Rebuilding Cities

One of the good things about reading policy magazines more than a year after they are published is that one can much more easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

In the September 19, 2006 issue of the New Republic there was a pretty good article about rebuilding cities, what struck me was this portion:

The impulse to rebuild a radically new city is especially pointed in New Orleans, punctuated as it is by a degraded infrastructure, corrupt politics, massive wealth disparities, and, in many neighborhoods, near-Third World living conditions. After a disaster like Katrina, "for the first time, adequate resources become available for thorough physical and design studies," wrote the authors of a 1977 National Science Foundation-funded study on post-disaster reconstruction. "The impossible seems possible ... the opportunity for comprehensive study and major change is at hand."

In fact, the idea of rebuilding a city "bigger and better" has a long - and disheartening - history. After the Great London Fire of 1666, the architect Sir Christopher Wren pushed city leaders to adopt his plans for an orderly city grid, with wide streets that would help slow a future fire. But even the man who built St. Paul's Cathedral had little impact on London's reconstruction. A similar story unfolded after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed over 50 percent of the city's housing stock and wiped out its commercial and industrial sectors. By coincidence, the year before the earthquake, the great architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham had drawn up a master plan for the San Francisco of the twentieth century. But, when the earthquake provided the perfect opportunity to put his plan into effect, it was completely overlooked. Even Chicago, which supposedly rebuilt itself according to exacting new construction codes after a fire wiped out much of its downtown in 1871, was actually first rebuilt in the same shoddy manner as before; it was only after a prolonged political battle that planners put tougher codes in place.

The crux of the problem, planners admit, is that no city, even one as thoroughly devastated as New Orleans, emerges as a tabula rasa. "There is already a plan for reconstruction, indelible stamped in the perception of each resident - the plan of the pre-disaster city," wrote the authors of the NSF study. Not only does the will of the residents to "make it like it was" render an thought of relocation void, but it also makes it difficult to conceive of any urban design that varies too far from the old model - no matter how socially unjust that model may have been.

"Plus Ca Change, Rebuilding a beautiful mess" by Clay Risen, The New Republic, September 19, 2005. pp. 17-19

I think this piece more than anything I have read captures the hubris of the urban planner. While I am no fan of New Orleans, personally I find it only rivalled among major American cities by Las Vegas in its ability to make me feel uncomfortable, the idea of treating any city as a tabula rasa for planners to build a perfect city upon is the sort of idea that should fill one with horror. I know it is received wisdom that the failure to rebuild London along Wren's lines was a tragedy, but am I the only person who is less than enthusiastic for a London along the lines of Dublin, Bath or Edinburgh's "admittedly beautiful" New Town? And of course this wold be an Edinburgh without its magnificent setting or the Old Town and Castle. But the most important part of this is that London's windy traditional streets and cramped conditions are 300+ years later a minor part of the great city that is modern London. Wren's planning may not have been followed, but in the West End and Westminster it is quite clear that this is what modern London has. And the East End would be the same regardless of any of Wren's plans. Cities grow organically, and what may appear desirable in one century is anathema in only a few decades. For example all of the great plans for rebuilding San Francisco were premised on the "removal" of the city's Chinatown, Burnham's famously. This in the same spirit as the author's dreams of building to correct social injustice. One can never recapture what has been destroyed completely, or even in part, but cities are living and organic, even if unfeeling, and there is a reason grand schemes so often come to either nothing or, even worse, sterility.