The body electric: Tom Vanderbilt on Christian Nold

Of course, power lines and subway routes are just the most obvious manifestations of urban networks today. Much of today's city pulses to an invisible series of signals. The "drift" of the modern flaneur, tracked by ATM receipts and RFID chips and closed-circuit television, may be set on a certain course because a cell phone has alerted one to the presence of a friend sitting in a nearby cafe. And yet, despite all the rationalizing power of the various urban grids, Nold's emotion maps show that the swoons of urban walkers are still random and unpredictable, commanded by involuntary memories, changes in thought, new directions.

I had this experience as I traveled to meet Nold in London. As I exited the tube at the Brixton stop and took a hard left, the first street I found intersecting the Brixton Road was Electric Avenue. As I read the sign, I felt a small charge in the back of my brain--yes, I thought of the 1983 song "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant, one of the few reggae artists ever to top the US pop charts. As an American living in the Midwest in '83, I cannot say that the song, one of a number to address racial tension in Brixton, signified much more to me than a rather infectious pop trifle. But here was Electric Avenue, a street I would have otherwise bypassed without interest, commanding a moment of attention, a small plot of mental real estate. Appropriately enough, it is so named because it was, in 1888, the site of the city's first electrified shopping market. And so, poetically, we connect a circuit with the city: our own energy responding to the energy of the street, bodies electric coursing down electric avenues.

TOM VANDERBILT IS A WRITER BASED IN NEW YORK.

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