Straight thinking about post-Katrina reconstruction

Flood waters from Hurricane Katrina cover streets in New Orleans, Louisiana. Up to 25,000 refugees from hurricane-flooded New Orleans could be moved 565 kilometers (350 miles) to the Astrodome stadium in Houston, Texas, a Houston official confirmed(AFP/POOL/Vincent Laforet)

I'm having a hard time sorting through my thoughts about New Orleans and the South in terms of post-Katrina reconstruction plans. There are so many issues--grinding poverty, race, economic and environmental justice, overconcentration of extreme poverty, business (port, transportation, oil and gas) and a big one for me, historic preservation.

In some respect I too often focus on the buildings, because that is the architectural legacy of which we are stewards, and the buildings--baring catastrophe--are there long after we are not. Many many commentators have made the point that the victims and survivors pictured in the most chilling photos and accounts are most often African-American.

The most historic parts of New Orleans have pretty much escaped the worst of flooding, because these sections of the city were built on high ground before 1910, after which levees were constructed, allowing for the habitation of lands previously most likely to flood.

(The Wednesday Wall Street Journal has a full-page article about the flooding in the Old Ninth Ward, an impoverished neighborhood, although from the reporting it appears that the levee breach there occurred because of a barge which had broken loose from its moorings, and like a missile the force of the storm shot it through the levee. The WSJ is not available for free online, but it's worth going to your local library and reading this piece.)

There has been a spirited conversation on the pro-urb listserv (the new urban "graduate seminar" discussion) about how to move forward and to ensure that (new) urbanist principles are topmost in reconstruction land use and development planning.

Dantzler House: On Beach Boulevard in Biloxi, Miss., the scene before and after. Top, Mississippi Department of Archives and History; David Rae Morris for The New York Times.

In some respects some of that conversation is premature. While acknowledging poverty, race, and class, this must be addressed in the context of this redevelopment "opportunity" that has been unleashed by Hurricane Katrina. There are two different threads here.

The New York Times reports, in "In Mississippi, History Is Now a Salvage Job" about the destruction wrought by the storm in Mississippi (and by extension in other areas) while the levee breaches and post-Hurricane flooding in New Orleans raise different issues about reconstruction versus recognition of wetlands and other environmental considerations--of course, the poorest of the poor tend to live in the areas of greatest potential environmental degradation, including flooding, and to not reconstruct these areas could be subject to charges of racism. Ultimately, the environment can't be controlled by technology and this has to be recognized.

Stefanos Polyzoides is a leading new urbanist architect and a prominent member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Yesterday, he sent a great post to the pro-urb list, which he has allowed me to reprint below:

We are so far ahead of ourselves, it is scary. This is not the time for arguing details. As urbanists and environmentalists, we must help conceptualize the entire process of reconstruction and have the courage to communicate it to the Reconstruction Authority in charge of executing their building of New Orleans. We are useless without broad public and private political support. We are useless if we elevate architecture to a premature forefront. We will succeed only if we enable the actions of the Reconstruction Authority and operate under its aura.

The national political and economic repercussions of the rebuilding of New Orleans are so vast, that those in charge of it will be compelled to carry it out under a very controlled process. This is no greenfield charrette on 300 acres. This is not a project to argue the merits of the Smart Code on.

In fact, this will not be a project at all. it will rather be a Marshall Plan for transforming a whole region of our country.

The questions we should be asking right now should be those a general would be posing before doing battle, that is, tactical and strategic propositions.

• Who is in charge of reconstruction and what is their chain of command?
• What are the issues of reconstruction from most to least urgent?
• How is the City to be secured?
• How may a similar calamity be avoided in the near future?
• How is the place to be made disease free?
• How will the infrastructure be re activated?
• How will dozens of institutions be revived?
• How will people be employed and the economy revived ?
• What should be demolished and what should not?
• What will the pace of rebuilding be, and what will the relative balance be between corporate and small business interests?
• And of course, the biggest question of all, how will $100 to 150 billion be distributed over the next ten to twenty years without graft and pork, tomake the city livable again? (500,000 households times $300,000)

When it comes to physical design, our greatest lever should eventually be in arguing that neighborhoods be the seed of all physical reconstruction. Not only because of what we know about them as new urbanists, but also because they are the best means of building in a manner that allows families to depend on each other during trying times.** Neighborhoods are the best place to incrementally heal a broken society. I know firsthand, because I grew up in a country experiencing the Long Emergency.

Neighborhoods can also become a familiar and comprehensible slogan that extends across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. Architecture may come to New Orleans later.

Debating the problems of housing typology is obscene compared to the life and death gravity of the issues that need to be addressed immediately.

Those of you living near the Gulf need to find a way to use your contacts to frame the thoughts and actions of the nascent Reconstruction Authority (those Municipal, State and Local officials, and the business community) that will be deciding the fate of New Orleans. This is urgent.
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** Neighborhood-based social networks are particularly important to those of limited means. This is discussed in great detail in the chapter on the "Use Values of Place" in Urban Fortunes: A Political Economy of Place. It is also the root of the argument in the book Root Shock: The demolition of America's urban neighborhoods. From a review of that book in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

By documenting the profound loss of community that resulted from these projects, [Root Shock is] a scathing indictment of urban policy in the United States, past and present. The uprooted communities -- the author estimates there are more than 1,600 across the country -- were concentrated in the African-American communities of America's large cities. The consistent theme is that the wholesale displacement of neighborhoods had an impact more traumatic and longer-lasting than is understood.

"Root shock ... ruptures bonds, dispersing people to all the directions of the compass," Fullilove writes. It caused the destruction of the interconnections that "were essential to the survival of the community."