New Orleans will rise again
When the previously unimaginable hits, there is a human need to calibrate the new disaster. Sudden traumatic loss and ongoing urban chaos always trigger a vain search for historical analogy.
When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour commented, ''I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago." To Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway, ''This is our tsunami." A resident described it as ''like a 9/11 for the South." Writers for The New York Times and USA Today recounted ''a diaspora of biblical proportions" and ''an exodus on a historic scale." Several news stories from around the globe even questioned whether New Orleans would become the ''American Pompeii." And this was before the threat from Hurricane Rita.
For at least the last 200 years or so, however, large cities have almost always been rebuilt. Regardless of whether they have been flooded, burned, bombed, starved, shaken, or poisoned, we have long bypassed the age of ''lost cities." Villages and towns may succumb, but even Hiroshima, the real Ground Zero, now thrives as an industrial metropolis, almost indistinguishable from other Japanese cities. The Chinese city of Tangshan, leveled by a massive earthquake in 1976 that killed several hundred thousand people, rose from the rubble to a population center of 1 million people within a decade.
There is a political necessity for government leaders to reassure citizens that their trust had not been misplaced. This ensures immediate calls to ''build back bigger and better than ever." The restorative support of the insurance industry sustains the inertia of investment in a manner that compels reconstruction but also resists more radical innovation.
City leaders can count on the emotional attachment of survivors to their battered places of origin, so this remains a powerful antidote to permanent exodus. The global networks of media, charitable organizations, and economies make it more possible to demonstrate care at a distance. From Banda Aceh to Biloxi, cities are no longer left on their own to die.
Understandable desperation in Katrina's wake led to assertions that New Orleans had been ''destroyed" and permitted wild speculations about relocating the entire city to some more sensible location on higher ground. But, as the older riverfront neighborhoods that remained above the flood waters made clear, the ''natural levees" along the Mississippi actually were the delta's higher ground. (This is probably one of the few times since Prohibition that denizens of the French Quarter ever delighted in being labeled ''dry.") New Orleans will be rebuilt, not just because of its history and culture, but because of where it is. America's greatest river system needs to feed through a great port, and a port simply cannot exist without a city to support it.
The history of recovery from other disasters suggests that the real question is not whether to rebuild, but how. Asking how to rebuild entails setting standards for rebuilding better, but also carries a moral obligation to rebuild in a way that connotes more than just land appropriation and gentrification. Which New Orleans will be rebuilt, by whom, and for whom?
A backward glance at examples of past urban disaster recovery efforts suggests five common dangers to avoid:
To a large extent, interpretation of disaster and recovery depends on who gets to tell the dominant story. There is always a need to demonstrate ''progress" but often the most visible evidence ignores local sentiment. Cleaning up the city will mean something very different if it is also framed as clearing out its people, especially if most of these are both poor and black. Large corporations, often based outside the region, will have the largest capacity to marshal necessary resources and will inevitably land many of the major contracts. For effective long-term solutions, however, indigenous community knowledge must be requested and valued. Former residents must be encouraged to feel they have a right to return.
The scale of the evacuation and the transcontinental dimensions of the diaspora make Hurricane Katrina's impact unprecedented in the history of American natural disasters. For some, the forced exit will catalyze opportunity to start anew elsewhere.
However, a focus on the numbers of people sent to distant shelters may mask the extent that most Gulf Coast residents found shelter with family and friends closer to their former homes. Many will want to return and attempt to reconnect severed social networks. To do so means establishing the best possible means for residents to communicate with one another and with the organizations that are poised to assist them.
There needs to be investment in an information system and process for ensuring that the dispersed public is able to participate fully in the array of decisions that have to be made. To fail at this will simply magnify the displacement that has already occurred.
In the early years of urban renewal in the United States, entire neighborhoods were destroyed just become some portion of the building stock was judged substandard. To preserve the character and affordability of many parts of New Orleans it will be imperative to retain a bias towards preservation, even if significant subsidies are needed to accomplish this.
It is possible, for instance, that some buildings or neighborhoods can be raised, rather than razed. Surely, building standards must be increased to maximize resistance to wind and water damage. A big challenge will be how to preserve and improve upon the built fabric at a price the former residents can still afford.
The return of tourists to a French Quarter Mardi Gras may offer no more than a compelling façade of normalcy, not unlike the efforts of the White House to import temporary lighting to Jackson Square to illuminate the background of the president's Sept. 15 speech. City rebuilding after disaster thrives on, even depends on, the power of architecture and celebratory festivals to symbolize recovery.
Urban reconstruction of prominent landmarks -- whether restored or newly conceived -- can convey an almost heroic sense of renewal and well-being. At the same time, though, it will be important to insist that the whole city and its region be monitored for progress.
Engineers tend to dominate the planning of infrastructure. Yet except perhaps in the most remote areas, the redevelopment of the Gulf Coast region should incorporate strong, integrated design -- with basic infrastructure, schools and human services, and housing and economic development needs considered holistically. Only a regional design approach can take account of the multiple overlapping jurisdictions that oversee features such as levees.
Clearly, New Orleans itself must now receive the investment necessary to upgrade its capacity to mitigate the effects of a Category 5 storm; without a commitment to reducing exposure to this risk, rebuilding becomes irresponsible. But rebuilding is also a challenge to seize opportunities to permit human settlement in the city and its region to work in closer concert with the underlying natural processes that make life so precarious.
Sound principles of neighborhood design, concern for local-level economic development, and sensitivity to environmental systems should be coordinated with decisions made about infrastructure investment. This suggests that some strategically chosen lowland places ought to emerge significantly different from their pre-Katrina use and appearance.
The history of urban recovery after disaster suggests that modest proposals for improvement often get realized but that radical reconceptualization of a city rarely occurs. For better, and for worse, cities are resilient places. They bounce back in the place where they were, even if they sometimes struggle to bounce back to the place where they had been.
For cities on the rise -- like Chicago before its 1871 Great Fire or San Francisco before the earthquake and fires of 1906 -- the post-recovery period often unleashes a continuation of an underlying trend. For New Orleans, however, bouncing back must also contend with the disastrous socio-economic conditions that Katrina's arrival exposed to the world. To succeed, rebuilding efforts should be used as an occasion to shore up local capacity.
Mayors from the Katrina-affected region, for instance, could be brought together with experts on design and development issues, tailored to respond to the challenges each mayor views as most important. This could also include mayors from towns and cities affected by unexpected population influx from evacuees.
A regional recovery program equal to the task will also need to engage community organizations in the area. Especially after well-publicized failures of many public authorities in the early days of the disaster, there is an urgent need to create trust and legitimacy where these did not exist, especially across racial lines.
A key aspect of ''recovery" entails reconciliation, which is distinct from rebuilding. Many people in the New Orleans region remain not just homeless and economically decimated, but also culturally and politically alienated. The recovery effort in and around New Orleans will fail if it stops short of addressing the conditions that preceded the disaster, as well as those that followed from it.
Lawrence J. Vale heads the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and is the co-editor of ''The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster." 