskills, much of which was drowned under eminent domain to make the Neversink Reservoir. Old timers here are still mad about what they call the "citiots."
Loved this, of course, as always. I've long been fascinated by the fact that the site of the current New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue was once an above-ground reservoir. On the 40th Street side, you can still see part of the wall with a wave-like design molded from the concrete.