Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster:

Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, 387 pp., paperbound $34.95.

In February 2006, Eugenie Birch and Susan Wachter, codirectors of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, convened a conference on how to help New Orleans and the Gulf Coast recover from the hurricanes of 2005 and on what could be done better the next time a disaster of similar magnitude strikes. From the symposium sprang this book’s 25 essays, written by individuals wielding a strong knowledge of geology, engineering, planning, housing, demography, and other aspects of the Gulf Coast.

A chapter by new urbanist Sandy Sorlien and Mississippi development chief Leland Speed, who has since returned to the private sector, tells about new urbanist endeavors in southern Mississippi, including Katrina Cottages, a proposed “Wal-Mart Village,” form-based codes, and the application of the rural-to-urban Transect. All of these initiatives seem hopeful, yet the outlook for Mississippi seems to me to be worse now than it was at the time this book was being assembled.

Patricia Southerland, organizer of a six-county smart-growth effort in southern Mississippi, funded by the US Department of Commerce, told me a few weeks ago that water and gas lines in much of damaged coastal Mississippi have still not been reinstalled, with the result that “people can’t rebuild” in many existing communities. Instead, a wave of sprawl — the form of development encouraged by Mississippi’s old-school Department of Transportation — has spread northward, above Interstate 10. Two of the six counties — Stone and George — don’t even have comprehensive plans, so they cannot regulate development, Southerland lamented. “There’s no leadership,” she said. There have been charrettes, she acknowledged, but “they leave.”

In New Orleans, the prospects are, if anything, grimmer — although you might not sense it from what some of the experts in this book say. A chapter by Jonathan Barnett and John Beckman of Wallace Roberts & Todd in Philadelphia calls for converting New Orleans’ obsolete canals into a park system, introducing bus rapid transit service that could eventually be replaced by 53 miles of light rail, and concentrating development in transit-accessible locations. Barnett and Beckman insist that New Orleans is not uniquely vulnerable to nature; many other cities are at risk of earthquakes, floods, and other disasters. Therefore, they argue, New Orleans must gradually be restored.

University of Pennsylvania planning professor Rachel Weinberger reinforces the call for an intense transit network, at least in the densest parts of the city, insisting that for the working poor, a decent transit system and walkable neighborhoods are wise public investments. Maintaining an automobile can cost a minimum-wage earner a third to half of his annual income, she says. Other chapters deal with restarting the economy, restoring urban vitality, and other topics.

Many of the proposals, while reasonable from an urban design perspective, seem wholly out of touch with the book’s powerful opening chapter, in which two University of Pennsylvania professors — Robert Giegengack in earth and environmental science and Kenneth R. Foster in bioengineering — explain why the New Orleans we once took for granted is not destined to endure. Giegengack and Foster point out that the Mississippi River keeps rising, while the ground beneath New Orleans sinks 5 to 10 millimeters a year. Meanwhile, waves and coastal currents voraciously swallow edges of the delta — an acre disappears every 35 minutes, by one estimate.

A matter of time
It is simply a matter of time before much of the river’s volume finds a more convenient path to the Gulf, via the Atchafalaya corridor, relegating New Orleans and Baton Rouge to “the role of back-country bayou towns,” Giegengack and Foster report. In probably the most important sentence in the book, they write: “New Orleans cannot be protected from a repetition of Hurricane Katrina, from the effects of a major flood on the Mississippi system that originates higher in the watershed, or from the consequences of the inevitable diversion of the Mississippi into a new distributary, the Atchafalaya River.” In their view, “no technological fix will save the city from destruction in the the long term (unless the deterioration in the environment is reversed, at unimaginable expense).”

With such an unequivocal judgment on nature’s long-term intentions, it seems almost futile to argue about whether to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward and other low-lying areas. But Rebuilding Urban Places originated in an academic setting, so the scholars and their commentaries march on, sometimes impressively. The book eloquently captures the music, architecture, and other expressions that have made New Orleans fascinating.

Dell Upton, an architectural historian at the University of Virginia, makes the case that when a city loses many of the commonplace buildings from its past, the city’s character is undermined, even if landmark buildings are preserved. He sees the built environment as an ecology. “Each building’s significance is defined by the presence of all the others,” he says. His argument could be applied to cities and towns everywhere, as a warning against sacrificing “ordinary” buildings.

Upton criticizes Katrina Cottages, saying that although they pay homage to the Gulf Coast’s historical buildings, they are too generic — they lack the meaning that comes from having been built on a particular block, at a particular time, for particular people. But he doesn’t offer much of an alternative. His rather vague and trusting prescription — that individual homeowners be allowed “to decide whether and how to rebuild, how much of it they want to do personally, and how long they are willing to take to do so” — may produce negligible results, judging from what has happened in the past year and a half.
This book’s proposals and insights could help Americans prepare for the disasters that will surely strike other cities in the years to come. For New Orleans itself, where a legacy of mistrust and resistance to outside energy compounds the problem of an untenable geographical situation, the book has the ingredients of tragedy. Inspiring though its music, architecture, and urbanism have been, the Crescent City appears to be going away.