Key insights from
The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
Audio available
12 minute read
Published Oct 6, 2020
What you'll learn
From traffic lights and telephone poles to sewage drains disguised as monuments, we pour meaning into our public spaces like cement into the concrete slabs of a sidewalk. Oftentimes though, our focus is pulled toward the more obvious beauties of our surroundings like new buildings or polished neighborhoods. Creative innovator of the acclaimed podcast 99% Invisible Roman Mars and show producer Kurt Kohlstedt lead readers through a tour de force of the concealed stories of our cities, lifting the manhole cover of uniformity to reveal underlying meaning—let’s just say, you’ll never look at a stop sign the same way again.
Key insights
- 1 Beneath every monument is mystery—meaning carved in marble.
- 2 Read between your city’s signs.
- 3 Look out for hidden “Thomassons”—sometimes function is forgotten.
- 4 Paris, China, and New York envision carless futures and roads without boundaries.
- 5 Do you prefer a Wall Street high rise or an intercity “duck”? Architecture varies by artistic vision.
- 6 “Tactical urbanism” bypasses authority to renew the city.
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