Comments on: Rebuilding New Orleans: Beware the Developers

By: David Sucher

David Sucher — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:38:38 +0000

Christopher Lydon,

I am astonished at your attitude toward the New Urbanism and can only conclude — since you are otherwise intelligent person — that you simply don’t know very much about it. Please do look into it further and cut the cant.

By: jarch

jarch — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:41:53 +0000

ask Starr to talk about the framing systems : post and beam and hybrid balloon/ post and beam systems, probably others i am not familiar with, from the Victorian era and earlier that have stood the test of time, but cannot be qualitified by current engineering and may therefore be deemed ‘unsafe’

By: plaintext

plaintext — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:30:07 +0000

How will the recently validated “takings” clause work in NOLA? Surely there will be provincials on every block and corner holding off all comers. Will the revolution be less urban planning and more of an uprising?

Should we put more men on the moon, fund public broadcasting or rebuild NOLA?

By: joel

joel — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 12:39:05 +0000

Where are everyone’s ideas? (See my over-long-winded, semi-(but only semi) tongue-in-cheek one under “To Rebuild or Not to Rebuild?”) Let your imaginations and altruistic instincts go. Let’s get a collection of them, present them to the N.O. residents who plan to return and hear their “ayes” and “nays” and comments. Then let’s hear their preferences, plans and other ideas. What would their ideal New Orleans be?

My usual preference for most buildings is to put them underground and I think that should apply to whole cities… well, at least, I think, we should bury them so all that exposed pavement and roofs do not become such heat sinks as they presently do. That would be ala Mac Wells – http://www.malcolmwells.com/

But, alas, where the land keeps sinking and the water table is no lower than one can dig with a hoe in 15 minutes, an underground structure may desire that pontoons be fitted.

Does Radio Open Source have a station in LA, TX and MS yet? I’d really like to hear the opinions of those from N.O. regarding their hopes and wishes for their new New Orleans.

Cheers.

By: plaintext

plaintext — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:23:11 +0000

Here is a review http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i05/05b01301.htm of a book by Lee Clarke, “A Rutgers University sociologist and expert on disasters. His new book, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (University of Chicago Press)” http://worstcases.com/speaking.html The book is due for release in Nov.

From the review: “Clarke divides people into probabilists and possibilists. Much modern scientific and governmental policy about disasters, he claims, emerges from probabilistic thinking — “What’s the likelihood that the nuclear plant will melt down?” — while possibilistic, or worst-case, thinking asks “What happens if the nuclear plant has a really bad day?”

Clarke asserts that we engage in worst-case thinking as individuals every day — we buy insurance, decline to take up sky diving, and so on. But when risk assessment broadens from individual decision making to societal setting of policy by “elites and institutions,” probabilists rule, and too often stigmatize possibilists as irrational.”