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We Must Not Get This Wrong

Justin Davidson

September 26, 2005

Justin Davidson is a Newsday staff writer.

Decades from now, when the toddlers who were corralled into the putrefying Superdome have children of their own, we will know whether the decisions made in the first months after Hurricane Katrina helped to rejuvenate New Orleans or ruin it all over again.

The torrent of money that will flow into the Gulf Coast over the coming years would have paid for a war or two. Instead, it has been earmarked for a colossal program of recovery and reconstruction. That's cause to celebrate, provided the process doesn't wind up ravaging the landscape in its own, peaceable way. The one-two punch of cataclysm and windfall will shape the way America conceives of its cities for generations. We cannot get this wrong.

One person who has an idea of what right and wrong mean is Jaime Lerner, the three-time mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, who is widely recognized as a genius at making cities work. Lerner is a longtime proponent of what might be called "blitz urbanism:" the rapid, workable improvement that does an end-run on bureaucrats and doubters. The renaissance of Curitiba began one night in 1972, when workers transformed a central artery into a flowered pedestrian mall in 48 hours.

That kind of haste could be disastrously applied to New Orleans, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency is rapidly erecting "temporary" trailer parks that could easily become permanent slums.

Lerner's technique looks more promising when it is combined with his progressive credo. "The main purpose of development should be quality of life for the large majority of people," he said in an interview. "If you don't have a generous view of cities, then you don't have a generous view of people." That is a simple but radical statement, especially in the midst of a U.S. housing boom fueled by an affluent minority devouring land ever farther from urban centers.

To Lerner, one corollary of the principle that cities should serve people is that transportation should be quick, clean and cheap, both to build and to use. In Curitiba, a ballooning city three times the size of New Orleans, he assembled a network of accordion buses running along dedicated express lanes, supplemented by a web of local lines. The bus shelters—long Plexiglas tubes equipped with ticket-taking turnstiles—have become one of the city's most recognizable architectural forms.

In the days after Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin complained that he lacked enough buses or drivers to evacuate his citizens without cars. Eventually, public buses were imported from New York City. It doesn't take a catastrophe to see why public transportation makes sense. You need only compare the clogged arteries of Long Island or Los Angeles with the painless Curitiba commute.

New Orleans is quickly becoming a battleground for competing ideologies about how Americans should live. Advocates of federal housing, enemies of sprawl, champions of preservation, defenders of big business, community activists, environmentalists, oil lobbyists are all chiming in with a vision.

If the poor are not welcomed back to New Orleans—if the diaspora is never reversed—then a plagued but vibrant metropolis will become what author Joel Kotkin calls an "ephemeral city." Kotkin's term describes the hollowed-out relic cities for the rich, whose economies rest on the tottering tripod of glitz, cool and history.

It is not hard to imagine a contained, pristine New Orleans whittled down to its pretty showcase center, a few quiet office blocks and some gleaming new subdivisions on higher ground. The Smaller Easy would have less crime, less misery and less unemployment. But a healthy city cannot be a segmented, segregated place where the rich navigate around the poor but never see them. "The more you mix functions, the more you mix ages, the more you mix income," Lerner said, "the more human the city becomes."

The best and oldest parts of New Orleans already exemplify those values. "This is a diverse city and many of the aspects that allow it to be so are inherent in the strategies of the 18th- and 19th-century planning," said Steve Dumez, a New Orleans architect. "It's a lot of the 20th-century planning that was a recipe for disaster."

Few will mourn the grim postwar towers built to house and isolate the poor. It's the dense grid of pre-electric New Orleans that will serve as the future's best guide.

Once the emergency has passed, one of the first tasks of reconstruction is to figure out what not to scrap. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is fielding a team of experts to assess what can be salvaged and to try to prevent any overzealous bulldozing.

But preservation melds quickly into planning, because it is guided by taste and ideology. Katrina has offered officials a chance to shed the city's blight simply by declaring it unsound. Yet the more unsavory aspects of the city's past cannot be excluded from its future by fiat. "A city is like a family portrait," Lerner said. "You don't rip this portrait even if you don't like the nose of your uncle. This portrait is you."

For the reconstruction of New Orleans to succeed, planners, architects, citizens and officials will have to discover a new equilibrium between their past and their aspirations. Poverty existed before Katrina, and poverty will return. The question is whether it can have more dignity than it did before.

Each family in each drowned neighborhood will have to decide whether to trust that calamity can be deterred next time. But the decisions where and how to rebuild can be guided by a set of principles that have a track record of success. The precepts are clear.

Extend the center's basic street grid and density into each reclaimed zone. Draw on the city's treasury of traditional architectural forms. Channel car traffic toward the periphery and connect neighborhoods by a network of bus corridors modeled on Curitiba's. Plan for a diverse economy and provide a basic quality of life high enough to attract new business. Place an architect or a planner, not a bureaucrat or a general, in charge of rebuilding. Be willing to import wisdom from abroad.

Out of the rubble and the mud-wrestling might come a sweeping change affecting localities all over the country. This could be the moment when the ideas of smart growth and the value of public transportation become so compelling to so many people that they forge a new national standard.

"You have an opportunity to give the world an example of how to build a more human city," Lerner said. "It can be done."