Cities Are Defined By Their Disasters
Lessons for Baltimore from New Orleans, NYC, and Detroit
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Last week Baltimore suffered a tragedy, when a giant container ship hit and collapsed the Francis Scott Key bridge, killing six construction workers, and leaving Baltimore with a literal hole in its infrastructure and region’s economic engine.
We live in a time of disasters. Pew researched the quantity and cost of disasters last October and found “a significant increase in both the frequency and the cost of billion-dollar disasters during the 20-year period from 2003 to 2022 compared with the previous 20-year period from 1983 to 2002.”
In the first 20-year period, 96 disasters caused more than $546.3 billion in damage and other costs. These figures rose to 244 events and more than $1.95 trillion in costs in the subsequent 20 years—marking a 154% increase in the number of billion-dollar disasters and a 257% surge in costs. More alarming, this trend appears likely to continue: At this writing, the U.S. had already endured 23 billion-dollar disasters in 2023, surpassing the 2020 record of 20 such disasters, with more than three months still left in the year.
We think of cities as being defined by their continuity and status quo— their industries, their people, their culture — but they are actually shaped by these moments of infrastructure failure, natural disaster, and often times a combination of the two. With each disaster, our cities change. Or they should.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore took to X/Twitter to share a comforting thought — that after this disaster, the city and the state will come back stronger, as it’s always done.
This is the message of continuity that we want to hear. But disasters are inflection points, not bumps along some linear path. The language of disasters expresses this. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in a Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise from Disaster:
The word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of… An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion. Catastrophe comes from the Greek kata, or down, and streiphen, or turning over: it means an upset of what is expected and was originally used to mean a plot twist… The word disaster comes from the Latin compound of dis-, or away, without, and astro, star or planet, literally without a star.
This has been a saddening and disorienting moment for Baltimore, but a lot of the focus has been on encouraging the city and state to get back to normal as quickly as possible. Matt Yglesias and others are looking for Wes Moore to be the next Josh Shapiro, who is given credit for reopening I-95 in 12 days after it collapsed. Shapiro is now considered a likely presidential candidate because of the swift I-95 response.
But in the haste to get things back to normal, the city may be missing an opportunity to do things much differently. Below, I’ll explore examples from New Orleans, New York, and Detroit and how these cities transformed themselves for the better after disaster.