New Orleans = Chicago?

After all of the enormous human devastation, almost impossible to contemplate, after all of the finger-pointing about catastrophe planning and global warming (The New Orleans Commission?), the truly vital issue of where will the AALS convention be held, etc., the survival of New Orleans is the important long-term question.

In the near term it will be many months before what is now a toxic brew of hazardous waste, snakes, insects, dead bodies, rabid animals and sewage can be purged. People have to get on with their lives, and many of the most mobile, with the most capacity to rebuild the city, will resettle elsewhere. 

A bunch of people will come back, eventually, but what kind of city will it be? This W$J article suggests that N.O. has a choice – rebuild itself as a kind of amusement park of the past, or focus on something that has been anathema to the folks there – economic growth.

The best example I can think of is my own hometown of Chicago. As awful as the Fire was, it proved to be Chicago’s great opportunity.  The city rose out of the ashes to host the greatest world fair, and become one of the world’s great business and architectural centers.  But it was thinking about the future that made that happen, and the people who thought about the future of Chicago had strong economic incentives to make it work.  That's the big question about the future of New Orleans.

Update: Tyler Cowen posts on the robustness of cities, discussing New Orleans' weak government and referring to, e.g., post-war Japan and Pompeii, but not to Chicago. Tyler refers in passing to the possibility of future floods, which is certainly a concern.

Comments

[Seth]

Hopefully, New Orleans will take this opportunity to build something amazing as Chicago did after the great fire. Lets face it, before the hurricane, there were some fairly crappy parts of that city. Many of those parts have been washed away, now the city should completely rebuild itself, let it be the first model of a new "New Orleans School of Architecture." The reports of thats city should be premature, I say New Orleans will be the future, but only if the opportunity is seized.