The Emergency – forum of City Officials
on Rebuilding Infrastructure for a Sustainable Environment
“ECORISE”
Policy Objectives, Design Criteria & Best Practice Assessment
New Orleans, 7 to 9 March, 2007
Senator Michel Thiollière, Mayor of Saint Etienne, France, Representing CUF & AMGVF.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to our American friends. Their sincerity and
openness in telling us what they have experienced since last year were very interesting and
very moving.
At this point of our debate, we may try to compare a city crisis to a human disease. A
crisis is a means of checking how the functions work or why they have failed. It is also a
means of asking ourselves if we have adopted the proper ways of life. It has often been
pointed out that some cities are more resilient than others. Also that some can count on better
support, better advice. And it is probably on these matters that our group is relevant. On these
both issues, the functions of the city and its capacity to resist and recover, what matters the
most is the city history, identity and culture.
These topics can be enhanced, fortified, provided if the group helping the city to
recover has the suitable material, based on exchanges, experiences and the adequate
republican and democratic spirit to provide. This is why I am convinced that our meeting in
New Orleans is a fundamental step forward to reach our goal: helping in the recovery of dying
or disabled cities, at least cities which have come through disaster like Katrina. This is a step
forward because we share experiences, because we are here in New Orleans which is a
“struggling city”.
I would like to make 3 points now:
1- What do such disasters teach us?
2- What are the main elements that make a city?
3- Can our forum be permanent and open for the reconstruction of cities?
1/ The lessons of the disaster:
New Orleans obviously needs help, money and the enforcement of laws. But it also
needs vision leadership as it has often been said.
There’s a book I like very much by Leo Marx, “The Machine in the Garden”, about
American literature and I think it’s comparable to what we are experiencing in cities like New
Orleans. “An inspiring vision of a human community has been reduced to a token of
individual survival”.
What is at stake is that we must recapture the essence of this inspiring vision. Because
disasters bring everyone to a notion of survival, we must look forward and bring people
together around a renewed vision. This is why I do think the act of rebuilding a city is a
political one. It is a question social and urban contract, it is a question of community.
All ingredients are necessary of course: money, private companies, NGO, personal
involvement. But when we deal with sustainable development, housing, the creation of a new
economy, equity between territories, transportation, education, democratic life, we deal with
politics. The problems that a recovering city is facing belong to politics.
2/ Difficulties to rebuild:
The vision and the recovery process must avoid some natural trends that would carry the
city adrift, and eventually endanger it fatally. I’d like to point out just three points:
- Emphasis put on one function, like tourism, museum. In the world there are such cities
like Venice which is very involved in this process, the city becoming a museum with
of course all kind of consequences.
- Erratic city planning problems like losing the heart of the city.
- Social break out, like the middle classes having to leave the city because they don’t
find housing proportionate to their means, and also, as in New Orleans, the lower
classes which have no choice but to stay in the city
So in order to avoid these risks and in an effort to keep the city together, public
authorities have to enforce a public development of the city and of course, find all means
possible of making the people being actors of it. Resiliency, thoughtfulness, public
investment, popular support can fortunately facilitate the chances of a new start:
- By cultivating the culture and the identity of the city.
- By favoring innovation, inventiveness, research, higher education.
- By organizing partnerships between the public and the private sectors for the success
of the recovery.
3/ Forum:
In conclusion, at this point of our Forum, I would like to call on a permanent Forum
like ours. Through our conversations, I have felt a deep desire to meet again because we think
our task necessary. And in a way, we need it, we have to do it.
I think I remember that in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said something
like: “On Earth it is for us to do God’s job”. Whether we believe in God or not, I think we
have a great task to do.
Maybe it would be a generous idea to have this permanent Forum on the year that we
are celebrating Lafayette’s birthday 250 years ago and as it is an American and French Forum
today, maybe it would be a good idea to have this Forum for the future.
This group as such is a good example of what we could do in the future since we have
experts, researchers and professors. But we also have private companies and we have public
officials and altogether we probably represent what is the most important for the recovery of
cities.
If this Forum continues, I suggest that there’s no hierarchy in the Forum itself, but
only a college of people who are interested in these problems and just want to share
experiences and develop new ideas on the recovery of cities and the sustainable cities for the
future, and also maybe give them advice, with a lot of humility and determination as well for
cities which need advice for recovering.
What I feel is that if we know a few things about cities, it is because we have listened
and observed what it’s happening here in New Orleans but also in other cities where we live
or everywhere in the world. If we want to deal with the future of cities, I think the sustainable
development has to be enforced locally: we think global but we must act locally. We are
concerned and face to face with a new type of government of cities because globalization also
depends on us.
If the members of ECORISE accepted to work on such an idea, we could say that our
New Orleans Forum has been fruitful.
This is what I wanted to tell you today and I hope we’ll have many more opportunities
to meet. Actually for me it has been a very rich experience. Thank you for your attention and
thank you for the experiences you shared with us.