JOEL
GARREAU: REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS?
“The
city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt,” Professor
Joel Garreau wrote to lead off a piece that
appeared on September 11, 2005, in The
Washington Post. “The tourist neighborhoods?
The ancient parts from the French Quarter to
the Garden District on that slim crescent of
relatively high ground near the river? Yes,
they will be restored. The airport and the
convention center? Yes, those, too.
But the
far larger swath—the real New Orleans
where the tourists don't go, the part that
Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its
population of 400,000 scattered to the waves?
Not so much.”
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Professor and
author Joel Garreau |
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In
the piece, which was picked up by publications
and media outlets
around the world, Garreau also made prominent mention
of an SPP class—a semester-long
scenario-planning course aimed at analyzing which global cities would be the
winners and losers 100 years from now—that he recently co-taught. “The
students were keenly aware of the impact that climate change might have on their
calculations, among hundreds of other factors,” Garreau wrote in The
Post. “Yet
in the end they could not bring themselves to write off such water cities as
New York and Tokyo. They simply wouldn't bet against the determination and imagination
of New Yorkers and the Japanese. As someone put it at the time, ‘If it
turned out New York needed dikes 200 feet high, you can just hear somebody saying, “I
know this guy in Jersey.”’” He concluded his piece by
wondering whether or not the same kind of fortitude will surface as New
Orleans is
rebuilt.
Garreau has also
spoken to a number of television and radio programs
about
New Orleans. Notably, he appeared on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and “Open
Source” for WGBH in Boston during the week of September 12. He is the author
of the 2005 book, “Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing
Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human,” and is
an editor and writer for The Washington Post.
To see a video
clip from his recent appearance on “The NewsHour,” click
here.
Learn more about
him at his website: www.garreau.com.
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