Site Presented By
Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Thomas Campanella, professor of urban planning and design, University of North Carolina, and co-editor of "The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster"
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, city planner Lawrence J. Vale and I began a broad historical study of urban resilience in the wake of disaster. Among the many lessons this work imparted, two shine brightly through the current fog of trauma in the Gulf.
The first is that cities are more than the sum of their buildings. They begin and end with people, the poor as well as the rich. Thus, there can be no such thing as a resilient city without resilient citizens.
The second is that reconstruction does not equal recovery. A city's damaged buildings can be restored, its broken highways and fiber optic cables repaired. But if the people who constituted its lifeblood and soul are gone, that city will never be the same again. We can rebuild New Orleans, but can we recover what Katrina took away? That will involve a commitment that goes far beyond the celebrated streets of the French Quarter.
The New Orleans of Fat Tuesday revelry and costumed krewes, of tourist and conventioneer, will bounce back as strong as ever (it will benefit, ironically, from the ubiquitous presence of New Orleans in the news for a month now). But the real test of Orleanian resilience will come down to whether Americans are willing and able to put the "other" Crescent City back on its feet.
That other New Orleans was bedeviled by huge social problems long before Katrina came along. As anyone awake on earth knows by now, New Orleans was among the poorest, most dysfunctional and dangerous cities in the United States. The preexisting conditions that compromised the city's ability to cope with the disaster now make its chances of recovery slim.
Inertia can play havoc with post-disaster planning, a "regressive resilience" that can quickly reestablish old patterns of economic inequality, racial segregation and entrenched poverty. Bad stuff rebounds as much as good, maybe even more so. But a catastrophe can also throw new light on long-concealed inequalities, as was so painfully evident in the immediate wake of Katrina; and in the right circumstances, exposure can precipitate change.
The great Mexico City earthquake of 1985 literally revealed governmental corruption and abuses of authority (police station cellars, for example, were found to contain evidence of torture). Such shocking revelations galvanized the capital's resilient citizens to demand greater political accountability and a variety of reforms, including extensive affordable housing. But how do citizens band together when they are evacuees and are no longer in the same place? The greatest tragedy of Katrina may well be not the flooded homes and looted shops, but an essential population scattered to the four winds. These were poor, uneducated people; but they were the lifeblood of the Big Easy, and they carried in their traditions and cuisine and mannerisms and habits of speech a kind of urban genetic code that made New Orleans what it was. Now they are gone off to Houston and Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore and a hundred other towns and cities, part of the largest internal migration in America for a generation. Can we fault them for getting the hell out of town?
New Orleans failed these people -- it failed to give them a decent education, to prepare them for good jobs, to protect them against gang violence. It even failed to give them a lift in the face of a killer flood. But we have a chance here to make things right.
By building affordable housing, creating an effective job training and placement program, improving public education, and cracking down on crime, the New Orleans wrecked by Katrina can be recovered and made a vital part of the larger city. This must be done quickly, before any more roots are put down elsewhere, to signal to the evacuees that they will have a great city to come home to.
Our armies are posted in foreign lands to help rebuilt societies from the ground up. What we can do for Baghdad and Basra we must do for the Lower 9th Ward, Treme, Bywater and other places destroyed by the hurricane, where the real battle for New Orleans will go on long after the television cameras are gone.
Ronald Utt, senior research fellow for the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation
We're looking at a way to provide a core basis of incentives and opportunities and then let the existing members of the community decide what they want their community to look like -- things like tax incentives, capital gains reductions and reinvestments in basic infrastructure, which will create a foundation that the city can thrive on.
And this is more of a bottom-up approach than other proposals, in that it recognizes that New Orleans is a group of citizens who are chiefly responsible for how the city is rebuilt. This is in contrast to the top-down proposals, where people are vicariously imposing their preferences on what's happening, because this is the first time in a long time that there has been an opportunity to rebuild an entire city, and everybody wants to participate. America has built a lot of cities from scratch but not with any ideas as to where they were going to go. St. Louis started with a group of 200 trappers. None of those trappers had any idea what St. Louis would look like today.
Everybody that has a certain interest in something wants to chime in with their proposals -- if for example you're a trolley advocate or a light-rail advocate, you see in New Orleans a showcase for transit, or if you're a new urbanist you see an opportunity for new buildings and architecture and increased walkability -- everybody who has an interest sees this as a captive experiment. Someone might say, "You need a town square, you've never had a town square before and it should be this big." That's what we need to avoid. We need to get out of the way and let the individuals rip.
Recognize that New Orleans has been losing population since 1960, in contrast to most American cities that gained population throughout the 1990s, and this reflects a variety of reasons, including a high crime rate and not untypical problems with public schools.
The issues of public safety and public education need to be addressed because those are among the key reasons New Orleans has been suffering an exodus of people and businesses. And you have to decide how the school system should look. We would advocate a decentralized, competitive school system, and one way to do that is to incorporate public charter schools.
These are delicate issues. Regarding public safety, you may already be on the way to a substantial overhaul of the police force, with the resignation of the police chief and the 200-plus police officers who left their posts during the hurricane.
As for rebuilding, with the low-lying areas you'll have to make decisions, because they're still vulnerable and many homes might not be able to get flood insurance. Is it technically feasible to build a city that would withstand a Category 5 hurricane? Most of the houses in that area, if they had insurance, were old so they got grandfathered under the old insurance. Would it be better to turn these areas into a public park, essentially, and concentrate on building on higher ground? In other words, invite people to come back to the metropolitan area but not necessarily to their old neighborhoods.
And a lot of these people were renters, so it's not their house they would be returning to. Since they're not property owners there's not even a piece of land for them to go back and sell.
Getting people to come back is a big issue. With housing vouchers and things of that nature they are getting more embedded in some of the cities to which they've evacuated. And anecdotally we're learning that some of them are saying, "You know what? It's not so bad here."
Get Salon in your mailbox!
