Eugenie Birch

The published proceedings of a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in early 2006, Rebuilding Urban Places, aims to “draw lessons for the present and the future from our experience to date with the aftermath of Katrina.” Contributors reach from as far back as the Lisbon Fire of 1755 to more recent disasters in the United States - the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco earthquakes of 1906 and 1989, and Hurricane Andrew’s destruction of the Florida Coast in 1992 - for strategies and lessons in rebuilding the places where people live, work, and find meaning, in the wake of terrible destruction. Sadly, the lessons learned, techniques developed, and suggestions proffered may be more relevant for the country’s next major disaster than to the struggling city of New Orleans, about which the contributors are realistically guarded, if not pessimistic. 

In the first essay of this interdisciplinary volume, a bioengineer and environmental scientist set the tone, arguing that “New Orleans can not be protected from a repetition of Hurricane Katrina.” The reasons are simple: either a major flood on the Mississippi system that originates higher in the watershed or the inevitable diversion of the Mississippi into a new distributary, the Atchafalaya River, will bring new destruction to New Orleans in the not-so-distant future. Establishing New Orleans’s unfitness for human habitation in the long term starts the collection on a gloomy note. But in the contributions that follow, thinkers from the worlds of design, public policy, education and economics - as well as a folklorist and sociologist - offer what they can to help others learn from the disaster and create a realistic model for the city’s short-term recovery. 

From their multiple perspectives, these valuable essays examine questions of who must take responsibility for rebuilding and how. They offer many promising suggestions and means for preventing, predicting, and reacting faster to such devastation in the future. Considering the missteps already made, and the growing challenges to replenishing housing and devising resettlement strategies, however, the lessons come too late for New Orleans. At this point, the city might benefit more from a companion volume addressing how to rebuild after disastrous rebuilding. In light of the overwhelming natural, social, and economic challenges posed by the problem at hand, historic preservationist Randall Mason’s argument for the centrality of cultural preservation in rebuilding provides a much-needed perspective. Emphasizing the import of cultural values over economic ones, and highlighting the power of New Orleans as place, he reminds us why we must continue to search for solutions that respect the past but are viable for the immediate future: We cannot simply move away to drier ground or on to the next problem.