What will New Orleans become?

Needless to say, the devastation to southern Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has become the year's dominant story. And once the extended period of rescue and recovery can mercifully come to an end, we will be faced with the daunting task--and question--of rebuilding. While post-disaster rebuilding is often a question of "when?" rather than "if?", the very predictability and unnaturalness of this disaster, particularly the flooding of New Orleans, has led many to question whether New Orleans should be rebuilt at all. Maybe this was simply Mother Nature reminding us that we've just been living on borrowed time, with our elaborate and expensive engineering works vainly trying to keep the river's and the ocean's waters at bay? Of couse, such a viewpoint is extremely distant, analytical, technical, perhaps even inhuman in a "Spock" kind of way. No doubt, as very human beings, we will struggle mightily to balance our cool-headed rational environmental assessments with our more romantic, place-embedded selves. That is, to what lengths and to what expense should we go in order to protect or rebuild a beloved place--e.g., Venice, La Conchita, the WTC--no matter how foolishly it might be situated? What, after all, is the "price" of place? This question is hard enough to answer at the scale of the individual, let alone all of the concerns about equity, fairness, justice, etc. that come into play at the societal (local, regional, national, global) level. Clearly, New Orleans will get substantially rebuilt; the city means too much to its (former) inhabitants and the rest of humanity to be simply abandoned as the world's largest ghost town. But the questions above loom large, as do the many questions of how to rebuild that always loom behind--in a planning and architectural sense--major urban renewal/redevelopment efforts. LA Times architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne has recently provided a very good review of what some of these questions might be--the kind of rebuilding we might collectively hope for, the kind we might instead dread and more cynically expect. (Many of the same issues are also discussed, but not in the same singled-voiced way, in a recent New York Times piece.) Finally, if you're like me and not particularly familiar with the local geography of New Orleans, you might find it very helpful as you read Hawthorne's article to follow along using the resources at Google Maps. The links below will help get you pointed in the right direction; then simply toggle between the "satellite" and "Katrina" views to see the same bit of the city both before and after the storm.

• the Lakeview neighborhood and City Park (plus Elysian Fields Ave. a little to the east), where some of the worst flooding occurred
• the flood-ravaged and more deeply impoverished 9th Ward
• the more-or-less dry French Quarter (Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, etc.)
• adjacent Faubourg Marigny
• the stately Garden District
• Uptown, with Tulane and Loyola Universities
• The Superdome and adjacent CBD

Finally, the following websites provide a detailed view of pre-Katrina New Orleans--albeit largely from a tourist's eye view:

• INETours.com
• TourNewOrleans.com
• BigEasy.com
• Map of New Orleans wards
• Map of Louisiana parishes
• Wikipedia entry on New Orleans