Dell Upton: Briefly I want to offer you four keys to understanding the physical aspects of New Orleans that you’ve been seeing on the news and that need to be kept in mind when we think about the task of rebuilding or even as some have suggested, whether to rebuild at all.

The first of these keys is the topography of New Orleans. Why is it where it is? Here’s an 18th century map. New Orleans, as you can see, is considerably up the Mississippi River from the delta. It’s right here where the River and Lake Ponchartrain come together. The French had initially established their southern North American headquarters at Mobile, but they really wanted to control the intersection of the Caribbean basin and the Mississippi delta and New Orleans, the site of what’s now New Orleans, was not only really the first even possible site that they came to up the river, but as you can see, they imagined that it might be possible to come in from the Gulf through Lake Ponchartrain and cut out that long hundred-plus mile trip up the river, so New Orleans is where it is because it’s at a key strategic meeting place of the Caribbean and the North American continent.

Why does it take the form that it takes? The Mississippi River is like the Nile River and other similar rivers— overflows periodically. It leaves deposits of soil on the banks and this is a diagram from Peirce Lewis’s New Orleans the Making or an Urban Landscape which is far and away the best book on the urban morphology of New Orleans or really of any American city, but you can see how you get those kinds of ridges very close to the river with the natural levy and the back swamps behind it, so the very first New Orleans was laid out on that natural levy, the Vieux Carre, the Old Square, and then plantations, private land laid out in strips up and down river and these eventually developed as suburbs. It’s at the bend in the river where the river and the lake are closest, where they’re nearly connected by Bayou St. Jean which comes in from Lake Ponchartrain and runs toward the Mississippi and ultimately extended in a canal that ran down into a basin at the back of what’s now called the French Quarter. In the 19th century, New Orleans grew up and down the river on this high ground in a pattern like this with the interior of the crescent and the areas along the lake still primarily undrained swamps, so that’s the first point.

The second point is the water. Water has always been the key fact in New Orleans—using it, restraining it, draining it, the levy in New Orleans aggressively defended in the 19th century. People understood that the levy was not only their economic life, that their place at the intersection of these two vast regions is the main reason for their existence, but also that the levy held back the river which was the greatest threat to human life, so that unlike other American cities where waterfronts in the 19th century, even beginning in the 18th century, were sold off and privatized, New Orleans, until the railroads came after the Civil War, New Orleans very aggressively defended that levy as open public space and no one was allowed to take over, no one was allowed to do anything to damage.

The levy constantly raised and periodically moved out. Outside the levy the river continued to deposit soil, what was called the [bateur], people took soil from the bateur to fill their lots. Periodically someone would move the levy out, fill in the bateur and create more land extended out into the river, so the levy is constantly is being raised higher, constantly being moved out into the river, and the result is that notorious bowl that you hear so much of on the news with the high ground next to the river and the highest ground is the artificial levy. The French Quarter here, the old section on the natural levy, and then in the middle, these low areas that then raise back up to levies created in the 20th century along Lake Ponchartrain.

What that means is that even the highest ground in New Orleans had to be constantly filled and drained. Soil, as I mentioned, taken from the bateur. The canal that ran in from St. Jean to the basin, that’s Basin Street, behind the Vieux Carre is the oldest of these, but from the beginning of the 18th century, the city— You have to imagine a city that’s filled with these drainage canals, eventually, below ground as well as above ground canals. Street-side drainage ditches and sewers. This is a drainage canal out in the suburbs of Metairie.

At the end of the 19th century, you get a key development which is the invention of these massive pumps that constantly pump and drain the surrounding back swamps. These canals, the extension of the lakefront into Lake Ponchartrain open up the interior, what’s called Mid City in New Orleans, and northern New Orleans along the lake became very lucrative real estate. You’ll see this is Lake Oaks, a genteel suburb on the edge of Lake Ponchartrain and you’ll see a sign that says “Developed by the Orleans Levy Board,” so this possibility became too tempting to restrain people’s desire to build and drain new land leading after World War II to the development of these vast suburbs, particularly in Jefferson Parrish, Metairie, very directly the result of white flight.

So, all this area is what flooded, because it’s already low, because it’s sitting on what the 19th century called decaying vegetative matter; that is, the water is pumped, collapsed, so it’s sinking, but the nature of the topography of New Orleans that I started with and the economic function in New Orleans means that New Orleans could have been nowhere else. There’s no other site, either topographically or economically that it could have been, so it’s an important point to keep in mind when we talk about the possibility of moving it, not rebuilding it here.

That leads to my third point which is fatalism. This kind of thing has happened in New Orleans many time before, beginning with a series of what were called crevasses, breaks in the levy. McCarty’s Crevasse in 1816, Sauvé’s Crevasse in 1849, a break upstream, all this hatched area is area that was flooded and it’s essentially the uptown and mid-city areas of present-day New Orleans and part of the French Quarter. The Bonnet Carre Crevasse, as they say in New Orleans, Bonny Carey Crevasse in 1871. The 1927 great Mississippi flood would’ve gotten New Orleans but a somewhat cynical decision was made to cut the levies down river to drown the people there and save the city.

Hurricane Camille in 1969, again, flooded most of this area, so from the very first, people in New Orleans understood this. They understood that this would happen. They understood the geology, they understood the topography, they understood the epidemiology of the site very clearly. They understood that it was a site unfit for human habitation and that the only reason to live there was greed and that created a very fatalistic attitude in them. This is a detail of a map made by a doctor in the 1850s, Edward Barton, the Sanitary Map of New Orleans and he decided to map the incidents of Yellow Fever in New Orleans. What you see on the darker spots on the map are the more incidents of Yellow Fever and what he discovered was that Yellow Fever happened closest to the drainage canals. It happened, he thought, wherever the ground was broken for these canals exposing this decaying vegetative matter to human effluvia and those together created disease, so the point to him that’s kind of ironic and kind of tragic point was that the very thing that people in New Orleans did to protect themselves was what was most dangerous to them. There was no way they could win and so one of the kind of side effects of that is New Orleans was the last major American city to have a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1905 and as far as I know, the only one to have had a Yellow Fever epidemic after people really knew the cause of Yellow Fever.

A final key to thinking about New Orleans is that New Orleans is a seamless cultural landscape and it’s essential to keep that in mind when we think about this issue of rebuilding. New Orleans has few monuments that you can kind of pick out and cut out of the fabric like Mussolini did in Rome or like the National Park Service does in many places. The city is made up of variations of house types, building types, that were synthesized in the Caribbean from African and European ideas. They created modular building practices that were carried on New Orleans to World War I and often in cases to World War II. Here are two kinds of familiar New Orleans houses—a shotgun house or a double shotgun house in the middle and a Creole— What are called Creole cottage or banquette houses, sidewalk houses, on the other side. They’re both actually variations of the same Afro-European ideas.

And alongside these European Euro-American urban and domestic commercial industrial landscape that survived from New Orleans pre-oil commercial heyday, so that people often say New Orleans is unique. It’s not unique. It’s basically a Caribbean city but it’s distinctive certainly and it’s distinctive not only in this fabric, but in the fact that it is relatively, and I say relatively, undamaged by large-scale urban destruction or urban renewal that most large southern cities have suffered. If you’ve been to Mobile or Atlanta or Nashville or Richmond, you see the wreck of a city. New Orleans, for the most part has escaped much of that, and so it forms an urban fabric that can’t be replaced. It can’t be reconstructed. It can’t be thinned out. It can’t be pinned up in little restrictive historic district zoos like Society Hill in Philadelphia or Beacon Hill in Boston. It can’t be redesigned without losing the whole point of the thing.

And, finally, that won’t happen anyway. If you look at the histories of great urban disasters, the London fire in 1666 or the Chicago fire, Baltimore fire of 1904, San Francisco of 1906, the structure, the structure of property ownership, the legal structure, the existing infrastructure, cultural and legal and economic infrastructure of cities makes it virtually impossible to start over in any city, so they usually come back in a form very much like they had before and I leave to Bill that discussion.

William Morrish: A discussion of this kind of topic is, again, multilayered like Dell’s talking about. It involves a number of human experiences and events involving our most proud and precious constructions that we have as human beings—our cities.

First, I think it’s important to begin with the phenomena of a disaster as it intersects and constantly plays on us as a culture and the fact that our societies are in a constant dialogue between natural forces and our city. In fact, we seem to place the cities all over the world right in the front of this dialogue. Venice, London is in a swamp, Indianapolis is in a swamp. Politically, they put it there in the swamp. It was the only place they could agree legally in the state to place it and it was the only wet place I think in the whole state, so they put Indianapolis in a swamp.

Politics and swamps go together, but fatalism and immorality in Los Angeles has produced the movie industry and so we begin to see that we place, as the historian William Cronin would say, our city is at the intersection, at the lines of intersection between economy and ecology, and that what we have here in looking at this very important statement by Susan Neiman who wrote this statement right after the tsunami is to constantly remember that we’re involved in the fact that we’re part of the processes of the world.

What disasters do and I’ve worked on a number of them—earthquakes in Los Angeles, the 1993 flood of the Mississippi River and the World Trade Center and I’ve been doing more and more research. The recent book called Resilient Cities, excellent, the final chapter talks about something I think the 12 different principles that one has to face when you’re dealing with a disaster in cities, but what I’ve discovered and I would add to that his book, is that it’s strips away the veneer from anybody’s big easy.

In fact, in today’s global society we can barely handle a heavy weather storm. There’s always these incredible essays that come out in the paper after a big snow storm hits New York about what are going to do about all this snow, it’s just slowed up business for 24 hours and it’ll bring the economy down. It’s sort of like those calculations we do of time wasted in the car, you know, billions and billions of dollars because of snow, so we created the southwest and there we have heat days, so you trade off snow for snakes.

But what we do is that what happens is what we begin to see in these huge catastrophe is that it accelerates the processes that are already underway, that we don’t like to talk about the fact that our cities are dynamic and that the present is very dynamic. History is dynamic. The present and the future is dynamic and it accelerates what ecologists would call successional change and that’s what we’re involved in now, even more so of this hurricane hitting the city at this time or the World Trade Center at this time in the midst of this huge global transformation that’s been brought on by the realization of ecological interconnectedness and economic interconnectedness, the ability for a city to survive offline for a week is catastrophic, but successional change as opposed to just change is a very important term because it’s historic in the sense that in many regards what happened before is not going to continue. Some things radically are going to be different.

We are moving into another agenda, another era, and it’s redirecting. Yes, New Orleans is going to come back but there’s going to be another direction and that’s what’s being discussed now. That’s the huge fights that are going on in City Hall, in FEMA tents, in Washington, D.C., and out on the street.

It also exposes things we never want to talk about, not only the fatalism but the denials that we live with every day—oh, the traffic’s not bad, water’s not too bad here, and maybe it’ll rain more next year. We really begin to expose outdated ways, deferred maintenance. This is a huge one I’ll talk about and disenfranchised.

It exposes what we saw in Hurricane Andrew, 200-mile-an-hour wind came through, stripped off all the palm leaves and all of a sudden we went, oh, my God, there’s all these elderly poor people living in trailers that have no money or insurance, where’d they come from? They didn’t come in with the hurricane. They were there all along.

And as we’ll discover in the south, why were so many people left, isolated on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans? It’s because they’ve moved there and they’re now in harms way, so it demands a new city narrative. One of the major points of Lawrence Vale’s book which this drawing is from is to understand that we’re not only rebuilding this city as if it had a fire, there’s incredible cycles of ways that happen, much like any grieving process goes on and as much as politicians would like to get out there and build a statue or a history museum or build a memorial, the process is dynamic and it has to be understood that way and as you see here in this great cycle, what’s interesting is the question is whether this disaster is even over yet. And many people would argue it isn’t. Katrina is gone, Rita’s over there, the disaster’s still underway and so this process of renewal and recovery hasn’t even started yet and as you can see, it takes one to two years before you even get an economy going at a kind of minimal level. Eight to 10 years if you have green lights to get it up and running like the highway’s going to get built.

But this issue of the emergency is quite fascinating which is actually based upon how we respond to it rather than the effect of the disaster itself. The emergency question of its long-term impact has more to do with whether we’re actually prepared to think about taking our neighbor in the car to get out of town or there’s actually a transit system that actually might get them out of town.

As Peter Schwartz in most remarkable book called Inevitable Surprises— I think it’s one of the best books to actually talk about the future, he writes down there are some things we do know about—we may not want to talk about them—but they are there. The question is how’re they going to play out. The hurricane has revealed some very important things that have been there at the level of our cities in general in this country.

What we’ve found in working and we’re still having discussion of 9/11 working on the World Trade Center and being in New York, there’s been a whole discussion of what we might call the global others. How do we fit as a country of people with other people. It’s not a nation versus a nation. It’s groups of people meeting groups of people and there’s plenty of others out there and we don’t know what to do with all those strangers and that’s been the struggle and I don’t think we’re doing well with that.

Katrina is all about those local others, you know, that thing that we thought was going to be okay, that everybody seems to be fine, the economy’s doing okay, everybody seems to have access to everything, everybody seems to have a car, everybody seems to be doing okay, but things are not that way. Things are radically different and changing.
Here’s another inevitable surprise. There are going to be more hurricanes, ergo Rita, and we have a very long alphabet of other names that we can use and we’ll continue that way, global warming or not.

The other one that no one really wants to talk about in New Orleans is that the Mississippi River is going to move its channel. It’s on the eastern-most swing and in 1973 John McPhee has a wonderful essay called “The Atchafalaya” which talks about the old river control Morganza Spillway. That’s a billion-dollar spillway, if you want to know the size of some of these things. In 1973 billion dollars, so that’s about, what, a hundred billion now, but the river almost changed because a barge broke lose in a flood and got shoved into one of those gates and the river is so forceful it was squeezing it through, sort of like toothpaste, on the other side and almost took the spillway out and basically they said if it broke, the river would just start swinging back towards Lake Charles and it’ll eventually move which raises a very interesting question. New Orleans could be a great island. Talk about fantasy island. The Mississippi River may become a lake and it probably will be that. It’s much like looking at Venice today or any other city.

The left behind—very powerful—is this story of Katrina, again, Charlie, Andrew, these events, World Trade Center, the amount of people, 3,000 people died; 60,000 people lost their jobs which were in the range of 9 to 20 dollars an hour which cannot be replaced and they’ve received no support, so the left behind question of the history of New Orleans or the history of south central Los Angeles or anything are there and what was amazing was not only the pictures of people of color, the people of less means, but the elderly is a profound set of images which as I’ve talked to some people in New Orleans, you haven’t even seen anything yet about the story of abandonment of older people.

A real undercurrent of mine and I know this is a really big statement here, but it’s important, is that— What it says down here is 30 years of Proposition 13. I’ve been working on cities for 30 years, about that time that Proposition 13, probably not a good time to come into public infrastructure, period, but essentially I’ve been following infrastructure, urban development. We have not invested in infrastructure since the 1960s and ‘70s and in California in the 1970s, when we were there, everybody said we had enough, we don’t need anymore and so we don’t really need to pay for it anymore, so we’re going to just sort of opt out and hope that it comes through private investment and through the economic development and some did.

Right now, we’re sitting in a country that doesn’t understand where it’s going to fund or development their infrastructure. It’s confused between private sector and public sector and that what we’re seeing in New Orleans is a very vivid example of not only just the New Orleans way of doing things but essentially a system by which they haven’t built a sidewalk in years, they haven’t built a new pump since 1940 and if you look at power systems such as in a city nearby us in Washington, D.C., who on the average age of a school, the building is a 125 years old. The sewer system hasn’t been addressed in 137 years and the Anacostia is one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

So we have been sort of thinking it’s just there. We’ve had it a long time. In 1990, a report came out from the Reagan Administration at that time that deferred maintenance on American infrastructure was three trillion dollars. We have done nothing on that topic.

Another kind of thing is that we’ve been building a lot of infrastructure that hasn’t been really been serving the community. It’s been servicing industry, an important topic. I’ve been up the whole length of the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Lake Atasca. It’s artificial from top to bottom. Yes, the Army Corps took over in 1927 to deal with the flood issue. The bulk of the money has been basically to build the levy system to move ships and barges. It’s a giant liquid freeway for the grain and petrochemical industry which we all rely upon but the focus of funding the Corps has been managing and there’s a whole question of why the Corps is doing this, is really focused, as you can almost literally see, the shape of the canal and levy mirrors the shape of the vessel more than it does to talk about the flooding that happens on either side.

One of my most favorite statements to be used both in the World Trade Center and in New Orleans is an accepted level of contaminants and toxicity. This is when I really worry when an official stands up and said it’s acceptable level of contaminant and they go, for who, and they’re in a hazmat suit on and their rubber boots. This is this whole debate that has been actually put aside in the last number of years which is incredible that all of this sewage water that was in the middle of the city is actually being pumped into Lake Ponchartrain when it could’ve been pumped into the Mississippi River which, you know, one or the other, but the Mississippi River is way more polluted at this point than the Ponchartrain and the 30% of the nation’s seafood comes from Ponchartrain and that area, so I’d stay away from oysters for a while.

So, it can’t be the Big Easy anymore. It’s been a nice way to sell the town. It’s sort of like New York can’t always be the Big Apple. It has to sort of get down and do some work.

There’s these kinds of very important questions that people in New Orleans are asking and most of us living in the global world. Someone living in Argentina, a poor person living in Ankara, have some of the same questions—how does one build in an unfamiliar and unknowable world and this wonderful quote by Bruno Taut who is modern architect from Germany who had to leave Germany due to fascism and found himself in Japan and finding this other world that is completely fascinated, a world that is completely separate of him that he found connections that he never believed in, but he found today living has become very hard. No one was living in their real home.

A city is hard to kill. Yes, buildings come and go, but property lines are forever in this country and the things that are important moving forward are the memories, the motives and the skills of its inhabitants. The memories are very important and we also have to be very concerned about that.

There’s a whole group that feel it’s time to rebuild New Orleans the way it used to be which is the Corps version of the way they think it is and there’s a kind of desire to make the whole city not a fusion of culture but of one period and one style.

I think in listening to some incredible jazz musicians who’ve been talking about their community, the whole series called “The Higher Ground,” which is done out of Lincoln Center, a phenomenal mixture of music and history, is a reminder to us that New Orleans is really the soul of all American cities. And that jazz coming on the train from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. to Harlem gave that world a life has sort of kept that rich gumbo of culture of our society that what we’re really dealing with as other people are discovering, that New Orleans is not by itself. It’s always been part of a great big meta system, that the new memory and the old memories, they really are all interconnected as much as Mississippi is not like Alabama, like Louisiana which has always been a problem. They’re very much interconnected.