In City Limits,, David Alm reviews Joe Flood’s The Fires, about how reliance on computer models in the 1970s helped fan the flames of a burning Bronx – a poignant reminder amidst another problem we’ve created but don’t know how to fix.In 1961, President Kennedy hired Robert S. McNamara away from his job as president of the Ford Motor Company to, essentially, manage the conflict in Vietnam just as he had the American automotive industry. As secretary of defense, McNamara – a Harvard MBA – hired top analysts from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit problem-solving think tank, to help."Systems analysts were soon wielding more influence over American defense strategy than any five-star general or chief of staff," writes Joe Flood in his fascinating new book, “The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City – and Determined the Future of Cities.”It was only a matter of time, Flood explains, before New York City would attempt to manage its fires just as McNamara was managing the war: New York was simply, and merely, another system.Except New York, like Vietnam, wasn't so simple, and the fatal flaw in applying a RAND model to New York City's fires lay in the fact cities are comprised of human beings, and human beings make mistakes.The Fires is about those mistakes. But like most great books about New York, it does not isolate its subject. The blazes that inspired its title, which ravaged the Lower East Side, Harlem, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx during the 1970s – what New York City firefighters would call "The War Years" – are only part of the story. Their causes were rooted in so many parts of the municipal puzzle that to study them is, in effect, to study New York City itself.And to study New York, of course, is to study the very things that define this city: politics, business, socio-economics, architecture, and the clumsy balance of wildly divergent interests that somehow keeps New York from tipping into chaos. But Flood goes even further, charting the connections between New York's fires and the standardization of corporate management, the Vietnam War, and a nation too quick to embrace the computer as an infallible aid to mankind.via City LimitsPHOTO:Ricky Flores/ City Limits
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