"From the Ruins"

the UK Guardian: From the ruins, an opportunity for rebirth---

More than 150 years ago, the Illustrated London News pronounced loftily on a young American city. "New Orleans has been built upon a site that only the madness of commercial lust could ever have tempted men to occupy," observed the magazine in 1853. Now the planners and citizens of one of the world's most famous cities have to decide how - and if - they can rebuild and what Hurricane Katrina has changed for ever.

Yesterday question marks hovered over everything from what has become of the city's criminal records and its prisoners to whether there would have to be a full-scale bulldozing of the ruined areas of the city. While the city's main preoccupation was still search-and-rescue and handling looters, a debate was already starting about the future.

After Hurricane Betsy devastated the coastline in 1965 and took 74 lives in Louisiana and Mississippi, the US Army Corps of Engineers added extra height to the levees meant to provide protection for the city and its surrounding areas. Even then, they were aware that a hurricane of the force of Katrina would still be able to cause the kind of damage that has been witnessed in the past few days.

What the city and state government now have to decide is whether they again attempt to build the floodwalls even higher, or whether they accept that some parts of the city will be impossible to protect, and that the whole shape of New Orleans may have to be rethought.

The architect John Thompson, chairman of the Academy of Urbanism in Britain, said yesterday that the disaster presented New Orleans with an opportunity to create a new kind of city.

"It's quite a cathartic process to be thinking of something better for the future," said Mr Thompson, who has been involved in a number of urban regeneration projects around the world, including some in cities hit by disasters.
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"Throughout history, cities have been hit by disasters, and that can provide an opportunity for a rebirth, rather than just a restructuring. The issue you have is not just the physical restructuring, but also the spiritual, cultural and economic restructuring." Daniel Libeskind, the planner of the World Trade Centre site in New York, also sees a chance for the rebirth of the city, in the same way that Berlin was reborn after the second world war.

Referring to the famous heritage of New Orleans, Mr Libeskind told the New York Times: "To work with history doesn't mean to imitate it or make it kitsch, or simply simulate it, but really take the roots of great culture and build upon it.

"And what could be more creative than jazz? It's the right theme. You can build in a rich way with a variety of voices, yet create an overall structure of harmony."