Dead Cities

Let's take a moment for New Orleans, folks. Better coverage elsewhere -- check out Boing Boing for links in the blogosphere. So here, you just get an observation: nature, abetted by dumb human decisionmaking, has killed that city.



In a lot of ways, New Orleans is -- maybe was -- a great place. Tremendous food and music. Like Las Vegas, it was a place where Americans kept their decadence, like a precious thing in a box. In Europe, every city and town blows up into a party Carnival; in the US, we keep our Carnivals going non-stop, 24/7, but they're geographically confined.



But New Orleans also had hideous poverty, one of the highest murder counts in the country, vast slums...and constant construction on its waterways that rendered it vulnerable to disasters like Katrina.



So now what do we have? Looting, riots at Wal-Marts attempting to hand out emergency supplies, the poor dying because they have no private means of evacuating, and a once-great city turned into a seven-foot-deep stew of cholera, corpses, and fuel. Whether or not global warming exacerbates storms, the swamp has taken back the city. It's Mad Max over there.



Some of you readers are planners. I'm not. But I'm asking: remember New Orleans. City planning is not just a matter of building cute little urban entertainment destination malls close to parks, on light rail lines. Those things are important, but better planning -- a better city -- could have elevated New Orleans' poor, provided easier ways out of town, made the city safer in the face of a hurricane. A better city would not have died.



When the science fiction writer William Gibson said that the future is already here, but unevenly distributed, he wasn't only talking about cell phones and PET scans. He was talking about this, too. The apocalypse doesn't come all at once, folks. It happens bit by bit, until pretty soon CNN's talking about abandoning a city you love.



Remember New Orleans.