3 Questions: Lawrence Vale on rebuilding Haiti

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An MIT urban design expert explains why devastated cities are nearly always rebuilt — but why Haiti faces special challenges to reconstruction.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office


Damage to several buildings in Haiti after the earthquake on Jan. 12.
Photo: United Nations Development Programme
January 20, 2010

The human and economic toll of this month's earthquake in Haiti has yet to be fully measured, but it is clear that the country faces an enormous rebuilding task. Lawrence Vale, MIT's Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning, is an expert on the reconstruction of cities devastated by natural disasters or warfare; a 2005 book he co-edited on the subject, The Resilient City, explores how and why modern societies choose to rebuild ruined metropolises. MIT News asked Vale about Haiti's long-term prospects for renewal.

Q. In The Resilient City, you write that throughout history, devastated cities have almost always "risen again like the mythic phoenix" and "are among humankind's most durable artifacts." What are the crucial first steps that could allow Haiti, and the Port-au-Prince area, to rebuild?

A. Before 1800, it was more common for cities to be destroyed and abandoned, leaving the world with "lost cities" later to be recovered only as touristic ruins. In the last 200 years or so, however, it has been rare for governments to let their cities die, even after massive annihilation from war — think of Hiroshima or Warsaw in WW II. Similarly, cities tend to be rebuilt in the same location even after massive natural disasters — half a million people may well have died in Tangshan, China from an earthquake in 1976, yet that city regained its population numbers within a decade. More generally, the combination of nation-states, insurance industries and global philanthropy have all made "caring-at-a-distance" much more prevalent. Cities are no longer left on their own.

That said, the thing we loosely term "rebuilding" is at least a three-part challenge. There is physical rebuilding, both in terms of the necessities of daily life such as basic shelter and in terms of more symbolic structures — civic institutions such as a destroyed cathedral or palace. Then there is socio-economic rebuilding, an especially difficult challenge in a place like Haiti where poverty was so broad and deep even before this particular disaster struck. Finally, there is the challenge of emotional rebuilding, the need to cope with great personal losses. Each of these entails a form of resilience.
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