“[…] Standing there, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of façades, scaffolded and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece […], an eighteenth century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting […]”
From Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday”

Of course few of us would disagree at the novelist view of the city as a “brilliant invention”. He is capable to point out some of the infrastructures that in the past have made possible life in the cities: sewage and clean water supply were the most important in terms of the dramatic improvement they posed on health. Public lightning made our cities safer and, recently, fiber optics allowed the delivery of new services to its occupants. What the novelist can not grasp yet is the new set of infrastructures that lay hidden at the city’s “dark” side. Continue reading →