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What does the process of reconstruction after a disaster look like? Once an earthquake or a fire strikes in a city, questions of how it should be rebuilt clash with the city’s pre-existing problems. Advocates ask, for instance, how to build back destroyed housing while also thinking about problems of bad sanitation or decaying infrastructure?
While incredibly destructive, these catastrophes offer a “blank slate” for ambitious plans that address older issues. In this newsletter, I’ll explore some of these questions and how they play out in some of the world’s most destructive disasters.
Great London Fire of 1666
When fire struck London in 1666, it quickly spread all over the central part of the city. Over 4 days, the firestorm engulfed the narrow cobbled streets and spread through the wooden crowded buildings. When the flames were extinguished, the fire had already destroyed 15% of London’s housing and left around 200,000 people homeless.
The city got to rebuilding quickly, however, and the proposed plans were often radical and ambitious. Among the people who proposed a new layout was even Robert Hooke (the inventor of the first microscope!), but perhaps the most influential of these plans was Christopher Wren. Wren outlined a baroque urbanism plan in which London would follow a street grid and axial symmetry, becoming the first city in Europe to do so:
But these plans were not carried out. As the video explains, London favored a quicker rebuilding process over a plan that would dramatically change the city’s landscape. True, a more ambitious plan could have resulted in a grander city layout. However it would have also required much longer, lead to countless land disputes between landlords and the delays would have spurred a refugee crisis in the process.
What came out of London’s rebuilding process was, in general, better infrastructure: more accessible streets and fire-resistant buildings, most of which were completed in just 5 years in 1671. Christopher Wren’s plan, on the other hand, continued to be influential in areas like “street improvement in eighteenth century London and nineteenth century public health reform”.
San Francisco 1906 Earthquake
In April 18th 1906, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook San Francisco and the fires that followed burned large chunks of the city. Before the earthquake, San Francisco was considered “disorderly and overcrowded” and architects and planners were already thinking about how the city could be made a healthier place to live.
Such a plan was drafted by Daniel Burnham, one of the most important Beaux Arts architects of the time. Here’s a photo of this imagined version of the city, full of wide boulevards and parks:
As the earthquake leveled much of San Francisco, supporters of this grand plan saw the chance to rebuild the city by starting anew. Similar to London, however, the need to rebuild quickly sidelined Burnham’s plan, and as a result, San Francisco was rebuilt similar to how it was before. A few Beaux Arts buildings did manage to get built, however, including the Ellen Gunst Building:
🚌 Transit Nugget: Part of the destroyed infrastructure included the 19th century streetcars, which at that point became largely unusable as the rails melted down. These older streetcars ran down Market St, however they were often slow compared to the electrified fleet that existed elsewhere in the US. Once electrified, they allowed people to get to and from the Embarcadero much quicker, helping the city recover.
1923 Great Kanto Earthquake
In September 1st 1923, Tokyo was struck by an 7.9 magnitude earthquake that killed 100,000 people, with most of the casualties being from the fires that broke out across the city. In its immediate aftermath, much of the public discourse resembled that of San Francisco and London: how should the city be rebuilt? Would it be through laying out wide avenues that signaled Japan’s power? Or should the city focus on providing more social welfare infrastructure for its citizens?
Debates raged on about the exact kind and scale of reconstruction that would take place. In the end, the budget approved was far smaller than what was expected, which meant the 6-year rebuilding process had to be done through land readjustment, where the government could alter the boundaries of residential lots for the reconstruction.
In the end, the total reduction of residential land stood at roughly 2.9 million square meters. Much of this land was used to build roads, sidewalks, small parks, and social welfare facilities in Tokyo.
Japan took other measures, too, and officials focused on fire-proofing buildings to prevent another catastrophe like it happening again. To ensure buildings could withstand an earthquake, they amended the Urban Building Law to include seismic standards while also providing subsidies for owners to retrofit their homes.
💭 Some takeaways
Once a major disaster strikes, the road to rebuilding seems to follow a common thread: some groups of planners see the reconstruction process as a way to start afresh, fixing a city’s urban plights and envisioning major changes in its design. Others typically advocate a more financially austere path in which a city is mostly rebuilt as it was before.
The opportunity to rebuild a city after a disaster conflicts with things like huge costs and political opposition, and usually grand visions of urban plans are not realized. Most changes spurred by these events don’t look like city-wide very radical plans, but they are instead laws that stop these disasters from being as destructive in the future. And, while a major plan might not get realized, its ideas can influence planners in the future and be talked about centuries later.
Thanks for reading!