This is the 99% Invisible City. I'm Roman Mars. Five years ago, we came out with a book, and thanks to all you

beautiful nerds, it immediately landed on the New York Times bestseller list. It was filled with

dozens of design stories from cities around the world. Some were brand new stories, some were based

on episodes of the show,

and others grew out of 99PI articles by the book's co-author, Kurt Kolstad. And the idea was to

create a kind of field guide to the city, not any particular city, but a guide to the underlying

design principles of every city. The book was called the 99% invisible city, a field guide to the underlying design principles of every city.

The book was called The 99% Invisible City, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design.

And I remember that subtitle took us like a whole lot of time to come up with.

Oh, yeah.

Many phone calls were made.

Much was made of that. It was like, hidden versus secret every day versus

ordinary. Exactly. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. And to launch the book,

Kurt and I produced a special 99PI episode made of short guidebook style entries recorded

in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. And now to celebrate the

fifth anniversary of the book, we're going to share those stories again today. And with that,

I'm going to hand the mic back to the Roman Mars of five years ago from October of 2020.

For the first time, in a long time, I'm in our office in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California.

A couple of people actually still work here. Two people can occupy the space without violating

any social distancing guidelines. There's two entrances. There's two different bathrooms, there's two different kitchens. I usually work at home.

But today I'm here because our first book, The 99% Invisible City, has just been released into the world.

Since it's a guide to the city with stories and histories of the seemingly mundane things around you.

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