Clifford J. Levy: Post-Katrina, Bricks and Mortals
WHEN President Bush went to the virtual ghost town of New Orleans on Thursday to champion a plan for its recovery, his words - "This great city will rise again" - carried familiar echoes. The American way of facing these calamities: get up off the ground, dust (or dry) yourself off and start over. Dream big, and take back what nature took.
After Hurricane Andrew thrashed Florida in 1992, for instance, a high-powered civic group, We Will Rebuild, sprang up, with a vow to make a "better, healthier community." Surveying San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906, the magazine Sunset proclaimed that the city would end up "greater and more beautiful."
Nearly a century later, Mr. Bush used similar language and imagery. "The people of this land have come back from fire, flood and storm to build anew, and to build better than what we had before," he declared.
Yet shadowing Mr. Bush's plans for a new New Orleans is an uncomfortable notion. Hurricane Katrina was a brutal natural disaster, but it also touched off a manmade one. The chaos and mismanagement, the violence and the racial tensions broadcast to the world recalled not earlier natural disasters, but something else: the strife in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict in 1992; the race riots in Detroit and Newark in 1967, from which neither city fully recovered.
In his speech from the French Quarter, Mr. Bush promised "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen," and the federal government will undoubtedly inject tens of billions of dollars into New Orleans.
But whatever the financial and engineering challenges in reviving New Orleans, the harder truth is that cities often have difficulty bouncing back from manmade misfortune that throws into doubt their potential as safe places to live and work and invest, urban affairs experts say.
Even before Katrina, New Orleans was sliding in prosperity and in population, with high rates of crime and poverty. The question now is whether the jarring aftermath of the storm has fatally wounded New Orleans's reputation in the eyes of the public - residents and business owners who left and those who might consider moving to New Orleans in the coming years.
Hurricane Andrew was nearly as devastating to areas of South Florida, and people also fled, some permanently. But many returned, and while some areas were economically scarred for years, they are now booming. The '92 hurricane did not stir the kind of social strife that tends to make cities seem unwelcoming, perhaps because the underlying fabric of those communities was not frayed in the first place.
On the other hand, the lesson of Detroit and Newark is that these events can push teetering cities over the edge. Like New Orleans, they were struggling with a wilting industrial base and the flight of the white middle class. The riots hastened those trends, in part because there was a loss of faith that the cities were governable.
The resurrection of New Orleans, in other words, may hinge on whether the storm is remembered more for the collapse of the levees, which can be repaired and bolstered, or the collapse of civil order, whose taint is much harder to wipe away.
"New Orleans has to rebuild not just its buildings and its political culture, but its image," said Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: A Global History."
"People want to know whether a place is a credible first-world city," Mr. Kotkin said. "What they found in New Orleans was that underneath the gloss and facade of a first-world tourist attraction was a third-world reality. It will take a lot of work to erase that view."
Max A. Herman, an assistant professor at Rutgers University in Newark who studies urban unrest in the 20th century, said he had been struck by the similarity between the media images after Katrina and those during the violence in Detroit and Newark. The 1967 riots flared after accusations of police brutality in each city.
He cautioned that the situations were dissimilar in many respects, saying that the looting in New Orleans seemed to have been relatively insignificant and received more attention than it deserved. He suggested that there was more sympathy nationally for New Orleans and support for its recovery than was the case with Detroit and Newark in the late 1960's. Back then, black residents were often viewed, unfairly or not, as having brought the disaster upon themselves by attacking the police and burning buildings....
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After Hurricane Andrew thrashed Florida in 1992, for instance, a high-powered civic group, We Will Rebuild, sprang up, with a vow to make a "better, healthier community." Surveying San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906, the magazine Sunset proclaimed that the city would end up "greater and more beautiful."
Nearly a century later, Mr. Bush used similar language and imagery. "The people of this land have come back from fire, flood and storm to build anew, and to build better than what we had before," he declared.
Yet shadowing Mr. Bush's plans for a new New Orleans is an uncomfortable notion. Hurricane Katrina was a brutal natural disaster, but it also touched off a manmade one. The chaos and mismanagement, the violence and the racial tensions broadcast to the world recalled not earlier natural disasters, but something else: the strife in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict in 1992; the race riots in Detroit and Newark in 1967, from which neither city fully recovered.
In his speech from the French Quarter, Mr. Bush promised "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen," and the federal government will undoubtedly inject tens of billions of dollars into New Orleans.
But whatever the financial and engineering challenges in reviving New Orleans, the harder truth is that cities often have difficulty bouncing back from manmade misfortune that throws into doubt their potential as safe places to live and work and invest, urban affairs experts say.
Even before Katrina, New Orleans was sliding in prosperity and in population, with high rates of crime and poverty. The question now is whether the jarring aftermath of the storm has fatally wounded New Orleans's reputation in the eyes of the public - residents and business owners who left and those who might consider moving to New Orleans in the coming years.
Hurricane Andrew was nearly as devastating to areas of South Florida, and people also fled, some permanently. But many returned, and while some areas were economically scarred for years, they are now booming. The '92 hurricane did not stir the kind of social strife that tends to make cities seem unwelcoming, perhaps because the underlying fabric of those communities was not frayed in the first place.
On the other hand, the lesson of Detroit and Newark is that these events can push teetering cities over the edge. Like New Orleans, they were struggling with a wilting industrial base and the flight of the white middle class. The riots hastened those trends, in part because there was a loss of faith that the cities were governable.
The resurrection of New Orleans, in other words, may hinge on whether the storm is remembered more for the collapse of the levees, which can be repaired and bolstered, or the collapse of civil order, whose taint is much harder to wipe away.
"New Orleans has to rebuild not just its buildings and its political culture, but its image," said Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: A Global History."
"People want to know whether a place is a credible first-world city," Mr. Kotkin said. "What they found in New Orleans was that underneath the gloss and facade of a first-world tourist attraction was a third-world reality. It will take a lot of work to erase that view."
Max A. Herman, an assistant professor at Rutgers University in Newark who studies urban unrest in the 20th century, said he had been struck by the similarity between the media images after Katrina and those during the violence in Detroit and Newark. The 1967 riots flared after accusations of police brutality in each city.
He cautioned that the situations were dissimilar in many respects, saying that the looting in New Orleans seemed to have been relatively insignificant and received more attention than it deserved. He suggested that there was more sympathy nationally for New Orleans and support for its recovery than was the case with Detroit and Newark in the late 1960's. Back then, black residents were often viewed, unfairly or not, as having brought the disaster upon themselves by attacking the police and burning buildings....