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New Orleans’ history undeniably displays resilience. The city has rebuilt numerous times, and each time taking advantage of the disasters encountered to overcome them and become stronger. If the repetitive aspect linked with New Orleans’ disasters is remarkable, it seems that general urban resilience is a somewhat common phenomenon, especially in urban areas affected by a single disaster, and has been so, at least for the past two centuries.

59  _{Baron  de  Carondelet,  New  Orleans,  June  28,  1792,  “Governor  Carondelet’s  Levee}  

Ordinance  of  1792,”  from  the  certified  copy  in  the  archives  of  the  Louisiana  State  Museum,   New  Orleans,  donated  by  the  late  Miss  Kate  Minor.  

60  _{Lack  of  mitigation  has  also  been  an  issue  in  recent  times  in  New  Orleans  when}  

hurricane  Katrina’s  levees  failure  brought  to  light  the  lack  of  proper  flood  protection.  In   1994,  the  first  edition  of  Ben  Wisner’s  book  At  Risk  warned  that  “there  ha[d]  been  near   misses  that  highlight  the  potential  damage.  In  1969  hurricane  Camille  missed  the  major   US  city  of  New  Orleans  by  about  100  km.  Even  so,  262  people  died  and  losses  [were   considerable].  Given  its  coastal  situation  and  its  location  between  a  large  lake  and  the   Mississippi  River,  a  direct  hit  on  New  Orleans  would  cost  hundreds  of  billions  of  dollars   and  probably  take  thousands  of  lives.”  Yet,  by  2005,  when  Hurricane  Katrina  struck  New   Orleans,  the  city  was  unprepared  and  its  levees  were  dysfunctional.  The  ensuing  

reconstruction  effort  further  confirms  the  resilient  character  of  a  city  that,  despite  its  lack   of  mitigation,  still  continues  to  be  rebuilt  to  date,  after  each  major  disaster,  perhaps   demonstrating  that  the  level  of  resilience  exhibited  is  more  of  a  spontaneous  nature  than   organized.  

According to Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, “only forty-two cities worldwide were permanently abandoned following destruction between the years 1100 and 1800. (…) After 1800, such resilience became a nearly universal fact of urban settlement.”61 Vale and Campanella further explain that no matter how large the devastation, cities in the modern era have recovered and rebuilt. They illustrate their argument with the numerous cities destroyed during World War II and point to the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan), razed by nuclear attacks, and Coventry (U.K.), destroyed via bombing. Vale and

Campanella assert that even the rare cities that have completely disappeared throughout history and have been completely destroyed, still manage to exist in some form today. They take the example of Pompeii, which exists today as a remembrance and touristic site.62 Cities are “among humankind’s most durable artifacts.”63

Additionally, Vale and Campanella suggest that rebuilding and resilience are two different things. If rebuilding occurs almost every time a disaster takes place, resilience can also be assessed in terms of human trauma. Have people relocated, have they been traumatized by the events that generated reconstruction of their

61  _{Vale  and  Campanella,  “The  Cities  Rise  Again,”  3.}   62  _{Vale  and  Campanella,  “The  Cities  Raise  Again,”  4.}     63  _{Vale  and  Campanella,  “The  Cities  Raise  Again,”  5.}  

city? The trauma and the relocation of a city’s inhabitants are also an indicator of its resilience. If governmental agencies sponsor reconstruction, resilience most often comes from people. Recovery is a difficult matter to evaluate. For some, recovery will be the face of a city and the reconstruction of its buildings, for others, it will come down to the return of its misplaced population.64 In some cases,

destruction and reconstruction simply seem inevitable. Vale and Campanella discuss the case of New York City. It seems their analysis of that city can be applied to the situation in New Orleans, where the city is “a place seemingly destined to be destroyed and rebuilt with striking regularity.”65

Urban planner Kevin Lynch, in his Wasting Away, takes the example of Antioch, Turkey, devastated on seventeen distinct accounts in a time period of just over one century by earthquakes, invasions, plague, but that did not disappear, although reduced to a very small village. According to Lynch, “a city is hard to kill, in part because of its strategic location, its concentrated, persisting stock of physical capital, and even more because of memories, motives, and skills of its inhabitants.”66

64  _{Vale  and  Campanella,  “The  Cities  Raise  Again,”  12.}   65  _{Vale  and  Campanella,  “The  Cities  Raise  Again,”  16.}  

66  _{Kevin  Lynch,  Wasting  Away:  An  Exploration  of  Waste:  What  It  Is,  How  It  Happens,  Why}  

If cities are almost always rebuilt, one may legitimately wonder what makes New Orleans so distinctive. Among the reasons that may be evaluated is the

regularity of the numerous natural disasters, a type of disaster that one can to some extent prepare for and plan for to better protect a city. In fact, in the case of New Orleans, levee construction has been and still is a crucial endeavor. Cities touched by unforeseeable disasters such as bombings, attacks, or other disasters usually only encounter such catastrophe once and therefore their reconstruction may appear less questionable. What makes New Orleans distinctive is the regularity at which disasters struck. As previously stated, New Orleans has encountered twenty- seven major floods so far,67 or approximately one every decade. This regularity is also at the origin of recurring debates as to whether to relocate the city, or to take other measures. New Orleans was a necessary city in colonial times because of its strategic situation. Today, however, considering the rise of high-speed air and land transportation, the prevalence of the Mississippi for water transportation is not as significant. The necessity of the city is no longer linked with the commercial and development needs of the region, but with a more emotionally related resilience. New Orleanians are attached to their city. This phenomenon probably also played a part after residents had settled for several generations. A large part of New

67  _{Kates,  R.  W.,  C.  E.  Colten,  S.  Laska,  and  S.  P.  Leatherman,  “Reconstruction  of  New}  

Orleans  after  Hurricane  Katrina:  A  Research  Perspective,”  Proceedings  of  the  National   Academy  of  Sciences  103,  no.  40  (October  2006):  14653.    

Orleanians is made of natives, or long-term residents. These inhabitants are for the most part no longer first generation immigrants. Their history is in New Orleans, and they wish to protect their heritage.

Conclusion

What is resilience today? The International Institute for Sustainable

Development suggests resilience to be “a community’s capacity to cope with and recover from [hazards’] impacts.”68 This definition adequately fits New Orleans’ reaction to hurricanes and storms. The city coped, the city recovered, each time. Did an equivalent exist in colonial times? Could today’s resilience be compared to the events in colonial Louisiana? Mitigation is a large part of today’s resilience. It is, however, still the main element that seems to be missing from the type of resilience associated with New Orleans. Despite the more effective measures and ways to cope with disasters that were put in place with time, without adequate management and implementation of mitigation, today’s resilience can somewhat still be compared to that in colonial times. Was resilience during colonial times spontaneous, or organized? It seems that the answer to this question would be that New Orleans displayed a more spontaneous resilience than organized, considering the dramatic lack of mitigation measures: it simply made more sense to rebuild.  

68  _{“Disaster  Resilience,”  International  Institute  for  Sustainable  Development,}  

Emergency management experts Dennis Wenger and Gavin Smith defined disaster recovery as “the differential process of restoring, rebuilding, and reshaping the physical, social, economic, and natural environment through pre-event

planning and post-event actions.”69 New Orleans’ main issue over time seems to come from the lack of preparedness and mitigation to face future disasters. I will now discuss the world history that preceded New Orleans’ colonial era, then move on to the disasters that the city encountered and how it dealt with recovery.

69  _{Gavin  P.  Smith  and  Dennis  Wenger,  “Sustainable  Disaster  Recovery:  Operationalizing}