The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

This is 99% Invisible.
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A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast

Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean?

Or stopped to ponder who gets to name the streets we walk along?

Or what the story is behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships?

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.

Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.
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You are about to see stories everywhere, you beautiful nerd. Now get out there.

'If you've ever wondered why our world is the way it is, this show has your answers' The Hustle

'99% Invisible...is completely wonderful and entertaining and beautifully produced...' Ira Glass, This American Life

'The hugely inventive 99% Invisible treats the design of everyday things like a forensic science.' WIRED

The ideal companion for city buffs, who'll come away seeing the streets in an entirely different light. - Kirkus

Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city's secret anatomy laid bare -- a hundred things you look at but don't see, see but don't know. Each entry is a compact, surprising story, a thought piece, an invitation to marvel. Together, they are almost transformative. To know why things are as they are adds a satisfying richness to daily existence. This book is terrific, just terrific. - Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Grunt

We usually define cities in terms of their bigness, so it's easy to forget that our daily experience of any city is made up of countless tiny, intimate encounters. Just as Jane Jacobs did fifty years ago, Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt provide a new way of seeing urban life, finding secrets and surprises behind every sewer grate, storefront, and street sign. - Michael Beirut, design critic and author of How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World

Conversational, bite-size entries [and] beautiful tricolor illustrations . . . A field guide for anywhere. - Booklist

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