Timeless Lessons for Rebuilding New Orleans: 5 Point Strategy for Sustainable Rebuilding

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, the habit of building in the suburban style was largely the cause of it. How so? Climate change and automobile- dependent sprawl. More specifically, 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. This is not a trivial contribution to the problem. Cities are the largest creations of humanity - you'd think we'd be very careful how we build them, but we haven't been. And also, the vast land areas gobbled up by car-induced scatterization makes it well nigh impossible to build appropriately to the natural environment in any location.

Let's run this mind experiment for a moment. Let's say someone on our planet had the time, wisdom and information enough to sit back and say, "What are the basics here? We'll get our priorities straight by starting from the city because of its commanding size and direct link to climate change. Then we will ask, "How have cities been built over the ages? How have they interacted with nature?" And in particular, "How have they been built in relation to rivers and oceans and floods?" Let's even add to the mind experiment that it is you and I who are doing this thinking.

The lessons from history for rebuilding New Orleans - and building cities in general - go way 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's over 20 feet high.

These cities 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. Their populations were modest by today's standards with up to 50,000 for Ur and 40,000 for Mohenjo-daro, though the highest anywhere in those times.

Now fast forward to present day. Typical for contemporary cities of the automobile era, New Orleans, also built in a floodplain, has spread out considerably beyond its dense center to establish a very large footprint, displacing the natural buffering landscape/waterscape locally called the bayou. The perimeter wall of Ur was 6 miles long, the levees of New Orleans, 350 miles long. For comparison, that's 6 times more levee per person at New Orleans with its 500,000 population - and of course, at Ur, behind those protective walls the city was elevated instead of sunken below water level.

Locally more to the point, however, is that ancient Native American cities along the banks of the Mississippi were also 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, assessing the qualities of the water and landscape below for fishing and hunting and appreciation of the weather and distant horizon. The air was fresher, the sunny side drier and warmer and, generally, a new environment with a new integration of effects and services could add to the inspiration of the culture itself. It feels great to make something unique, useful and, if done well, beautiful. Should it be healthy, happy and safe to boot, you have quite a creation of value in its own right. 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.

The compact pedestrian environment of high diversity makes such multiple positive effects possible, whereas, in the suburbs, the single use bedroom community embodies the opposite of this principle. The variety of experience available only electronically in the suburbs is a virtual reflection of the real thing, otherwise only accessible by using a far-flung transportation system, lots of time, heavy machines and massive flows of energy.

The bankers and business people of early New Orleans were far too busy making money to think of history and cities on elevated platforms or to contemplate the virtues of the pedestrian community, and so, 80% of the city was built below sea level.

5 Point Strategy for Sustainable Rebuilding

But now we are back to the here and now of our mind experiment. What might we learn?

1.) Raise the level of New Orleans wherever possible by adding fill and building on top of that. Calculate sea level rise caused by global warming over a few more decades and add another ten feet of fill. Now-days we subsidize car and oil companies by spending billions on freeways, wide arterials, parking lots and garages. Instead, we should spend on those areas we just can't culturally resist, like San Francisco and New Orleans. Build them stronger and better defended: more steel to San Francisco, more fill to New Orleans. There need to be federal, state and local incentives to encourage this. Skip the gift of steel and concrete to car drivers provided by many levels of government today - drivers have caused enough damage already.

2.) Make the city much more compact and pedestrian friendly, for several reasons. First, to reduce the area of land needing protection in flood-prone places like New Orleans, making it easier and cheaper to defend. Thus the perimeter of whatever levees necessary would also be reduced. Diked areas would include historic districts of small area and 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 very 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. Roll back sprawl. Remove automobile-dependent development on the periphery. This is essential if we are to conserve energy well enough to combat global warming and deal as best we can with the dislocations inevitable as we pass world peak oil production and start the permanent slide into expensive, limited energy availability.

Pedestrian cities can accomplish small footprint land uses and high performance. Car cities are too gigantic in land area to accomplish anything but perpetuating the disasters we see multiplying right now. Giant metropolises need models - New Orleans could become one - for downsizing into regions in which city centers becoming whole smaller compact cities and district centers and neighborhood centers becoming eco-towns and eco-villages relocalizing essential manufacture and caring for the restoration of agriculture and natural environments earlier displaced by ill advised sprawl.

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! The real estate with destroyed buildings or with vacant lots would then be inexpensive enough to be purchased for open space - bayou, nature preserve, farmland, open water - whatever makes the most sense. Make urban homesteading programs available again for those choosing to live in and up-grade urban and even suburban centers on their way to becoming real towns with the full range of working and living, of economic and social life close physically together.

4.) Establish a crash program for renewable energy like solar and wind - that fits perfectly with the energy conserving structure of the city rebuilt in the compact, mixed use pattern. Coordinated with reshaping cities around pedestrian and transit needs, renewable energy systems constitute the most fundamental and effective strategy in combating global warming and ameliorating future hurricane fury available. Again, this applies to New Orleans and the vastly larger sprawl of Everytown, USA. Forget making cars "better" in any way. That only perpetuates the disastrous waste of land, energy, time and lives - and even climate stability - indefinitely into the future. Build future cities for people, not cars.

5.) Connect cities internally and between one another, mainly with energy efficient rails, and de-emphasize energy squandering highways steadily into the future. Build streetcars rather than streets for cars. With one line of rail delivering as much freight and passenger service as eight lanes of freeway, it is close to insanity in an energy-constrained future to not build that way. There are tools that work magnificently with transportation and land use transformation, such as transfer of development rights and ecological zoning maps, land trusts and natural habitat restoration plans - and simply straight forwardly investing money in such work that, with resolve, could do the trick.

In New Orleans, the above five point strategy - 1. building appropriately to the location (up), 2. shifting to pedestrian centers oriented development, 3.) encouraging flexibility in population migration, 4.) building renewable energy systems, and 5.) switching from cars to rail - 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 but close to Lake Pontchartrain areas should be allowed to go back to water and/or bayou, which ever makes the most sense from the ecological and storm buffer points of view. Areas selected 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. Areas selected for higher density with a particularly high amount of damage should be bulldozed and earth brought in for fill. Venice Italy, dating back to 1,400 years ago, was built on fill on shallow waters and sandbars that barely broke the waves. But this fill was known to be too soft to support buildings. And so, the entirety of Venice is standing on wooden pilings driven into the sand and silt. Submerged under water and deprived of oxygen, this wood is still strong and solid after well over a millennium. Some similar solution might work well for New Orleans. The pedestrian city makes it possible - and makes energy conservation of a high degree possible as well.

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 benefit to 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 abyssal depths. This starves the marshlands around New Orleans of both nutrient containing silt for plants, and hence animals of all sorts including food animals of the fishing industry. This starves fresh water that would historically flow 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. Meantime, not only has sediment been diverted to the depths, but the land has been sinking due to extraction of oil and natural gas and the level of the ocean has been gradually rising too. Notice the suburbs' role in this. Burning prodigious amounts of oil in the form of gasoline, this low-density way of living has caused subsidence by extracting oil and also helped cause higher sea level - as well as more violent storms - by contributing more to global warming than any other single activity of humanity.

The solution, then, would be to gradually reduce extraction toward zero to combat further subsidence and reserve most of what we do use in terms of oil and natural gas in the rebuilding of all cities so that low density is replaced with ecologically informed pedestrian infrastructure steadily into the future. This also 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. But this writer can't answer such technical questions until others with much more local ecological, hydrological and engineering knowledge join in asking the question.

Finally, I acknowledge that this prescription for a healthier New 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 to an imagined 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 high paying jobs only for people taking part in such 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 for car drivers first reassert itself and services to(the pedestrian again be forgotten as the memory of high winds and high waters and hundreds of miles of vulnerable levees slides away with time, as people fall back into old ways of short term thinking? I have no real answers for that other than to hope people take seriously that what we do build physically has very real consequences.

Here then, winding up our thought experiment, is an overall rebuilding pattern for both New Orleans and suburbs everywhere: Metropolitan areas and cities with suburbs all need to find their centers and reinforce them. They need to withdraw development away from their low-density fringes and toward pedestrian, bicycle and transit centers. Cars and sprawl not only will kill us, they already are in Everytown, USA, where car accidents and air pollution, violently or quietly, lay the people down, and in New Orleans, on the front lines in the new war of climate change against none other than all of us.