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In A Paradise Built in Hell you examine five different disasters that took place in cities over the last century, all in very different contexts and times. What are the similarities in human response that you saw across these disasters?
I picked these urban disasters because they were good representations that gave me geographical and temporal range. In all of them you see a similar improvisational, altruistic, brave response on the part of ordinary people that often creates a more vital civil society than they had before, and in that they often find satisfaction and even joy. I think of Katrina as something that began as a somewhat natural disaster — as a hurricane — and became a manmade disaster when the levees broke, and became a full-fledged, entirely uncontained catastrophe when the people in power panicked, demonized New Orleanians and essentially turned the place into a prison city — treated the trapped people as criminals or threats or problems, rather than as our brothers and sisters who deserved to, if not be rescued, at least be able to walk out of the city, which they were not.

In the book you said the response to disaster has a lot to do with the pre-disaster society.
I think New Orleans was richer and poorer than a lot of places. It had the literal poverty, these enormous divides around race, but it also had these very strong, extensive kinship networks and a deep sense of roots, a strong sense of place. New Orleans is a place where strangers will talk to you on the street. There are places in this country where people are almost affronted if you interact with them and think that privacy is an almost sacred rite and privilege that they don’t want anyone to mess with. And New Orleans is the opposite. People dance in the streets — there’s an enormous amount of celebratory culture that’s inclusive and public. So it’s more divided because of racism but it’s also less divided than your average suburb in middle America, and I think almost every other city in the country. That mattered because people did take care of each other — they did form these extended communities in shelters and schools and other places that looked after each other.

It seems people had a clear yearning for collective work and society in disaster communities. It contradicts the assumption that American society is one in which profit and personal gain is the top priority.
Disasters are when we revert to our original animal nature, and that original animal is brave, empathic, compassionate, altruistic, generous and pretty resourceful. These are situations where people are not making elaborate philosophical decisions — they’re deciding to get the neighbors out of the rubble now. So it’s quite powerful evidence both of who we can be and of who we desire to be.

If a desire for a more public civic life is there, what can we do about it? How can we restructure our cities without disaster?
I see carnivals and these festivals of public life as having a lot in common — these moments when a lot of boundaries fall away, people coexist in public, there’s a certain kind of transgressiveness. Carnival is very much like disaster in that it is kind of wild and at times almost violent. I’m fascinated by the Latinoization of so many places in the U.S. and by the Latin American daily practices of coexisting in public, of having markets that open onto the street, of just being more open and engaged. I sometimes joke that it’s a race to see whether we’ll suburbanize Latinos before they urbanize us, because it often does create these revitalized neighborhoods that are important in disaster
as well.

We already have an enormous infrastructure of engagement. You can see in cities and nonurban places that there are a lot of these systems, and so the question for me is not saying, “We have nothing — let’s start from scratch,” but saying, “Let’s look at what we have that does work and see how to multiply it, how to make it deeper and stronger. There are certainly places where there’s practically nothing, these sort of super-suburbanized, suspicious places where you have a little death threat security plaque on your front lawn, which you never actually step on because you use the garage door opener and then go straight into the house through the garage. It’s what’s made me admire New York more and more: More than almost anywhere, along with New Orleans, people coexist together in public and take enormous pleasure in it, and draw a kind of confidence from it. I always wonder what would have happened if you had the equivalent of 9/11 in a city where people were suburbanized and withdrawn into private life and didn’t know that you could evacuate half a million people on foot. I wonder if the really rich and bold everyday interactions of New Yorkers with each other, even the silent ones of just being in proximity — helping someone get their baby carriage up the subway steps, etc. — really is kind of disaster preparedness.

Disasters are when we revert to our original animal nature, and that original animal is brave, empathic, compassionate, altruistic, generous and pretty resourceful.”

Your chapter on Mexico City stands out as the post-disaster possibility of social change. What was it about Mexico City that meant disaster could lead to widespread social engagement?
I can only answer speculatively; it’s very hard to know why one disaster had more broad, lasting consequences than others. The Mexico City earthquake was remarkable because it’s considered the moment when civil society was reborn in Mexico, after this repressive one-party rule for decades, and it was partly because people were so angry at the callous and incompetent response of the government, which did very little to rescue people trapped in buildings, which allowed building codes to be violated and these shoddy structures to arise in the first place — a government that stole a lot of the donated relief, and was lackadaisical about search and rescue and accepting foreign aid. People were forced back onto themselves, and they did beautifully. It often happens in disaster that people find each other. I can only speculate, but my sense from looking at Mexico City in the context of other Latin American disasters is that there are more antiauthoritarian traditions. I think there’s a romantic idealism around political engagement. There’s a strong sense of civil society and public life already. Somehow people are able to recognize what those joys and strengths they find in disaster are, and often to hang onto them more effectively than we do. The sad thing about most of the United States disasters I looked at is that in some sense people find these strange little evanescent social utopias, and they let go of them and go back to a life that’s in many ways the antithesis, without saying, “This is who I could be. This is who I want to be. This is what life could be.” The joy is there, but not the sophistication or whatever it might be to understand it, recognize it, mean it and perpetuate it.

How can we translate some of the benefits of what you call temporary “disaster utopia” communities into our everyday civic life?  
I think building a collective society means having some kind of confidence and trust in each other, some kind of everyday altruism where, not only do I want me to have healthcare, I want you to have healthcare, because it makes my life better if everybody lives with a certain kind of bottom line of safety and security. And then looking at arenas in which people connect, in which people coexist, which I think is an urban design and practices question, among other things. I think the revival of urban living as a pleasure and a joy after the decades of white flight is a victory in this direction. The enthusiasm for public life and kind of do-it-yourself practices that I think a lot of young people are into are very cool. Backyard gardens and urban farms, neo-localized food securities, farmers markets and things like that are ways of trying to engage in survival systems with each other and with our places that make them more pleasurable but also more secure, in either the short-term emergency of disaster or the long-term crisis of things like climate change and economic change.
Disasters amaze me because they prove that we kind of already know how to make a society function, we know how to take care of each other in an emergency and to extrapolate from that and go do it on an ongoing basis. I think it’s evidently possible. The confidence from that is another thing that people need. I think there are a lot of really interesting pieces, some of which we have to some degree, some of which are in our reach, some of which require really reimagining who we are and who we could be, and reassessing what it is we really want from ourselves and each other. I’m hoping the book helps people make those changes and decisions and realize those possibilities.

This article appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!