Days of Future Past

I meant to be already retired by now, but HR tells me they’re still looking and can I stay a bit longer, and otherwise they’ll sue me. So, I stay. (I think Maggie is bribing HR.)

The closer I get to that possible retirement, the more books I find myself reading. I’ve always been a reader, though I seem to have more time for it now. If you've followed my blog, you can probably guess I tend toward history, with an emphasis on logistics, architecture, and construction.

My most recent read is Daniel Brook's A History of Future Cities. Despite the name, it's not science fiction. Instead, it's a history of four cities (St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Dubai, and Shanghai) that have undergone rapid Westernization and industrialization by their rulers in an effort to turn them into world class cities.

These “instant cities” all have histories that eerily echo one another. They all seem to have gone through remarkably similar life cycles:

• They began as nothing, or as a provincial backwater, then were built up massively in a very short time by order of their rulers.
• They undergo a period of absurd Westernization, to the point of hiring exclusively Western architects, who often never even go to the cities before designing their buildings.
• They all undergo a period of rejection and resentment by the rest of the nation.

These cities are most strongly characterized, however, by their rejection of the traditional ways of their country.

Each city is, of course, still extremely distinct from one another. Dubai, for instance, has a population that's 97% foreign workers, divided between affluent foreign businessmen and poor itinerant laborers shipped in from other countries and paid a pittance.

Mumbai is surrounded by and interwoven with one of the world's largest slums.

Shanghai disguises all of its poor workers it imports in uniforms and houses them in dorms on the outskirts of town.

Brook does an excellent job exploring the rise and fall of cities in regions trying to rapidly adapt to and join the technological West. The result is that these cities become not just comparable power players but places actually trying to be the West, in a very real sense.

Though A History of Future Cities definitely tends towards the somber at times, it's a surprisingly gripping read.

Dashingly Superstitious

I love researching the historical underpinnings of superstitions.

Take spilling salt, for example. A common superstition says that if you spill salt, you need to throw a little bit over your shoulder. This isn't actually the whole story, though.

You're supposed to throw it over your left shoulder (into the eye of the devil lurking over it) without touching the thrown salt with your thumb or index finger.

The superstition has a few possible origins. Some claim that Judas spilled salt at the last supper. Da Vinci actually painted Judas spilling salt in “The Last Supper.” Others think it came from the fact that salt was extremely expensive in the Middle Ages. That one seems rather reasonable to me, except that then throwing it over your shoulder as a cure for the bad luck doesn't make a ton of sense.

Another superstition says that you should hold your breath when passing a cemetery. If you don't, a spirit might fly into you. I'm actually going to argue that this one doesn't make sense anymore. In the Middle Ages, graveyards were dank, miserable places. Graves were cramped, placed close together, and often shared. Burials were often shallow, so bones would stick out. The gravestones were decorated with grim and gloomy reminders of eternal suffering. They were dank, awful places—both by design (to compel people to the Church) and by poor urban planning (cities tended to be cramped and without green space).

In the 1800s, this began to change. People began to have a very different view of humanity: rather than being doomed, sinful creatures, we instead began romanticizing humanity, and began considering it naturally good.

Graveyards became cemeteries. The word cemetery comes from the Greek koimeterion, meaning “place of rest.” We started honoring our dead, placing them more widely apart, and giving them beautiful, well-tended green space. In fact, the first cemeteries built this way were such popular tourist attractions that they began inspiring American cities to begin building parks and having more green spaces in the city.

So why doesn't that superstition apply anymore? Well, it would make perfect sense that spirits would want to leave a dank, miserable graveyard. A cemetery, though? Sounds to me like a pretty nice place to rest once you're gone.

Statues in Ordos, Looking for Some Company

China is full of ghost cities.

Huge, sparkling, well designed new cities. With no one living in them.

For the past couple of decades, China has been building brand new cities and neighborhoods for people to move into. And yet no one wants to.

Ordos City—specifically, the Kangbashi New Area—is the most famous of these ghost cities. The Kangbashi district was designed to be a brand-new city of a million people, in order to help deal with infrastructural problems in the existing nearby city of Dongsheng.

The growth of the nearby Ordos desert had been causing water shortages in Dongsheng, so the new city was designed and built some 16 miles away, near several pre-existing reservoirs. Despite the beauty of the new city, the impressive high-tech public works, and the incredibly cheap real estate, no one wanted to move there for a long time.

Even today, only some 150,000 people live there.

It's not an isolated case, either. Most new cities constructed from scratch have similar problems attracting people. Why is that?

Successful new cities tend to grow for a reason. Oil or mineral resources are found, and workers are brought in. New industry is opened up. Shipping lanes change. And so on and so forth.

Historically, there has to be an economic incentive to start a new city. Just building a new city won't necessarily attract anyone.

That's not the whole story, though. People want to move somewhere where they know people, or where they know that there will be good schools and cultural activities. On top of that, cities tend to grow organically. People usually prefer moving into neighborhoods that have arisen naturally, rather than being completely planned out.

Cities aren't just buildings and infrastructure. They're the people in the buildings, the culture the people build, and the history behind them.

Redundancy is really important in infrastructure engineering. Redundancy is really important in infrastructure engineering. Redundancy is really important in infrastructure engineering.

Strength in Redundancy 

On December 15, 1969, the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, collapsed, killing 46 people. If this sounds familiar, it's because a terrible movie, The Mothman Prophecies, was made about it.

Ignoring said terrible movie, however, the Silver Bridge incident offers many important lessons about engineering and infrastructure planning.

Poor design and poor maintenance were the main contributors to the actual collapse of the bridge, along with the bridge carrying much heavier loads than it was designed to handle. The Silver Bridge was an eyebar-chain suspension bridge. An eyebar is a long, straight metal bar with a hole—or eye—at each end used to attach it to other parts. Eyebar bridges weren't uncommon; they'd been in use for more than a century at the time of the collapse. 

Unlike other eyebar-chain suspension bridges, however, the Silver Bridge wasn't built with the safety redundancies others had. Other bridges of its type had chains of many redundant bar links with rows of four or more bars. Some even had multiple such chains. 

The Silver Bridge had links composed of only two bars each. The failure of even a single bar would result in complete collapse of the link—too much stress would be placed on the other bar in the link—which would break the whole chain on that side of the bridge.

May All Our Bridges Be Strong

To make the dangers even worse, the bridge used rocker towers, which could tip slightly in response to large loads. While this reduced some of the stress on the bridge, they required working chains on both sides to function. The failure of a single link in the eyebar chain would collapse the entire bridge. And that's exactly what happened.

In defense of the designers, the bridge was built in 1928, before much of our knowledge about bridge engineering had accumulated the hard way. On top of that, they had built it with particularly high strength steel. Still, it did fail in the end.

When considering how much redundancy to build in, there are a few things to keep in mind. Cost is the obvious one: building in redundancies can get expensive. Of course, if you can't afford them, maybe you shouldn't be building whatever it is in the first place.

Weight can also be a tricky consideration, and one that should be taken considerably more seriously than cost. Using high-cost components can replace some need for redundancies (though not to the degree of the Silver Bridge design).

The biggest lesson, though?

Redundancy is really important in infrastructure engineering. Redundancy is really important in infrastructure engineering. Redundancy is really important in infrastructure engineering.

Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy—Curious that you’ve ended your part of the alphabetical quote-off, and I’m still on C? Be suspicious. And just to even things up, a triple entry on my part so that we’ll both end, Affirmatively, at the same time. Been nice quoting with you this past year…what’ll we do now?

“Can miles truly separate us from friends? If we want to be with someone we love, aren’t we already there?”

— Richard Bach

“Baby: an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.”

— Elizabeth Adamson

“A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.”

— Bob Hope