Historic house in New Orleans.

The term “urban fabric” refers to the patterns of a town’s or city’s physical structure. You can see the ethnic and cultural diversity of New Orleans, its history and its physical location, reflected in its urban fabric. This fabric is intricate and fine-grained – a city built more for people than for cars. It is a city of neighborhoods more than it is a city of monuments. It is important, in the rebuilding of the city, this character be kept in mind.

For example, there should not be enormous new buildings built upon the ruins of a neighborhood of small houses. This would damage the traditional urban fabric of the city. As New Orleans rebuilds, it is important to retain the nature of its traditional fabric – its neighborhoods and streets, its routes of public transportation, its green spaces – and rebuild with these patterns in mind.

The urban fabric of New Orleans is unique. New Orleans is much more like the port cities of the rest of the world – Marseilles, Genoa, Havana – than like those of the United States (New York, Boston, or Seattle, for example). Most areas of the old French and Spanish City – the Creole houses with cast-iron balconies, tree-lined boulevards, the French Quarter, the Garden District – were not significantly damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The important parts of the city that need work and rebuilding are the lower and middle-income neighborhoods that grew up around the old city and that make up the essential character of New Orleans. The Shotgun Houses, Double Shotguns, Camelbacks, and Creole Cottages of New Orleans contribute substantially to an urban fabric that does not exist anywhere else in the world.

Many of these neighborhoods and the people who call them home had significant problems before Hurricane Katrina struck – problems of neglect and poverty, problems of politics and city government, problems of lack of social and medical services, problems of everyday living. As we rebuild with the old urban fabric in mind, we must not make the mistake of simply replicating what was there before. We must also build with improvement of people’s lives in the neighborhoods in mind. This will include thinking about how best to build houses that are better able to resist problems of high winds and floods, heat and humidity, in the future.