This is also where the transition to a third age of information-led city infrastructure represents a break with the past-and where The Matrix, for all its prescience, likely misread the future. Just as much as running water, the city's infrastructure supports the serendipity, anonymity, and reinvention at the core of all of our best possibilities-and the city's generative role in our economy and society. And architecturally, the space you find, empty but with utilities, is not a liability so much as a cultural and social possibility. You see the whole city on your way, but you are, to all who don't yet know you, whoever you wish to be. When you can walk everywhere, you might end up wandering anywhere. It is not just the pervasiveness of infrastructure but its relative neutrality that is at the core of such possibilities.
They also brought us the grand expanse of the Champs-Élysées-engineered to cover the enormous masonry sewers that ushered in Paris' ultimate triumph over cholera. These conduits bring us the ubiquity of suspended ceiling grids-designed to screen the mess behind. Yet they inexorably define the spaces we inhabit. Like the blood vessels of our own bodies, the pipes and wires of modern buildings and cities structure our lives while remaining almost entirely hidden. Today, when water tumbles out of the tap into your sink, it is but a cameo turn in an epic journey from faraway reservoir through final sewage treatment, across dozens-even hundreds-of miles, and months or years of time. In response to the waterborne pandemics of the 19th century, the modern European and North American city became defined by sewers and drains so extensive as to be beyond imagining. Earthen conduits moved stormwater in Xi'an, China, millennia ago lead tubes led drinking water under the stone-paved streets of classical Rome.