Cyborg Agonistes: Disaster and Reconstruction in the Digital Electronic Era

Palma Nova near Venice, with its famous star-shaped fortifications, is a city of two tales. You can read complementary narratives from the plan. One tale is of enclosure. The walls, as in other ancient, medieval, and Renaissance cities, protected the concentrations of assets and settled populations within from nomadic bandits and mobile armies without. In addition, as Lewis Mumford cogently put it, “[T]he power of massed numbers in itself gave the city a superiority over the thinly populated widely scattered villages, and served as an incentive to further growth.” Density and defended walls provided safety, economic vitality, and long-term resilience. At the extreme, under siege, the gates were closed, soldiers manned the battlements, and the city became selfcontained for the duration. To attack it, one needed some technology to breach the defensive perimeter—Joshua’s trumpet, Achilles’ wooden horse, Francesco di Giorgio’s tunnel beneath the walls of Castel Nuovo, a battering ram, or a siege engine. The second tale is of connection. The central piazza, surrounded by public buildings, is both the focus of the internal street network and the local hub of a road network that extends through the gates and out into the countryside, linking the city to others. The piazza is—like the server of a local Internet service provider (ISP)—a node at which nearby and larger communities are connected. When the gates are open, the city functions as a crossroads rather than as a sealed enclosure, a place of interaction rather than one of exclusion. Urban history is, from one perspective, a struggle of these narratives for dominance. Eventually, the network won. Mumford associated this victory with the rise of capitalism—a new constellation of economic forces that “favored expansion and dispersal in every direction, from overseas colonization to the building up of new industries, whose technological improvements simply canceled out all medieval restrictions.” For cities, “[T]he demolition of their urban walls was both practical and symbolic.” Superficially, modern Manhattan resembles a scaled-up version of Palma Nova; it is a regularized street grid, surrounded by water, and accessed by a limited number of bridges and tunnels.

Resilient Tokyo: Disaster and Transformation in the Japanese City

Natural disasters have destroyed, in whole or in part, Japan’s cities on numerous occasions. Human action, whether internal warfare or the air raids of the Second World War, has been the cause of further devastation. But regardless of the origin of the destructive force, Japan has always rebuilt its cities, and usually with astonishing speed. This chapter argues that while urban disasters can bring about an opportunity for changes in the built environment, they do not appear to induce innovation per se. Many times, the Japanese rebuilt their cities much the same as they were before, innovating only slightly on building codes or urban form. At times of ongoing political, economic, and social transformation, however, the leadership sponsored urban change in the wake of destruction. These interventions, instead of responding to post-disaster conditions, were often pared-down versions of predisaster concepts, constrained by limited finances, the lack of appropriate planning tools, the strictures of land ownership, and the needs and desires of private initiatives that called for rapid reconstruction and the preservation of traditional urban form. Societal transformation by itself has promoted the large-scale demolition and urban transformation of Japanese cities far beyond the areas touched by natural or human-made disasters. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, modernization, andWesternization, following the Meiji restoration of 1868 and the establishment of modern Japan, in particular buffeted Japanese cities on a grand scale. The repeated destruction of the capital, Tokyo (or Edo, as the city was called until 1868), and its rapid reconstruction provide an especially compelling means to examine disaster and rebuilding in Japanese cities. A focus on Tokyo permits comparison of reconstruction following both sudden, natural destruction and human-inflicted attack, as well as analysis of urban change in the absence of disaster. Earthquakes rattle Japan regularly; typhoons are frequent visitors; and tidal waves as well as tsunami have wiped out many settlements along the coasts. Rivers are highly susceptible to flooding, and inundation along major rivers in Edo resulted in the affluent abandoning the lowlands to the poor and lower classes and building their villas on the highlands. Traditional Japanese architecture has responded to such threats in a variety of ways. Wood construction, for example, provides flexibility in the event of tremors, and heavy roofing helps to stabilize houses buffeted by typhoon-strength winds.

Resurrecting Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the greatest site of physical destruction and renewal known to history. For some 4,000 years it suffered wars, earthquakes, and fires, not to mention twenty sieges, two periods of total desolation, eighteen reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religious faith to another. This cycle of trauma has resulted in a variety of outcomes; among them are demolition without reconstruction, repeated renewal, no destruction at all, and the conscious maintenance of ruins. This chapter explores how these divergent responses to disaster are linked to the most important buildings of the three great monotheistic religions, for which Jerusalem remains a place of special significance. In the stories and laws embedded in the documents of these religions there are clues as to how they propose to help their followers respond to losses, including the loss of life, property, territory, religious artifacts, and psychological well-being. In the loss and restitution of the major temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues, there is a similar tie between religious propositions and building form. In the story of the earliest city in the Bible, there is a tussle between God’s punishment of man and man’s restitution. First, God is angry and Adam is sent from Eden. Then Adam’s son Cain commits murder and is also banished, but he builds the first city and names it Enoch after his son. The first city is thus created by a criminal, but the city later becomes the place of God. There is a parallel ambiguity about Jerusalem in the texts. God is angry and he destroys, but he also loves and rehabilitates: “Here [in Jerusalem] was born the rumor of a single invisible God, a father figure, authoritarian—at once petulant and magnanimous, vindictive and merciful. . . . the sadomasochism of ‘in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour I had mercy’ was first articulated in religious terms.” For the twentieth-century theologian Jacques Ellul, Jerusalem is God’s singular creation, “his own city” to be both destroyed and restored as a model for all cities. In many of the destructions of Jerusalem, brutal violence was accompanied by regret or piety.

Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America

As the philosopher Martin Heidegger once revealed, there are etymological affinities linking the words building, dwelling, and thinking. The history of language, in this instance, teaches a profound lesson: that building is never simply a technical exercise, never solely a question of shelter, but also inevitably a forum for dwelling on life; it is nothing less, in many respects, than a form of thinking. Louis Sullivan famously described the architect as “a poet who uses not words but building materials as a medium of expression.”Certainly, when we build we are telling stories about the world, sculpting the cultural landscape even as we remold the physical one. But if buildings tell stories, it is also true that stories make buildings. When offices, stores, and homes are suddenly and unexpectedly annihilated, it is necessary not only to manufacture new material structures but also to repair torn cultural fabrics and damaged psyches. With this in mind, I propose to explore the relationship between the rebuilding of cities with mortar and bricks and the rebuilding of cultural environments with words and images in the aftermath of great urban disasters—a double process neatly caught in the twin meanings of the word reconstruction as “remaking” and as “retelling.” The reconstruction of events in our minds, the stories we hear and tell about disasters, the way we see and imagine destruction—all of these things have a decisive bearing on how we reconstruct damaged buildings, neighborhoods, or cities. Construction, in this sense, is always cultural. We cannot build what we cannot imagine. We create worlds with words. We build stories with stories. Certainly we cannot build with any confidence or ambition without some faith in the future. So when we consider the extraordinary endurance of American cities over the past couple of centuries when confronting fires, floods, earthquakes, and wars, one of our tasks must be to ask how people have perceived and described the disasters that have befallen them. In this chapter, I will examine the role of disaster writings and what I amcalling a “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, and I will argue that this expectation has contributed greatly to this nation’s renowned resilience in the face of natural disasters.

After the Unrest: Ten Years of Rebuilding Los Angeles following the Trauma of 1992

It is always difficult to measure urban resilience, but never more so when the trauma results from civil unrest, as opposed to a natural disaster or enemy attack.With natural disasters, it is frequently difficult to place blame, even if “acts of God” are sometimes all too intertwined with ill-advised decisions to site buildings in vulnerable areas. Wars and other attacks usually entail clear enemies, and eventually come to some negotiated halt, accompanied by greater territorial clarity. With riots and civil unrest, by contrast, destruction is community-based. Victims and perpetrators live in close proximity; violence is often inflicted within the very neighborhoods that feel most aggrieved; and recovery entails the need to redress not just physical damage but also deeply ingrained mistrust. Rebuilding, in this sense, requires not just investment in real estate, but also a variety of human capital—local infusions of community dynamism, neighborly cooperation, and no small measure of hope. In the United States, Los Angeles, California, stands out as the site of two generations of civil unrest: the Watts riots of 1965 and the civil unrest of 1992. The 1992 disturbance was the most damaging urban riot in American history, killing fifty-four people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. Touched off by the acquittal on April 29 of white police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King, the rampage lasted several days and spread to an area much larger than the earlier riots in Watts. The disturbance ranged across dozens of square miles, mostly along the lengthy commercial strips in the southern part of the city of Los Angeles, including many areas not traditionally viewed as part of South Central. It even spilled northward above the Santa Monica Freeway into Hollywood, the traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, and other neighborhoods far from the traditional centers of African-American residence. This chapter investigates a full decade of efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles, following the trial of King’s assailants. In so many ways, Los Angeles is a city like no other—a vast but low-rise city, dense and sprawling at the same time. Auto-oriented and generally without high-rises, Los Angeles might seem different from a more traditional metropolis such as New York.

A Vital Void: Reconstructions of Downtown Beirut

A few lines before the end of The Tiller of Waters, the protagonist, Nicholas Mitri, wakes up after his death in a void. Once he orients himself, he realizes that this void is actually the center of Beirut that he has inhabited alone during the 1975–1990 civil war and that he has been desperately trying to narrate and preserve throughout the novel. Mitri, a Greek Orthodox man from the predominantly Muslim West Beirut, had been forced out of his house by Shiite Muslim refugees from South Lebanon who had, in turn, been displaced by an Israeli invasion. Homeless, he drifts to his father’s textile shop in downtown Beirut, the contested battle zone between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut. There, he lives alone like Robinson Crusoe in the wilderness of the city center and recounts his family’s story and the history of the different peoples and religious groups that inhabited his life and the prewar city. The house where he lived with his Greek Alexandrian parents and with the Kurdish maid he loved, the shop owned by a Sunni Muslim next to his father’s in the bazaar of downtown Beirut, and the parlor where his mother was trained by an Armenian piano teacher are all eventually wiped out—not by the war but by the reconstruction project. The void, at the end of the story, represents the futility of his efforts to preserve the places. The buildings and streets, it turns out, are more fragile than the memories that inhabit them. The civil war that entrapped Mitri was triggered in 1975 by disagreements between Lebanon’s Christians and Muslims over the presence and power of the Palestinian militias in Lebanon. The war would briefly stop in 1977, with the intervention of Arab forces led by Syria, only to be resumed again, this time with the participation of the Syrians on the side of the Palestinians and Muslims. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 to support the Christians and expel the Palestinians, the war took on an international scope with a failed American and European military intervention.

Reverberations: Mexico City’s 1985 Earthquake and the Transformation of the Capital

On September 19, 1985, at 7:14 a.m. an earthquake reaching a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale and lasting almost two full minutes hit the coast of Mexico, rocking its capital city and shaking its buildings and its people. The next day, at 7:38 p.m., Mexico City experienced a second tremor of an almost equal magnitude on the Richter scale, 7.5. What has come to be known as the Mexico City earthquake, then, was in actuality two earthquakes, although those who experienced it lived through a single disaster whose longer-term reverberations were as powerful as the first set of tremors that hit the city on that initial day in September. The earthquake, or those two days of tremors big and small, produced a physical disaster on a scale not seen since the destruction of the city in 1521, when Hernán Cortés’s forces defeated the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. This same battle site later served as the seat of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish colonial power and subsequently marked the place where the majority of the 1985 earthquake damage occurred. After the first day alone, 250 buildings were completely destroyed with 50 more at risk of collapsing; thousands of others were damaged or considered to be unusable. Five thousand people were injured with more than 1,000 still trapped under the debris; more than 250,000 people were homeless. The city lacked telephone and electricity services. After the second day’s quake, when more reliable statistics began flowing in, 2,000 were officially confirmed dead (although close to 7,000 cadavers had been identified) with 28,000 still listed as missing; more than 7,000 victims were being treated at relief stations, with 30,000 at gyms and other sites turned into shelters. More than 800,000 residents were ultimately forced to abandon their homes and sleep in the open air. Official statements later acknowledged 5,000 killed and 14,000 injured; but an independent final tally accounted for 2 million residents temporarily made homeless and thousands dead, tens of thousands injured, 100,000 damaged building units (mostly residential), and hundreds of thousands of residents made permanently homeless.

“Resist the Earthquake and Rescue Ourselves”: The Reconstruction of Tangshan after the 1976 Earthquake

At 8:02 a.m. on the morning of July 28, 1976, approximately five hours after an earthquake struck Tangshan in northeastern China, a MIG-8 fighter jet landed at the People’s Liberation Army base nine kilometers from the sprawling industrial city of Tangshan. Two army officers quickly ran toward the plane and an officer named Lee asked, “What is the flight’s mission?” The pilot replied, “We are looking for the epicenter of the earthquake.” Without checking the identity or credentials of the other passengers, Lee anxiously asked the pilot to fly over Tangshan and confirm his suspicion that the epicenter lay under the city. As Lee watched the plane fly toward Tangshan, he radioed the pilot, “Can you see Tangshan yet?” Through the speakers came the pilot’s shaky voice, “Yes, where it used to be!” When the earthquake shook Tangshan out of its slumber in the early hours of that summer morning, nobody imagined that it would turn the city into a vast ruin. Not a single structure in this city of thirtythree square kilometers escaped unharmed from this earthquake, which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale. Fully 78 percent of Tangshan’s industrial buildings and 97 percent of its residential buildings were leveled. The enormity of the physical destruction could only mean a comparable scale of human calamity. The official death toll stands at 240,000, but outside sources have posted much higher figures. Some current residents still believe that the death toll is at least twice that of the official tally. One third-generation Tangshan resident pointed out, “Not one single building escaped earthquake damage. How can the government officials say that only one quarter of the Tangshan population perished in this disaster?” To this day, the true death toll remains a haunting unknown. What is certain is that within three seconds on July 28, 1976, Tangshan was obliterated from the earth by a natural force roughly 400 times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is conceivable that if the earthquake had not been detected by a number of seismological centers around the globe, the news of this great catastrophe would never have reached the outside world.

Warsaw: Reconstruction as Propaganda

By any standards, the resilience displayed byWarsaw duringWorld War II and its aftermath was awesome. The city endured three waves of destruction: during the German invasion of 1939, the Jewish ghetto uprising of 1943, and theWarsaw uprising of 1944 and their aftermaths. After the last had been put down, Adolf Hitler ordered the city to be destroyed entirely, and particular care was taken by the Nazis to individually target monuments and buildings of any historic, cultural, or aesthetic significance. This was done with grim efficiency, and by the time the Soviet army occupied the city in January 1945, over 80 percent of the buildings in the city lay in ruins. Of the 780 buildings on the historic register, only 35 survived intact. One of those buildings that survived—the Lazienski Palace—still had bore holes ready for dynamite which German sappers had not had time to insert when the city was captured. On visiting Warsaw in 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower commented that he had never before witnessed destruction executed with such bestiality. There had been no military justification for the devastation. Yet almost from the moment the city was liberated, it began to recover. In the first two months after liberation, sappers and workers were able to remove 100,000 mines and unexploded shells from the ruins, and 1 million cubic meters of rubble were removed by the end of 1947. Despite a lack of electricity, water, transportation, and other basic infrastructure, the population doubled to 366,000 within four months. Reconstruction of key streets and repairable buildings began immediately, and new residential areas were planned and later constructed. Within just eleven years, the city would recover its prewar population and could be said to be a fully functional capital. But the jewel in the crown of the reconstruction was undoubtedly the rebuilding of the Old Town, the historic core of the city that symbolized 700 years of Warsaw’s history. Its completion—in 1961—above all suggested a rebirth of Poland’s cultural and historical identity. There has been a spectrum of resilience displayed by the city’s inhabitants.

“The Predicament of Aftermath” : Oklahoma City and September 11

Memorial response in the wake of violence is an expression of resilience—whether marking “everyday” acts of murder, or more dramatic outbreaks of terrorism or war. Particularly in an age of mass death, when individuals become statistics signifying the anonymous death of millions, such response is about more than providing a tranquil sacred space for rituals of mourning. It is a protest, a way of saying, “We will not let these dead become faceless and forgotten. This memorial exists to keep their names, faces, stories in our memories.” Increasingly, memorial expression has become an immediate language of engagement, not just a language of commemoration. This is clearly evident in the rise of a new generation of activist memorial environments, in particular the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Oklahoma City National Memorial, consciously modeled after the Holocaust Museum. Both include memorial space, museum exhibition space, archival space, educational space, and outreach programs, promoting activist agendas designed to spark civic energies to combat anti- Semitism, terrorism, and other ills of modernity. Ideally, these institutions are sites of conscience on the civic landscape. Their role is to immerse visitors in a compelling and often horrific story, and transform them into actively engaged citizens. The terrorist attacks in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, and in New York on September 11, 2001, brought communities together and at the same time tore them apart. Whether represented in thousands of letters suggesting appropriate memorial forms, in the creation of so called spontaneous memorials—so popular now that they represent “planned spontaneity” and perhaps even memorial cliché—or in the formation of formal memorial processes, memorial expression helps people to transform bereavement, anger, fear, and resolve into an active communal grief that mournfully celebrates ongoing life, albeit transformed. There is instability in memorial expression, however. The fragility of memory is never more apparent than when memorials are envisioned. Memorial expression tasks creators to ensure remembrance through significant memorial forms, since the danger of forgetfulness, even oblivion, is enduring. There is instability as well in the rhetoric of civic resilience, which bravely proclaims that just as those murdered will be intensely remembered through memorials, the cityscape will be intensely remembered through acts of civic renewal.