Radiolab - Cities

Episode Date: October 8, 2010

In this hour of Radiolab, we take to the street to ask what makes cities tick.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Hey, man, how are you? Doing very well. Yourself? So, Aaron set this up. Who are we about to meet? So this is Skip Sherry. He lives in Brooklyn.

That is, we should say Aaron Scott. He's a reporter. Who turned us on to Skip. And Aaron met up with Skip because he had this experience. That's coming to a lot of people. who moved to New York City. Just tell us where you grew up. I grew up in the country outside of Athens, Ohio,

on 54 acres of wooded land. I would work all day as a kid in the heat. Hoeing and picking strawberries. Hauling water. Planting trees. He'd play in the woods. I loved the woods. But as he got older, he knew he couldn't stay in Athens.

Why not? Well, he's a musician. He wanted to make a living at it. So he bounced around for a bit. And then finally at age 30. There was no place to go except for New York. So it wasn't a matter that you wanted to live in New York? No, I didn't want to live in New York.

It was your last option. It was my last option. And he hated it. Because it was ugly to me. You know, like too many humans, too much concrete. Yeah. You know, one theory about autism is that the things that come into an autistic kid's brain all have equal value.

They don't know how to sort through it. And when I first came to New York, it was really... It is pretty overwhelming. I had decided to leave, for sure. But then, take us to the roof. I was lucky when I first moved here. So he's staying with a friend who lives in this big building in Brooklyn Heights. Right across from the Twin Towers.

And it's 36 stories high. And he decides one lonely night to go up onto the roof. And there's this intense fog. And the Twin Towers, the bottom of them, was covered in the fog, but not the top. So it was like they were floating. There's a little like a cuticle sliver of moon in the sky. And the foghorns are going, and the boats are slowly moving.

And there's this breeze. And I had this brass penny whistle that my father had given me. And I was standing there, I was playing it. And I was really, suddenly something clicked. I was like, oh, that must, those are all the bridges. That's Williamsburg Bridge. That's a Manhattan Bridge. There's the Brooklyn Bridge.

That's New York. It's small now. And I'm looking at the Statue of Liberty, and my grandmother, Anastasia Pani, came from Albania, and they went to Ellis Island. I could see my history there, too. And suddenly it hit me, like, oh, my goodness, this is like a coral reef.

You can't see the people, but look at this beautiful structure they have created. That fog and that air. It was just the whole city was breathing. The whole, the nature was breathing. Everything was breathing. Connected on the spiritual level to the city for the first time. And so Skip decided to stay.

For a while. For a while. All over the world, people are now moving. Of course, we know this from the country to the city. At this point... The world two years ago crossed this extraordinary benchmark. That's physicist Jeff West. Where more than half of the planet is now urbanized.

51%. And that made us wonder. How do cities work? Is there some deep organic logic that holds all these people together? Or, as writer Joan O'Hara puts it, our city's just these tumors of people on the landscape. I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab, and our topic today?

Cities. Cities. I love them, but I don't know why. All right, so in talking about cities, it was kind of hard to know where to stop. start because every city has its own DNA kind of. Yeah, its own unique feel. Like, for instance, let me just give you my own stupid example here.

So every time I go to St. Louis to visit my mom, I'm on the plane, I'm in my own kind of groove, and I step off the plane into the airport, and it's just like, with the first step, you just hit this wall of something is different. Like, you feel the difference in your bones. Because. Well, that's the question. So is he there? I'm here.

What gives a city its feel? Oh, is this Mr. Bob Levine? This is Mr. Bob Levine. Mr. Bob Levine is a professor of psychology. California State University. And he thinks the answer to that question is time. Time. That each city warps time in its own unique way.

My cities are my subjects. He studied this idea for the past 30 years in all kinds of different ways. We looked at things like percentage of people wearing watches. How long does it take bank tellers in each city to change a $20 bill? Really? Yeah. And then we looked at talking speed. Really?

Talking speed. Yeah, we'd get on the phone and call post offices, since that seemed like something that would be available every place and make a standard request. Would you tell me the difference between regular mail, certified mail and insured mail? Okay, certified is when you just need someone to sign for it. Then he says they'd calculate.

The number of syllables per second. Regular mail just goes air mail. You know, if it's out of Utah. Salt Lake City, Utah. 2.73 syllables per second. Then if you want to return receipt card to come back to your house. Springfield Mass. Pay an extra 70 cents.

You want to spend? Yes. 3.45 syllables per second. And this one? Certified is when you want... Not really sure where it's from because the tape lost the ID. But it could be Nashville. Proof of mailing and then you want to know who you want to return receipt.

And if it is Nashville. 2.65 syllables per second. Slow. Well, Springfield was like, phew! But the... The whole talking thing was just really a prelude for Bob. It got him into what I think he's most known for. And what we find most fascinating, we actually looked at walking speed.

Walking. Yeah. Well, what I would do is I would get into a new city. And I am in Mumbai, India, Jerusalem. When I was Saita City, Chiang Mai, Thailand. We actually put out a call to Radio Lab listeners everywhere. We're in Buchanan in Liberia. To help us repeat the study.

Okay, good morning, radio lab. I'm recording from Dublin in Ireland. Downtown Osloak. Copenhagen. I would get into a new city and... Step one. I would scope out main business and shop in the area. I'm in Bukstawayne.

Step two, get out some string. A roll of string. My red string. 60 feet long. 20 meters we used over here. We wouldn't say feet, really. Step three, use that string to measure out the distance. Now I just have to roll out the string.

Now you tape the one end to the sidewalk and I would just make a more. Step four and go undercover. Get into corridor and, you know... Be cool. You know, act like you're reading in paper. or waiting for somebody. All right. Found myself a discreet place.

I found a pretty nice spot here. Do you use a stopwatch? I would use a stopwatch. A stopwatch. It's a trusty beep. Watch is working. Ready? Are you ready, boo?

Okay. I'm ready now. And go. Start walking. And it all goes quiet the minute I want to start. Brilliant. Thanks, Tilton. This experiment was actually harder than you would think. Much harder.

That you love people. This is not very easy to do. Timing was an issue. trying to sell you stuff. No, no, no. I don't need a shoe shine. Very good shine. Look in my color.

Pigeons don't can't? No, pigeons don't can't. Okay. Are you ready, boo? All together now. Start walking. Go. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step.

Step, stiff, stiff, stiff. Actually, it didn't sound like that at all. They weren't in sync, as you can imagine. Every city had its own beat. Start. Step, stiff, stiff, stiff, stiff, stiff. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step. Which on some level we knew, but still the range, it was pretty amazing.

Stop, 12.2. Oslo. 14.4 seconds. Mumbai. 27 seconds. Buchanan. Liberia. Wow. 13.8. Buenos Aires. 12.13.

Mexico City. 10.1 seconds. Copenhagen. 21.5 seconds. Cheang 9. 11.57. Portland. 15 and a half seconds.

Jerusalem. Just to break it down. On the high end, you've got. Step, steps, you're on it. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step. Okay, she was 9.5. And that's 10.4. Who take, on average, 10.76 seconds to cover 60 feet.

Compare that to Buchanan Liberia. Step, step, step, step, step, step, looking around, something actually on the head. She got a teen pink blouse. Whose walkers covered the same distance in about 21 seconds. 21 seconds. So if you want to think about it in football terms, by the time the Dubliner has scored a touchdown, The guy from Buchanan, Liberia, is somewhere, I guess, around midfield. Something like that.

And the spooky thing. According to Bob Levine is if you do these under the same conditions, same place, you will get the same time. These times don't change. Dublin is always about this. Steps, step, step, step, step. And Buchanan, Liberia is always around this. Manhattan is we found as right about here usually. Step. Step. Step. Step. With thunder.

step. Step. Step. Step. Step. In pink, no Dublin, but not bad. But why the consistency? What is it that makes that walking speed? Yeah. Where does it come from? You know, I mean, is anybody beating the drum? How well can you change the walking speed?

Say a bunch of us got together and decided that we were just going to up it by 5% on a given day. Will we get everybody to do it? And will they even notice the difference? Do we make the city? Or does the city make us? Thank you. Two-hour walkers Milena

Monter Buenos Aires Mostofa Christopher Comet Liberia Jonathan Jerusalem Erakilliman and Copenhagen

Weta Oslo Aaron Scott Portland Oregon Ferry Santonacho Thailand Grand Fuller

Mordazia Mexico City Etadi and I'm in Mumbai Markham Nolan I'm Dublin in Ireland Props also to Daniel Estring And an assessment

Why I don't know Because they didn't They didn't say their name So we can put them in there Okay so getting back to that question I asked a second ago Why is it that cities develop particular beats?

I mean, is it because the city does it to the people? Or the people do it to the city? Yeah. And we ran into a couple of guys who may at least have the start of an answer. Yes. A couple of physicists, oddly enough, named Jeffrey West and Luis Bettencourt. This is Jeffrey and there's Luis on the other side of the table. They're at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

Lots of Mesa's and so on. Nothing like the cities we just visited. It's almost biblical in its expanse. Yeah, the blue skies just sort of make you brave and templative and all those good things. Brave enough, in fact, to claim from their high desert perch that these beats the meter of every city that we've just been to actually has underneath it a kind of logic. If you tell me the average speed of walking in some city X. Take our Rochester, New York, where people walk. about this video.

60 feet in 12.67 seconds. If you don't tell him Rochester, you just tell him the number of beats? He will tell you. The population is maybe one and a quarter million people. Actual population, 1.03 million people. And the average wage, about $16,000 a year. Actual average wage, $15,58. Wow.

But how? Where? Let me ask you a precise question. Are you 100% correct? Are you 80% correct? No, of course. Some things you will score close to 100%, other things 80%. But if you start with just the number of footfalls per unit of time,

they can tell you all kinds of other things about the same place. I can tell you how much crime there is in the city. Income, wages, GDP. Number of colleges. Restaurants. Fancy restaurants. Number of theaters. Police.

The number of patents are being produced here. Cultural events per capita. Number of theaters. Library. The number of... The number of... of AIDS cases it's going to have this year. Really? Really?

All of these things are correlated in a quantitative, and I use the word, predictive fashion. Wait, are you saying that just from the number of footsteps per given time, that you can tell me how many libraries there are? Yes. We can tell me how many you should expect. How many things can you count when you're... Oh, presumably, you know, an infinite number. But it's limited by the things for which there are data. They've got data from the U.S. Census.

That's Jonah Lehrer. He's written about Luis and Jeff, and he's the one who kind of got us thinking about all this. Japan. In China. Data from... From sociological surveys. Some data on cell phones. And when they put all these numbers together, they discovered a deep pattern. The call comes from the footsteps. No, not the footsteps. What do you mean? Even the footsteps are a reflection of this deep and fundamental pattern that governs everything. Just one fact. What is it? You really want to know?

Yeah, what is it? Size. Size. How many people live there? Size matters. Size is the largest determinant of all characteristics of a city. Right. They would say, tell me the size of the city,

and I can explain the vast majority of all these different variables that we can measure. Right. As a city scales up, they say. From 100,000 to 200,000, a million to 2 million, from 5 million to 10 million. Everything about it, all those things that they've been measuring, they scale up too, but they scale up. According to a very very...

simple mathematical formula. It does not matter that New York has big skyscrapers and is on the ocean and that Boise is in the Rocky Mountains that San Francisco is on San Francisco Bay. Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That can't be. I was with you right up until that last point. I mean, you go to the Midwest and it's landlocked and then you go to a port city and it's on a port. I mean, that's got to matter. It matters, but these actually are superficial effects and account for only 10, 20% of their variation. What they're saying is that those specificities, the local history, is in large part, insignificant. But it is completely overwhelmed by these generic laws of urban scaling.

That to me is a very interesting and surprising idea, simply because we don't think of cities like that at all. No, we certainly do not. That's because you're not a physicist, so you don't think, you know, abstractly in that regard. Well, why should I? Because sometimes it can be very useful. Remember, what these guys have done is they've just created an average profile for every size city. So if you're a $1 million or $7 million or $12 million, here's how many things you should have. Now you can ask, okay, let's look specifically that city and ask, is it overperforming or underperforming?

Right. So what are some cities that are overperforming for their size? Of the large cities, San Francisco is quite an innovative city. New York is about average. in terms of patents. New York's below average? New York produces, roughly speaking, the number of patents it should for a size.

You produce, for example, about twice as many patents as Boston. We do? Yay, that's something. That's something. But you should have produced many more, given the size difference between about whatever. We're just average because they're counting patents. I mean, we don't have engineers.

This is one of the problems with their larger theory, which is that they're relying on data. that the U.S. census collected. So that's a real blind spot. You're counting fabulous. If you ever can figure out a way to count fabulous. Yeah, because as a point, you're not taking into account what it actually, the experience of living in a place. Well, what a theory cannot do is tell you about the essence of New York, the New Yorkness of New York, so to speak, the soul of the city.

And where does that come from? Who knows? I mean, I think that's such a broad question. Well, obviously, it has something to do with lots of people being jammed into a tight space, bumping into each other. What the physicists would call human friction. And that's a story you can't really tell in math, but you can hear it. Take Skip.

He gave producer Aaron Scott a tour of his block in Brooklyn. Listen to who he bumps into every day. So he took us on this tour. First place we went was this Jamaican body shop. Body shop is in cars? Yeah. religion specialist. I mean, it's basically these, you know,

West Indies Jamaican guys listening to reggaeton and hip-hop. Reggae. No, well, I like all kind of music. All right, it's one place? And across the street from this is Kinderspiel. A hidden Orthodox Jewish cookie bakery. Around the corner from that.

It's a butcher that sells live goats and chickens. And here are the goats. And on the corner, a Hispanic Pentecostal church. And every Sunday, they give it up to God with this exceedingly enthusiastic band. And I huddle at the window

and I think this is the best music in the world. I feel that deeply. And then across the street from that one is a mosque. And it's beautiful in the inside. Wow. Across the street. There's this big building. And the proprietor of this space is a gay foot fetish film producer.

Show me your feet. Show me your feet. So wait a second. You've got Jamaicans. Orthodox Jews with the cookies, Hispanics, Jesus, Allah, goats. And gay porn? Show me your feet.

All on the same block? Absolutely. For me, that's the hammer and the nails. That's the raw ingredients. Now I'm going to take that home and I'm going to assemble it into a song. And when you heard it's music, could you hear all that stuff? Some of it is clearer than others.

The sounds of the neighborhood, like the regaton music of the West Indies auto body shops, he kind of takes them and then filters it through some device that makes it sound like bells. Oddly enough, the day that Aaron spoke with Skip Was the day Skip decided? He's leaving New York City and he put in his notice. Which I guess makes his latest album Sonic New York,

kind of a dear John letter to the city. You can hear it on our website, RadioLab.org. And Robert Levine's book, the one about walking and time and stuff, is called A Geography of Time. More information about that, too, on our website, RadioLab.org. Also, you can subscribe to our podcast there.

Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred Pieson Foundation. Produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Hey, I'm Janet Boomerad. I'm Robert Quilwich. This is Radio Lab. And our subject right now is cities. 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...

Changing. All the time. And that feeling that Skip had up on the rooftop, like the city was breathing? Maybe the city really is. Like a living thing. Well, yes, in some ways that's exactly right. They evolve. They grow. Think about it, says Jeff West.

Every day, every minute, incomes energy in. Food. Trucks. Water. People out goes. Garbage. Ideas, songs. Stories, people. Energy in. Energy in. Energy in. Energy in. Energy out. That's just what a city needs to do, says Jeff.

Quote, metabolize food, so to speak, because we're Without that, organisms and cities and so on will simply decay. So how does a city stay a lot? What does it really take for a city to grow? Well, that question got me thinking about New York and led me to a place I'd been wanting to go for a while. I hear the reverb a little bit. Where are you?

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. It's about nine feet wide, nine feet up. Perfectly polished cement.

And it seems to just go forever. So this is basically, like 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 work. It's when you walk through the streets in Manhattan. This is Catherine Mallon from the Department of Environmental Protection. These water tunnels are anywhere from 200 to 800 feet below your feet.

They just, they're silently there. And when you turn on your tap. And you take a drink. You are basking in a daily convention. that is born from blood, sweat, and death. To explain, you really have to go back to a time when there were no tunnels. This would be 1790, 1800 or so. Around that time, says historian Diane Galicia, New York's population.

It was booming. It tripled in 20 years. And you suddenly had 100,000 people all getting their water from the same spot. A large freshwater pond called the collect. And they had pigs running around by the hundreds and the chamber pots out in 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.

Often, she says, they throw their dead cows and everything else. In the pond. The same pond that they were drinking from? Right. No way. Not surprisingly, as the city grew, people got sick. In 1798, there was a yellow fever epidemic,

killed a couple of thousand people in cholera and typhoid. City officials were like, this has to change. And as if to accentuate the point in 1835, it was a huge fire. The fire department rushes out to put out the fire, but they can't. It was in December, and the rivers froze, and they couldn't get water to the fires. If you don't have water to fight the fire, the city burns down. It's pretty simple. Yeah, 700 buildings.

So that's our starting point. A New York City that could not grow. By the way, the guy we just heard. John Chick, done of you. 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. Can you ask you a question? Why are you guys called sandhogs? Why would you be called tunnel blasters or earth movers or something that's more...

Do you have any idea where that name came from? Yeah, it comes from the dictionary. Really? And I love to look in people's faces when they ask me that, and that's the answer. It's described in Webster's dictionary as a... A laborer who did. or works in sand. The original sand hogs were the soft ground guys.

Compressed air. 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 is also true when they decided to build the subway system. Namely, nature. Like how do you, for example, build a tunnel under a river? Well, they were sandhawks. So they went down, they dug.

Literally dug with what we call muck sticks, shovels. under the river, 50, 60, 100 feet under the bottom of the river. Men with shovels, excavating ground. That's Nick's Sokol? I'm a tunneling engineer. Generally, it's a dark, dank place. Now, the obvious engineering problem is that the river bottom, which is now above their heads, is soft. Sands and silts and gravels.

How do you keep that from not falling on your head? That's when compressed air started being used. A basic idea says Nick is that these huge. pumps would basically pump air into the tunnels at such pressure that it would basically push the ceiling up. Exactly. So the mud doesn't cave in on you. The compressed air holds that thing from collapsing in on you.

Usually. The engineers on the shore had to get the pressure just right, says Jake. Because if they didn't, you'd get this absolutely terrifying situation that is maybe the best cocktail party story ever. 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 are up in the face of the tunnel. They're digging away. And then very suddenly... There's a blowout. In the face of the wall, a puncture hole develops tiny at first, but it quickly becomes... Bigger and bigger. Till it's the size of...

Sort of like an eye. Then a whole head, and all the compressed air rushes into that hole. It would be like if you shot a hole through an airplane, all the air would... Hats are flying into this hole. lanterns, shovels, then a guy goes into the hole. A guy? Yeah, a human being, into the hole.

Fonk! Then a third. The third guy must have been the luckiest Sandhog in the world. This is an article from the New York Times. As I struck the mud, it felt as if something was squeezing me tighter than had ever been squeezed before. He blew through all that 60 feet of muck.

Then through the river, up to the surface, the pressure blew it. right up into the air. You tell me I was thrown about 25 feet above the water when I came out, but I don't remember that. That's remarkable. And he came back down and landed right alongside a police boat. In the water? In the water.

So they took him, cleaned him up. He went home. He came to work the next day. That's why they gave him the award. That's why the award is... No, I'm not kidding you. 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.

So wait, this right here, this plaque that we're looking at. This plaque was donated. This is Richie Fitzsimmons. He's the current head of the Sanhogs Union. And we're standing in front of a big stone plaque with two dozen names on it. It's a 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 little photos come on there.

Later, he showed me a picture which really underlined the point. It's a picture of him on his first compressed air job. Oh, wow. Look at that. This is myself. 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. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Had cancer.

Still alive. Still alive. Still alive. If you ask any of the sandhugs, why they do this. Mostly, they'll tell you what we've got. to, the city can't grow without its tunnels. But she also get answers like this, from Chick. He says when you're down there and it's pitch black and you're just walking along. And you're 600 foot under Manhattan, you're 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 just, it's a weird place. like being on a planet somewhere. He says when he's literally in this rock that is half a billion years old, he sometimes feels

very humble. You're in the middle of the earth. You know, this is, you want to see nature. It is. That's a romantic way you're saying it. The human reality of it is...

Here's Richie's take. 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 is so freaking many of them that if you've got to squish a few and if they got to use each other to step off each other

to keep that whole thing, that's it. That doesn't sound very grand the way you're putting it like you guys. That's reality. Our job is to conquer nature, he says, plain and simple. We're builders. Human beings are builders. And collectively, there's nothing that we can't do. Nothing.

October 14th, 1842. Oh, it was a huge celebration. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers line Broadway. There was firing of cannons and the ringing of church bells. Fireworks even. And at the end of it all, says Diane, everybody gathered in City Hall Park. Yeah, they turned a big fountain on and... 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 it water usage? Skyrocketed. Suddenly you had it into plumbing. All the new buildings were being outfitted with water closets. 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've got to build more tunnels and then more. And if you follow the water in those tunnels back upstate, you see the, The city is gobbling up reservoirs. One after another. Dozens, which meant it had to kick people off that land. A little thing called eminent domain. Their villages would have to be bulldozed and burned.

Cemetery. Uprooted. 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. Only a second, because, like, there is another logic available here. Like, if you took all the people in New York City, all those New Yorkers, you know,

if you had every inhabitant in New York City suddenly left New York City, city and move to small towns all across America, you would need a ton of resources to make that possible. That's Joan O'Leary, again, by the way. So, in a sense, New York City saves lots of forests. Saves lots of water. And the reason why, well, that takes us back to Jeff and Luisha's ideas about cities. Well, I suppose. Because it all started years ago.

Jeff at the time was studying, this time was living things. Let's go back to biology for a moment. He looked at a huge variety of creatures, and for each one, he collected data. Everything from its metabolic rate to the length of its aorta, how quickly it breathes. And he discovered something kind of fascinating about creatures as they grow bigger and bigger. 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.

Yeah, yeah. No? No. 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... Wait a second. That means that the cell is somehow doing more with less?

Right. Does it also mean, though, that an elephant cell somehow is more efficient than a mouse cell? That's correct. Huh. And Jeff says the way they do that, it's pretty simple. They just move slower. They process energy at a slower rate. 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 way, it does this to a particular beat. But now, says Jeff, if you listen to an elephant cell, bringing in snow and pumping out the waste, it's moving, obviously slower, so it's using less energy in a given moment, which makes it more efficient. And what does that have to do? with cities. Turns out, cities work kind of the same way. In cities, you see the same kind of

efficiency when it comes to infrastructure. Electricity. Length of roads. Water. Length of pipes. Length of electrical cables. Gasoline. How much gas is consumed. Here's the point. The bigger the city, the less roads you need per capita. What does per capita mean anyways? Per person? Per person. The less electrical cable lines you need per capita, the less gasoline stations you need per capita, et cetera, et cetera. So every unit of pipe, care. more water, more sewage. Every line of electrical wire carries more. All right, right.

Jeff, 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? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. And this is where Luis and Jeff... I think the case is still a little bit out. And even Jonah. It gets complicated when you ask, are people more or less efficient? This is when everybody starts to throw in all of these caveats and qualifications.

All these other variable. And equivocations and ambivalations and prognostications and dipolations. Let me just tell you what I think. I think you'd better. All right, we all love to talk about how green we are when we live in cities. This is something everybody in a city talks about, right? Because we are. Because we take the subway and the bus.

We don't drive. Driving is the most energy-consuming thing. But listen to me, the analogy that you just gave me, It does not work. Okay, you said that cells as they go from small bodies to big bodies slow down. Yep. Well, cities, the opposite happens, of course. As cities get bigger, each individual unit in that city moves faster.

Thank you, Jonah. We speed up. That's true. 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. More and more of everything. New tastes, new ideas.

More interactions. more human friction. More. More choices. Yeah, a better life. That's what a city is all about. Is there anything wrong with that? No, not at all.

But all I'm saying is there's a cost to it that we don't acknowledge. Weston Bedincourt did this back of the envelope calculation where it's long been known that a body at perfect rest, if you lie on your bed all day in a coma, you will consume about 90 watts of electricity. That's called your basal metabolic rate. If you're a hunter-gatherer living in some tribe in New Zealand, You will consume about 240 watts of electricity every day.

The energy is just simply to stay alive plus the energy you need to hunt and gather. However, if you are living in America, the wattage required to drive your car, run your computer, make your clothes. Heat, air conditioning, being able to go to move it. On and on and on. All of the various things that constitute our life. If you add all those up. Your lifestyle requires about 11,000 watts of electricity every day. Whoa.

That's more energy than a blue whale requires. 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 jewels. 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. So one way to look at what cities have enabled us to do is basically live like 300 million blue whales in America.

Are you sure that cities are causing this development, that it begins and ends with cities? 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? Yeah.

And that trend, says Jonah? It's grown in neat parallel with the growth of cities. Cities have enabled that kind of growth. Even if you guys are right, and we know that half the planet already is living in cities. 80% of America. So, yes, there are more people. I'll agree with that. More choices.

Asking for more. More consumption. More energy. More, more, more, more. 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,

a trillion people to live together in peace, harmony, and beauty until the next round. All right, you go ahead and cling to that optimism. And you, of course, can go hang yourself in the corner. So, we'll be right back. I'm Robert Crilwich. That's Jad. This is Radio Lab. Hey, this is John calling from the city of Brotherly Love.

Radio Lab 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. Hey, I'm Jana Boomrod. I'm Robert Krilwitch. This is Radio Lab. And our subject today is cities. And if cities are like organisms, then one thing we should say about every organism that's ever been.

They die. Yeah, they die. So you would think cities would die? You would. But Jonas says no. Cities die very, very rarely. And they almost never die if there hasn't been a total, total catastrophe. catastrophe, physical catastrophe.

Which is weird. You know, if you think about it, says Jonah, because like, take a company. And sometimes they can get very big so that they include hundreds of thousands of employees. And yet they die all the time. Of the 30 companies in the original Dow Jones, only three are still in the Dow Jones Index. If you took 30 cities from the 1920s, I can guarantee you all 30 of those randomly selected cities would still exist on the map. And the question is why?

Why don't they die like every other social organization? What is it about cities that gives them this crazy persistence? That question led us to a place that, by all measure, should have died long ago. A place called Centrelia. Okay, so we begin on the side of... Where are we? We're on Route 61 in eastern Pennsylvania. Right.

This is Pat, by the way. He's a producer at Radio Lab. Hello, hello, hello. I know who Pat is. Thank you very much. Anyhow. We're waiting for this guy named Tom to meet up with us. Hello, are you Tom?

Yep. Tom Hynoski. How you doing? I'm Chad. What are you going to see at here? Just now. And we had asked Tom to show us around this town. Probably the best place that goes up on the hill up there and look, you know, you can look over everything. Okay. Sure. So we go up on the hill with Tom.

We actually meet up with another Tom. I'm Dempsey. I was the former postmaster here. So we now have two Tom's. Tom, Tom. Very confusing. Anyhow, the four of us stare down into a valley. They used to have a town in it. It was all. It was all strong. streets with homes on them all over here. Now, Centralia is just trees.

Well, right down here was the... Tom 2 points to some trees. Burra High School. Over here... More trees. Setting nice as church. There used to be a playground right at the bottom of this little hill right here. You can still see the bars. This is where things get a little strange.

I mean, right next to the swing set, where kids used to laugh their little heads off, there's a hole in the ground. Right there, I can see some steam coming out of the ground. Spewing steam. And Pat and I would later discover when we got close to it that that steam was really hot. Feel it, it's hot and wet. Oh my God. Ha!

Motherf-p-de. Where exactly is the fire? Underneath this. Like, how far? Here? 50 feet, maybe. So 50 feet down. If it is.

The smell doesn't bother you guys? What smell? You can smell. It smells like burning tires here. No. No, that's not. That must be from New York. That's stuck in your nose.

Come on. It really did smell. But the thing no one can deny is that underneath our feet, there's a web of coal mines that stretches for miles. 40 miles in each direction, 30 miles. And somewhere in those mines is a fire that's been burning for 40 years. It has either destroyed this town. Or not.

Depending on who you ask. This is Pat right here. My name is Mary Lugahan. I'm 82 years old, and I lived in Centralia. Most of my adult life. What year were you born in? If you mind me asking? What year was I born?

Yeah. 1927. Mary Lugan grew up in a town not too far from Centralia. Tiny little farm town called Burnsville. And when she got to Centralia, she said, it was... Well, it was like moving to the city. It had a Legion, a drugstore, it had a... A couple thousand people.

Lots of bars was in Centralia. Somebody told me one time there were 22 bar rooms in Centralia. I don't know if that was true because I didn't frequent bar rooms at that age. In all these places that she just mentioned were right on top of each other. So when you were walking, walking around, you'd see people all the time. Just take for instance, you go to the post office after work. I'll show you where the post office was.

Tommy would be there sometime. I was postmaster here for a number of years. You're pointing into a forest. It's hard to imagine this stuff. It is hard to imagine. And I'd yell to the post office because your mail wasn't delivered. So I'd go up to the post office. I'd get my mail and you'd meet people in the post office.

You'd meet people coming out of the post office. Now this was a good football field here. Now it's all growing in, nobody's cutting the grass, there's bushes growing up. Tommy Dempsey'd have a story. I would be an hour until I got home. A whole hour. This is how Centralia was.

Okay, fast forward. It's Memorial Day, 1962. This is where the borough used to dump all their garbage. Now, the fire started. I'd say just about right here where I'm standing right now. Tommy points to a little patch of nondescript yellow grass. Like right here. How did it start?

Do we have any idea? Well, it started. The most likely scenario, he says. We also heard this from a writer named Joan Quigley. The author of The Day the Earth Gave-in. Is that people used to heat their homes with coal, and maybe somebody threw their ashes into the garbage, which then ended up onto the dump.

They caught the whole thing on fire. Furniture, rugs, carousine cans. Which, Joan says, wasn't that unusual. Some of the former firefighters said, you know, the dumps got on fire all the time. And usually the fires just fizzled out on their own. But this one, for whatever reason, before it did, wandered a little bit.

And it found its way over to an old. exposed. Exposed coal vein there. Basically an old strip mine that should have been covered but wasn't. So there was just a big open cavity. When the fire got in there and... Hit that coal vein. Poof.

Fire trucks came up here and they hosed down the fire until they thought it was out and they left. Following day somebody says, oh, we see smoke and steam coming out of the ground up there. So they came back the next day and they tried to get the fire out and they couldn't very well do it. They weren't getting it. Because at that point, it was too late.

I wouldn't know where to start with this mine fire. I wouldn't know where to start. The first place that fire camped out was right underneath Maryle's house. And from that point on, it kind of took over her life. My goodness. Are these are these are scrapbooks? When we were there, she pulled out these two gigantic scrapbooks. This is going to take four men to lift his book.

Each book is literally three feet tall, and they document in painful detail how that fire split the town in two. This is how intense I was with this mine fire. She heaved open the book, and she shied. showed us this picture of three people grouched on the street in front of a hole. This is my husband, my son, and me. Husband holding a thermometer. We dropped this down on it, like a fishing pole down on the...

Oh, like your ice fishing. Yeah. This is their way of measuring the temperature, the fire below. And what did it read? It was pretty high. 100 degrees high? 850, something like that. Under your house?

No, this was on the street. But the street right in front of her house. Oh, wow. And the garage was right, as you can see, the garage here. It was right there. She showed us another picture of her standing in her garage in front of a trench that they dug, and inside that trench, you see flames. Oh, we used to go out at night and watch the glowing and the embers.

Fire up there got so bad that some of Mary Lou's neighbors actually got government money to leave their houses. They were the first people bought out. Never once, like at the beginning, did you think, like, oh, maybe we should just get out of here? No. There's a fire, 100,000. Never. I never went to go. Instead, she did exactly the opposite.

This was my husband, and this was a big official. She dug in her heels, and started writing letters. Congressman, Nelligan, Musto, we wrote letters to him, we talked on the phone with him. I couldn't tell you all the congressmen we talked. Four governors, all the Harrisburg officials. And they were promising everything but the sun, but it never happened. But other than the people who lived on that street, many, many people in town didn't have to worry or even think about the minefire. Nobody ever believed that the fire was even serious since I'm trying to.

My husband, myself, and Helen Woomer. Oh, so everyone else was kind of like... It's uptown. The fire is uptown. All that changed on Valentine's Day, 1981. We're up a little bit higher because of this guy. A fellow named Todd Domboski, who at the time was just a boy. I was 12.

12-year-old boy. He was playing outside. And his grandmother's backyard. And I noticed some small wisps of smoke coming out of the ground. So he went over to take a look. As I bent down to investigate, I noticed that my feet were starting to sink in. It was really soft. It was like quicksand.

The more I tried the struggle, the more I was just opening the whole larger. And he wound up sliding. To my thighs, to my waist. Until he was... I was under. All the way underground. Surrounded by hot steam. Smoke was so intense.

Smells like rotten eggs. Whoa. Well, I was screaming for my cousin. And his cousin heard him and came running over. Flucked me out like a flower. What happened to him changed everything. Because suddenly, reporters were everywhere. Reporters from the evening heralds.

National news media. Everybody pointing their cameras at Todd. I seen smoke. I went over to see if it was the minefire. And when I did, I just fell right through. And doing stories about this town that was on fire. Beneath centralia, the underground coal fires still burn hot. Centrelia is an inferno.

That, the attention. Parts of Centrelia look like the outskirts of hell. It would focus on what had to happen for the town. It wasn't long, says Joan, before some of the younger residents... Very small, informal group of young parents. Organized a march. Down Locust Avenue down the main street in town. How many people are we talking about here?

A couple dozen, with red ribbons around their arms and their wrists. And they walked two by two down the main street of Centrelia, like striking mine. Mary Lou glared at them as they passed. I was bitter. I was bitter with... They claimed they were for helping the town to be saved, but they weren't. What they were really for, she figured, was get now.

They were looked for funds to get relocated. She even hated their name. Concerned citizens against the Centrelia mine fire. She thought, how are they the concerned citizens? She's the concerned citizen. She had been fighting the fire for years. Yeah. The media was there taking video.

Cameras filmed the marchers looping red ribbon over everything. And Mary Lou's neighbor Helen? Cut the red, Red Rimmons down. Because we fought so hard to trying to save Centralia, why did they want to do this? People like Mary Lou and Helen Wilmer. They started telling people. No, no, no. Here's why it's safe. Here's why you should say. And while parents from the other group were on TV complaining about gases. In the home, it could be a death house. Mary Lou, Helen and a few others started up their own committee. The United Centralia Area Mine Task Force. They got on TV themselves, and in the community they started printing up flyers.

Fact sheets. And handing them out. Yep, door to door. Okay, I call this meeting to order. At town meetings, the dueling committees would get up there and make their case. Get yelled down. Would it get rowdy? Absolutely ridiculous. Families fighting against families, neighbors against neighbors. There's Lambie.

It split the town apart. Who's that? David Lamb. This guy, David Lamb, ran a motorcycle shop in town, and he was also a member of this concerned citizens organization. And one morning at about 4 a.m. He was sleeping. in an apartment and someone

threw a Molotov cocktail through his plate glass window. Mary Lou showed us an article from a scrapbook. Related to Lamb's activities as an officer of concerned citizens. Wow. This is no joke. This is like the Sopranos. This was really

bad. And in the midst of all this chaos, Congress started considering a bill that would basically let them buy out the town. Some observers believe that for about $50 million, Centrelia could be totally bought out. And so the mayor decided, let's hold a referendum. And the issue was stay or go.

In the weeks leading up to the referendum, Mary Lou and Helen again went door to door, talking to people they'd known their whole lives. And pretty much everyone they talked to said, I really want to stay. My mother wants to stay. August 11th, 1983. Shortly before 10 this evening,

Centrelia's mayor announced the results. There's 545 votes cast. 200 voted to stay. 345 voted to relocate. I was crying, yes. In my heart, I never thought that would happen, ever. You thought that everybody would say? Would it stay?

Maybe 40 people might decide or maybe 30. But that was devastating to know that so many people wanted to move. It was. And when you look at her scrapbooks, everything stops after that day. Yeah, this is just throwing in papers. Wow, it just stops. So abruptly. Yep.

I was mad and disgusted, and I didn't want to do no more about it. That was the end. Almost immediately after that vote, Congress bought out the town. People started packing up and leaving. Let me see where it is. I have some and has the big numbers. Mary Lou told us that when you decided to leave, a demolition crew would actually come to your house and paint.

Big red letters like this. A big number one in front of your house. It looked like blood was dripping off. Oh, it's like you were marked. Yeah. What would happen, she says, when your house was marked, is that your neighbors would see it. They'd get nervous, and then suddenly their houses would be marked. And then suddenly the whole block would be marked.

And I knew every one of them quite well, and I think I stopped talking to some of them. She'd see them on the street, she says, and look the other way. I didn't like any of them. Really? Mm-hmm. And one day, in the fall of 1987, these divisions caused something to happen that is just kind of like mythically bad. Yeah. It involved a married couple who'd been in the town.

well, she'd been there her whole life. And as a couple, they were divided. One wanted to stay, one wanted to go. I think it was the wife who didn't want to leave. And the husband, he was a shovel runner, and he wanted to take the money you get from your location and get out. Their neighbors were moving, had moved. The houses around them were being torn down,

and they had to make a decision. And all we really know is that at some point, they started to argue. And it escalated. He stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife and then drove up to an old stripping pit and set himself in his car on fire. Wow. This is going to sound like a strange question, but is there anything about that that makes sense to you? Like, why couldn't people let go of this place?

It is very primal. Beyond that, she really couldn't say why. And we asked Mary Lou, who hung on long after the murder. after that referendum, after the town was basically empty. I have no idea why kept me there. I have no idea. You have no idea? No idea.

I just didn't want to move. Would you say the person's in? You just sit a roof on there. See the house is down there? Yeah. Today, 11 people live in town. He's brother and his wife. My mom and them lived down through the intersection.

Tom and Tom pointed them all out from the hill. We knocked on every door. Figured we asked them what it is that keeps them living literally on top of the house. fire. Hi, good evening. Wow, that was the shortest. That none of them wanted to talk to us. Not even the dogs.

Oh, okay, all right. But then, Tom 2 took us to one last spot. Where are we right now? You're in St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Cemetery. The cemetery is just a few feet away from the hill where we started. And it's a really strange contrast. this steamy hell, and then suddenly you're in like woodsy Vermont. It's beautiful.

This is my grandfather and my grandmother. Tom has four generations buried here. Do you know how many people are here, Tom? There's over 3,000 burials in this cemetery alone. 3,000? Yes, plus. And the thing is, says Tom, even the people that left fled that fire continue to come back and be buried in this cemetery.

Which means this place, the cemetery, is the only thing in Centralia that's still growing. And suddenly, how Joan put it earlier? It is very primal. Made sense. You can experience your life on a multi-generational plane. This is where my great-grandparents are buried. Which means, in a sense, this town will never die, as long as the cemetery is still here. I don't even read their name on here.

This here? This? Big it out. Oh, it's under the dirt. See? Do you get this up out of here somehow. See it sinking down into the ground. But it's in the dirt, no.

Yeah, see it? There we go. It can see a damp. S-C-Y. Thanks about Walters for reporting that with me, and also to Chris Perkle and Georgie Rowland, who directed a great documentary about Centrelia called The Town That Was.

You can find out more information about that on our website, RadioLab.org. I'm Robert Krollwich. I'm Jad Abumra. Bye.