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| <back | home Rebuilding New Orleans — and Everytown, USA by Richard Register What do New Orleans and suburbia have in common? Both need to be rebuilt. That’s the big secret behind today’s headlines that nobody is talking about. If New Orleans was victimized by Hurricane Katrina, U.S.A. suburban sprawl was largely the cause of it. How so — climate change and automobile-dependent sprawl? Scattered development patterns, once built, force long distance travel for our everyday lives, causing us to burn enormous quantities of fuel and loading more climate-changing CO2 into the atmosphere. Cities are the largest creations of humanity, and you’d think we’d be more careful how we build them. The lessons from history for rebuilding New Orleans — and building cities in general — go back to some of the oldest cities on Earth, such as Ur in today’s Iraq, a city dating to almost 5,000 years ago, and to the not-much-more-recent city of Mohenjo-daro of ancient India. Both were built in river floodplains, but on constructed platforms of earth; Mohenjo-daro is over 20 feet high. These were pedestrian cities and, though their buildings were not very tall, their residential density was fairly high. They had narrow streets with no front, side and back yards. No freeways with sweeping landscaping there, no sidewalks or driveways, no parking lots or gas stations. Though the highest anywhere in those times, their populations were modest by today’s standards, with up to 50,000 for Ur and 40,000 for Mohenjo-daro. Now fast forward to present day. Typical for contemporary cities of the automobile era, New Orleans, also built in a floodplain, has spread out beyond its dense center to establish a very large footprint, displacing the natural buffering landscape/waterscape locally called the Bayou. Ancient Native American cities along the banks of the Mississippi were built on mounds. As far away as coastal California, the Indians built villages on top of shell mounds, for multiple reasons. Not only were these settlements constructed above the highest tides and waves for security, but because the views were improved for defense, for assessing the qualities of the water and landscape below for fishing and hunting and for appreciation of the weather and distant horizon, adding to the inspiration of the culture itself. To those earlier people, building communities on elevated promontories were more even than that, being also a place of ceremony, burial in many cases, remembrance of past and dedication to the future. What might we learn? 1.) Raise the level of New Orleans wherever possible by adding fill before building. Calculate sea level rise caused by global warming over a few more decades and add another ten feet of fill. There need to be federal, state and local incentives to encourage this. 2.) Make the city much more compact and pedestrian friendly, for several reasons. First, in the case of flood-prone places like New Orleans, to reduce the area of land needing protection, making it easier and cheaper to defend. Thus the perimeter of whatever levees necessary would also be reduced. Diked areas would include the small historic districts and the existing higher density areas where many people are served. Second, make the city more compact to reduce the commuting distances and make transit efficient and economical and bicycling convenient. This applies to Everytown, USA as well as New Orleans. Make suburbs into real towns with their own mixed and vital economies and culture by adding higher density and diversity of uses in their centers. Create car-free areas and increase them in size to whole districts over time. Remove automobile-dependent development on the periphery, rolling back sprawl. This is essential if we are to conserve energy enough to combat global warming and deal with the permanent slide into expensive, limited, post-peak oil production. 3.) Put in place incentives to reduce population voluntarily in the dangerous areas, such incentives as grants to people who want to move but can’t afford it. In the Oakland/Berkeley Hills Firestorm of 1991, 3,375 homes were destroyed, and a full 30% of the people affected wanted to sell and move. But their insurance policies required they rebuild in the same fire-prone location. Laws could be passed to require the insurance companies to pay victims of disasters to rebuild or simply move anywhere they want. A little flexibility, please! 4.) Establish a crash program for renewable energy like solar and wind. Coordinated with reshaping cities around pedestrian and transit needs, renewable energy systems constitute the most effective strategy in combating global warming and ameliorating future hurricane fury. Again, this applies to New Orleans and the vastly larger sprawl of Everytown, USA. Build cities for people, not cars. 5.) Steadily into the future, connect cities internally and between one another mainly with energy-efficient rails, and de-emphasize energy-squandering highways. Build streetcars rather than streets for cars. With one rail line delivering as much freight and passenger service as eight lanes of freeway, it is close to insanity in an energy-constrained future not to build that way. In New Orleans, the above five-point strategy would mean preservation of as much of the part of the city as possible that was above the Katrina flood, which happens to be much of the historic French Quarter and downtown. The lowest, and the fairly-low areas close to Lake Pontchartrain should be allowed to go back to water and/or bayou, whichever makes the most sense from the ecological and storm-buffer points of view. Areas farthest from those chosen for higher density pedestrian centers, whether lower or higher in elevation, are the most car- dependent and should also be abandoned for restoration of nature and agriculture, and in some areas around New Orleans, aquatic food production. Two issues for New Orleans in particular are sediment from the Mississippi and subsidence along the coast. As most people who have read about the catastrophe in the popular press now know, the river has been locked behind levees and dredged for shipping. As a result, the river heads straight out to the farthest edge of the delta in full flow and drops its burden of silt over the continental shelf and into the depths. This starves the marshlands around New Orleans of nutrient- containing silt for plants, and hence animals of all sorts, including fish. This diverts fresh water that historically flowed through smaller channels perpendicular to the main flow and across the vast acreage of the delta wetlands. Depriving these wetlands of fresh water allows salt intrusion, which kills many of the plants. The solution, then, would be gradually to reduce oil and natural gas extraction toward zero and reserve most of what we do use for the rebuilding of all cities so that low density is replaced with ecologically-informed pedestrian infrastructure steadily into the future. This means less climate-changing CO2 going into the atmosphere. The problem for New Orleans in particular would be, how much silt to capture for raising the overall level of the new, smaller-footprint city, and how much to dedicate to rebuilding the marshes and all the life based on them? If much of the river’s flow should be returned to side channels, perhaps part of the answer would be using more shallow draft ships moving up and down the Mississippi and out to sea and back. Finally, I acknowledge that this prescription for a healthier New Orleans has to do with its physical description. Beyond that are the obvious social, economic and political questions raised by the Katrina disaster. Will the rich succeed in limiting the return of the poorer only as service workers in a tourist destination city as hotel clerks and maids, tour guides and musicians, casino dealers and bartenders? Will the city become a shipping port and energy extraction and processing center continuing the old patterns of subsidence and global warming, with the high- paying jobs for its use-it-up-until-its-gone exploitation of finite and dwindling resources? Such a rebuilt New Orleans would be a cultural disaster for not just the displaced but for the whole country. Will the habits of providing first for car drivers reassert itself and services for the pedestrian again be forgotten as the memory of high winds and waters and vulnerable levees slides away, as people fall back into old ways of short-term thinking? Cars and sprawl not only will kill us, they already are doing so in Everytown, USA, where car accidents and air pollution, violently or quietly lay the people down. In New Orleans, we’ve seen the front lines of climate change’s new war, against none other than all of us. Richard Register is one of the world’s great theorists and authors in ecological city design and planning. He has worked for three decades activating local projects, pushing establishment buttons and working with environmentalists and developers to get a better city built. Richard’s latest book is Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature. Go to http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/rr-bio.html for more info. <back | top^ |