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THIRTY YEARS AGO, in their book ''3000 Years of
Urban Growth," the historians Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox calculated
that of all the cities that had been flooded, burned, sacked, leveled by
earthquake, buried in lava, or in some way or another destroyed worldwide
between 1100 and 1800, only a few dozen had been permanently abandoned. Cities,
in other words, tend to get rebuilt no matter what. We've been assured that But, after what promises to be a Herculean clean-up
operation, what will the new The short answer is that, right now, no one knows.
With the focus on rescuing stranded residents and restoring basic order, with
very little sense of what will be found when the waters recede, and with the
city likely to be uninhabitable for months to come, government officials
understandably have said little about the more distant future. Still, according
to Paul Farmer, the executive director of the American Planning Association
(APA), once people do return to ravaged cities ''there's often a rush to
rebuild way too quickly," before there's been much discussion about what
exactly is being built. And the debate, when it comes, is likely to be
bitter. ''There are zillions of stakeholders from residents and landholders to
city and state officials to business interests," says Jerold Kayden,
co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard's Graduate
School of Design. What sort of master plan emerges from this tangle of
interests is anybody's guess, but it's possible, even now, to get a sense of
the options. That some of them are so radical only serves as a further
reminder--if in any were needed--of the difficulty of building a safer Though no one is eager to talk about the situation
in For Kayden believes that whether to move the city should
depend in part on how much of the existing city survives the flood: ''I hope
there's a lot of urban fabric still there, but if there's not--if it's a tabula rasa, if enormous swathes are
effectively rendered useless--then what is one rebuilding? Why rebuild it if
it's below sea level?" The details of such a plan would be devilishly
complex, and would raise questions from the practical (where to put it?) to the
almost philosophical (would it still be the same city?). Lawrence Vale, head of
MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and co-editor of the recent book
''The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster" ( Perhaps even more ambitious is the possibility of
simply moving the river. As Godschalk
puts it, ''We might be thinking about redirecting the Of course, even if such a task were to be deemed
feasible, the attendant social and financial disruption would be unimaginably
large and complicated. Whole settlements and industries have grown up along the
river. Godschalk readily concedes the enormity of the necessary negotiations:
''What are we going to do about all the property that's there, all the
ownership by individuals and businesses and homeowners and so forth? How are
those people going to be compensated?" Another idea focusing on the river comes from a
Harvard Graduate School of Design project run by Joan Busquets, a professor
there who served as planning director for In the wake of Katrina, Busquets argues, the new
development could absorb many of the residents from the city's lowest and most
vulnerable areas, which could be abandoned to function as a sort of flood
buffer, restoring some of the original logic of the city's settlement. ''For
decades or for centuries," explains Busquets, ''the city always selected
the higher places for residences. The lower places were dumps for when there
was a lot of rain." There are also less transformative fixes that might
help somewhat. ''One thing that's frequently used in coastal floodplains is
just building elevation," says Schwab. ''Just clear out a lower floor so
the water can just pass through without actually affecting living areas."
In other words, houses could be raised up on stilts. Different materials would
help, too. ''Wood and plaster don't hold up very well," Schwab says,
''Concrete and stucco tend to hold up a lot better." Such changes would change the unique architectural
character of the city, its famously historical look and feel. But as Vale puts
it, ''a sustainable city has to react not only to its own history but to its
environment." The way Indeed, whatever happens, Vale and others hope that
the rebuilding will avail itself of such natural safety valves. ''We have
ignored the ecosystem of the Mississippi Delta at our peril for more than 100
years, and the situation is much worse because of that," says Vale. The
city, he believes, needs ''to work with the natural systems of the
area"--among other things, expanding a proposed Louisiana state project to
fill in coastal wetlands with water and silt diverted from the river--''as part
of the problem-solving rather than simply building higher and bigger
dikes." Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/09/04/the_city_that_will_be/ |
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