Talk focuses on rebuilding city

Most experts say New Orleans should be rebuilt, but differently.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
If you threw a dart at a map of the United States 999 times, you could not hit a worse spot to locate a metropolis.
Surrounded by two large, flood-prone bodies of water, New Orleans lies as much as 10 feet below sea level in some places, and is sinking deeper every year. With scientists seeing an era of more intense and more frequent tropical storms, it sits in the bull's-eye of Hurricane Alley. What's more, it's wicked-hot, and very humid.
And so now, with much of the city under water from the worst American natural disaster in nearly a century, some are wondering: Is it really a good idea to rebuild New Orleans, and will it be done?
The answers, most say, are "probably not" -- and "you bet."
The job may take years, but experts say that imagining a world without the rustic charm and joie de vivre of "The Big Easy" is like conjuring up a world without zydeco music, crawgush etoufee, or corrupt politicians.
Impossible.
Differing views
Indeed, throughout the week, a virtual jazz funeral line of New Orleans writers has taken to cyberspace to mourn the possible passing of the boisterous city that inspired them, and to plead for its survival.
"There are friends' houses that will no doubt be so much flotsam, neighborhood restaurants that won't serve another oyster po' boy, bars where the jukebox won't ever play Allen Toussaint or Ernie K-Doe again," Josh Levin wrote Wednesday in Slate.com.
Not to worry, says one expert who just studied how cities bounce back from natural disasters.
"All the experience of the last 200 years has been that no matter how devastated a city is, no matter how vulnerable a location, the almost ubiquitous experience has been to rebuild on that same site," said Larry Vale, who chairs the urban-studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who co-edited "The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster."
Vale said that because it is so important for humans to take some kind of meaning from disaster, the natural reaction is not only to rebuild a city but to seek to remake it even grander, as in some of the bolder proposals for a Freedom Tower to replace New York's World Trade Center.
Bush vows to rebuild
Indeed, Wednesday night President Bush vowed that New Orleans would be rebuilt. The White House will soon send a multibillion-dollar aid and recovery package to Congress.
Bush told Gulf Coast residents in a nationally televised address, "I'm confident that, with time, you can get your life back in order, new communities will flourish, the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it."
But not everyone agrees that the government should rebuild New Orleans. On Tuesday night, Fox News analyst Jack Chambless, an economics professor, said on the network that American taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill for people to live there.
"What we now have is the law of unintended consequences taking place, where FEMA has come into New Orleans, a place where, ecologically, it makes no sense to have levees keeping the Mississippi River from flooding into New Orleans, like it naturally should," Chambless said.
But most experts say that New Orleans should be rebuilt -- just rebuilt differently.
Necessary changes
Environmentalists note that hurricane damage and flooding is more severe because in Louisiana some 25 square miles of marshy wetlands become sea water every year -- roughly the size of Manhattan -- due largely to human activities. That means less protection from storm surges.
David Conrad, who studied the loss of wetlands for the National Wildlife Federation, said it's critical in the most flood-prone areas that "we either not rebuild or make absolutely sure that buildings are elevated to make them safer."