Rebuilding New Orleans— and Yourtown, USA
By Richard Register

Richard Register is not currently an OPEN EXCHANGE lister, but he did first teach a class on ecological cities for us in 1994. He is president of Ecocity Builders, a United Nations accredited NGO with a Board of Advisors that includes Ernest Callenbach, Fritjof Capra, Paul Hawken, Hazel Henderson, Brian Swimme, David Suzuki, and Sim Van der Ryn. Thanks, Richard, for this timely contribution to our national dialog!

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 wants to face. The suburbs are even implicated in amplifying the catastrophe in New Orleans. How? Scattered development patterns, once built, force long distance travel for our everyday lives, causing us to bum more fuel and loading more climate-changing C02 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.

In addition, promoting more energy-efficient cars means you can drive farther for less money and thus promotes yet more sprawl. Many environmentalists cling to the "solution" of buying an energy-efficient car. But that strategy backfires by keeping the same old car/sprawl system going with its constant hunger for massive infusions of energy, cheap or otherwise. In a similar one-piece-of-the-problem-at-a-time approach, making taller, stronger levees around New Orleans as the focus of the rebuilding effort contributes as much to the problem as it is supposed to contribute to the solution. The far better alternative in both cases is to remove sprawl development and go back—and forward—to the more compact and diverse sorts of cities and towns we used to build, but adding "green" and pedestrian friendly features we have learned about in the meantime.

The lessons from history for rebuilding New Orleans—and cities in general—go way back to some of the oldest cities on Earth. Look at Ur in today's Iraq, a city dating back almost 5,000 years, and the city of Mohenjo-daro of ancient India as well. Both were built in river floodplains, but Mohenjo-daro is raised on platforms of earth over 20 feet high. Both ancient cities were dense and covered only a small amount of land, appearing like islands as flooding rivers would roll by. The bankers and business people of early New Orleans were far too busy making money to think this one through, so 80% of the city remains below sea level. However, there is a better way:

1.) Raise the level of New Orleans wherever possible simply 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. We continue to subsidize cars and oil companies by spending billions on freeways. 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, and higher levees around the French Quarter. There need to be federal, state and local incentives to encourage this.

2.) Make the city much more compact and pedestrian-friendly than it is today, for several reasons. This would reduce the area of land that needs to be elevated in flood-prone areas. This would make it an easier, cheaper project. It would also reduce the perimeter of whatever levees would be necessary to protect historic districts that are not easily raised. Second, make the city more compact to reduce the commuting distances, to make transit efficient and economical and, in Everytown, USA, to make suburbs into real towns with their own mixed and vital economies and culture. This is absolutely 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.

3.) Put in place incentives to reduce population voluntarily, such 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 force the insurance companies to pay off victims of disasters to rebuild, or simply move anywhere they want. A little flexibility please! The vacant lots would then be inexpensive enough to be purchased for open space—bayou, nature preserve, farmland—whatever makes the most sense. Make urban homesteading programs available again for those choosing to live in and upgrade urban and even suburban centers on their way to becoming real towns.

4.) Establish a crash program for renewable energy like solar and wind, optimal with the energy-conserving structure of the city rebuilt in the compact, mixed-use pattern.

5.) Connect cities mainly with energy-efficient rails, and de-emphasize energy squandering highways steadily into the future.

Here is the overall rebuilding pattern for both New Orleans and suburbs called for in a secure future: 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 are killing us every day in Every town, USA. New Orleans is simply our newest frontline in the war of climate change.