Rebuilding A Dream

As the scope of the calamity in New Orleans was beginning to become apparent last week, Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, stepped back for a moment and thought the unthinkable--out loud. In a very unguarded comment to the editorial board of the Daily Herald, a suburban-Chicago newspaper, the most powerful Republican in the House said, "It doesn't make sense to me" to rebuild the city because its position below sea level would make it vulnerable to another floodwater catastrophe. Talking about what the Federal Government should do, he said, "We help replace, we help relieve disaster. But I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it ... we ought to take a second look at that."

That is not, to put it mildly, what the people of New Orleans--or of most other parts of the U.S.--were expecting to hear. "That's like saying we should shut down Los Angeles because it's built in an earthquake zone," said former Louisiana Democratic Senator John Breaux. Before the day was out, Hastert's office had issued a statement insisting that he had meant to say only that when the city is rebuilt, it will be important "to consider the safety of the citizens first." In contrast, President George W. Bush, in his televised address the day before, assured the nation that he had ordered his Cabinet to come up with a rebuilding plan for New Orleans and the rest of the devastated Gulf region.

Have no doubt: those places will be rebuilt, although the effort needed for such smaller cities as Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., may be different from the kind required for New Orleans, with its sizable downtown and wide metropolitan area. There are times a city suffers a disaster so enormous that it never recovers. Think of Pompeii. Or Chernobyl. But cities tend to be durable things. They eventually shake off the effects of even the worst catastrophes. A decade after the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago had a booming economy and a population of half a million people, up from about 300,000 the night the fire began. Berlin, Hiroshima, Rotterdam--all were leveled during World War II; all are flourishing now.

Devastated cities are frequently rebuilt in ways not so different from how they looked before disaster struck. Established property lines and existing infrastructure are confines that are hard to escape. Look at the World Trade Center site, where the determination to bring back all 10 million sq. ft. of lost office space and the presence of below-ground features like an electrical-utility switching station have had more influence on the shape of reconstruction than any number of visionary architects. Add to that the human tendency to take comfort in the thought that an area that has suffered near destruction can be resurrected in much the same form. "Modest improvements, not truly visionary rethinking," is the norm when cities rebuild, says Lawrence Vale, a co-editor of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. "There is too much urgency to rebuild fast, and not much can be done to withhold that. Visionary ideas don't catch on until later."

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