August 2007 | Art & Soul
Recovering New Orleans
By Thomas J. Campanella
Even before the floodwaters of Lake Pontchartrain stopped their lethal rise in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, questions about the fate of New Orleans began to fly like shingles in a storm. These touched nearly every aspect of urban planning theory and practice, making a whole range of hypotheticals suddenly as real as the nightly news. In the lead was a question as simple as it was profound: Would this great American city survive? Should New Orleans be rebuilt — all of it — in its original place and as before? Would it be grossly irresponsible for the government to resettle thousands of families in a city so prone to catastrophic flooding?
By the first few days of September 2005, it was looking more and more like New Orleans might not make it. It didn’t help that the city’s deputy police chief, Warren Riley, claimed on the national news that the Big Easy was “completely destroyed.” Nor did the total evacuation of the drowned town — itself unprecedented in American history — paint a hopeful picture. As thousands fled the city, New Orleans was “left to the dead,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline read on September 4. To top it off, journalist Joel Garreau penned an elegiac piece in the Washington Post, with the depressing (and misleading) title “A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever” (September 11, 2005). Would the United States, for all its wealth and power and technological prowess, be the first modern nation to lose a city?
Lost cities are, in fact, a relative historical rarity. True, Atlantis remains unfound, let alone rebuilt. Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried permanently beneath the hot ejecta of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Timgad was sacked by both the Vandals and the Berbers and was lost to history until archaeologists uncovered it in the 1880s. Monte Albán, on the heights above the modern Mexican city of Oaxaca, flourished for two thousand years before the Spanish conquistadors crushed it for all time.
But these cities are the exceptions. Much more common in the annals of urban history are cities that have rebounded again and again from horrific devastation. The Romans leveled Carthage after the Third Punic War, salting it for good measure. But it was the Romans themselves who later resurrected the port city and turned it into an administrative hub for their African possessions; even today, Carthage persists as a suburb of Tunis.
By about 1800, urban resilience becomes the rule. No major city in the past two hundred or so years has been completely destroyed, in spite of humankind’s ever-increasing power to do so. There are only a handful of exceptions. St. Pierre, Martinique — the “Paris of the Antilles” — was annihilated by a volcanic eruption in 1902 and never rebuilt.
Only one man survived, and only because he was locked in solitary confinement. But for every St. Pierre, there are a hundred cities that bounced back from catastrophic destruction.
The subject of urban resilience is one I explored with Lawrence J. Vale in an anthology entitled The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Our comparative study revealed no short answers as to why urban sites in the modern age are rarely abandoned. Our study did yield, however, a number of key points and common themes about both disasters and urban resilience, many of which have gained new relevance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For one, cities vary enormously in their resilience.
Just as some people can fend off an illness while others succumb, not all cities are equally capable of rebounding from a shock to the system.
A person whose health is compromised to begin with has less chance of recovery than an individual in full health. So, too, a city. New York proved highly resilient in the wake of 9/11, marshaling vast financial, political, and cultural capital in its effort to recover from the destruction of the World Trade Center. New Orleans, on the other hand, was already burdened with considerable socioeconomic problems before Katrina’s arrival. Such “preexisting conditions” will play a major role in determining how well the Crescent City will recover from the storm and its aftermath — and perhaps whether it can recover at all.
Urban resilience, moreover, is not necessarily progressive. In spite of the seeming tabula rasa opportunity a major disaster offers to correct old errors and put things right, reconstruction tends to favor the status quo. Even if a city’s buildings are toppled, foundations and embedded infrastructure are often reusable, and property boundaries can usually be reconstructed from archival documents. The imperatives of insurance policies, combined with simple inertia, push many landowners to rebuild more or less what they lost. There is also a deep psychological need to put things quickly back the way they were. While a disaster can be a catalyst for long-term innovations, its immediate aftermath is often a time of cautiousness and conservatism, officially at least.
This is why bold new plans rarely get implemented following a catastrophe; they’re a luxury for times of peace and are usually promoted by visiting visionaries with little at stake personally. In London after the Great Fire of 1666, grand plans by Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, and others remained paper dreams, defeated by “a complicated system of freeholds, leases and subleases,” to quote Kevin Lynch. London was rebuilt largely as before. And although Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871 led in time to a city of fireproof masonry architecture and the world’s first skyscrapers, initial rebuilding utilized the very kinds of firetrap construction that had caused the catastrophe in the first place. There are exceptions, of course; an authoritarian regime, unencumbered by democracy, can dictate a city’s reconstruction. When the Chinese government rebuilt Tangshan, leveled by an earthquake in 1976, it was a modern industrial city that barely resembled its tumbledown predecessor.
This notion of “regressive resilience” extends also to a city’s social order and political culture. Just as the built environment is commonly reconstituted as before, the power structure and social hierarchy of a city can quickly replicate itself in the wake of a catastrophe. Divisive pre-disaster social inequities and injustices are resilient too. On the other hand, nothing reveals the fault lines in a society like a major calamity, exposing to public scrutiny long-hidden patterns of power, poverty, race, and class. Such exposure can, in the right circumstances, precipitate positive change.
This was the case in Mexico City following the devastating earthquake of 1985; the tremors shook up not only the city’s buildings but the very legitimacy of the political system and its leadership. As Diane Davis described it in The Resilient City, the earthquake exposed a raft of official corruption and abuses — in some cases, quite literally (new government buildings pulverized by the earthquake were found to be of substandard construction quality, and the exposed cellars of ruined police stations contained evidence of torture). These revelations galvanized the capital’s “resilient citizens” to demand political accountability and a reordering of reconstruction priorities, including a new focus on low-income housing. It remains to be seen whether New Orleanians will prove as resilient as the people of Mexico City. For one, a scattered populace is very hard to organize politically; the social action that took place in Mexico City is unlikely in New Orleans if a large number of the city’s displaced and dispossessed fail to return.
All this underscores the fact that cities are more than the sum of their buildings. A city is a tapestry of human lives and social networks that are essential to the heart and soul of the place. A disaster can tear at this social fabric as terribly as at the physical infrastructure of a city. In New Orleans, this social fabric has long been intimately bonded to the unique geography of the city. The highest ground in New Orleans—the original “Crescent City” formed by the Mississippi’s natural levee, including the French Quarter and the Garden District—has long been occupied by the white elite. Blacks lived at the very crest of the natural levee, where they were safe from floods but endured the unpleasant noise and odors of riverfront industry. Creole blacks were concentrated in the triangular Seventh Ward, which begins in the lowlands but comes to a point on the Mississippi levee. “Anglo” African Americans later settled in old “back-of-the-city” neighborhoods, such as Treme, and in the lower reaches of Bywater and the Ninth Ward.
Although there has never been a perfect correlation among elevation, flood risk, race, and class in New Orleans (racially mixed middle-class neighborhoods, such as Lakeview and Pontchartrain Park, built on swampland drained by the Corps of Engineers decades ago, were also badly flooded by Katrina), it most certainly determined who got out of town and who did not. Middle-class whites — and blacks and Latinos and Asians — loaded their SUVs and fled; the poor were stuck without the means or money to find their way to safety. These people have now been scattered to the four winds, in the largest internal migration of Americans since the 1950s. With every passing day, it becomes less and less likely that these and other displaced New Orleanians will ever come home.
If they do not, then the Crescent City’s future is dim indeed. A city can be reconstructed without being recovered, and therein lies the great hazard of post-Katrina New Orleans. If history is any guide, there is little doubt this city will be rebuilt in some form. But will New Orleans be recovered as a real and robust metropolis? And whose New Orleans will it be?
![[Send]](http://wholelifetimes.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
