"How do you reorganize and rebuild a city after it's been smashed?" That's the question Robert Young '82, a visiting lecturer in city and regional planning, put to an audience Sept. 15 in a lecture held in Goldwin Smith Hall, "How I Would Rebuild New Orleans."

His suggestions ranged from questioning whether New Orleans should be rebuilt in the first place to suggesting that the city be split into two separate cities, one for tourism and one for industry.

In addition to teaching at Cornell, Young is the executive director of the New Jersey Office of Sustainability, the first state-level department of its kind in the country. The event, sponsored by the Cornell Institute for Progressive Policy, attracted students, community members as well as some evacuees from the New Orleans area.

Young began by discussing the historical significance of the New Orleans area, especially during colonial times and the Civil War. He then described instances of citywide destruction from the past, such as Nagasaki and Dresden during World War II.

"Americans tend to experience things as unprecedented," he said. "As a result, they don't know how to 'fix' an event like this."

According to Young, the current disaster in New Orleans represents a turning point in the dynamics of urban development. In the past, "urban planning has always meant, how do you deal with growth?" he explained. Now, however, it will mean recovery. Young identified three areas of change that will result in an increase in the need for urban reconstruction in the future: economic dislocation, ecological dislocation and military dislocation.

Economic dislocation includes such factors as deindustrialization and financial decline that have left cities such as Detroit virtual ghost towns. Ecological dislocation refers to changes in the climate due to global warming that could make powerful hurricanes more common. Military dislocation includes threats to national security, such as the ongoing risk of terrorist attacks.

As for the crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina, Young frequently stressed the need for a strategy before rebuilding begins in New Orleans. One of the first questions that must be answered, he said, is it even worth rebuilding? In order to answer this, he called for a survey of the economic, ecological, geographic and cultural prospects of the area.

"Let's never forget, despite all the high-flown rhetoric about the United States ... this place began as a business proposition, and it has never stopped being a business proposition," he said.

Assuming that it is worthwhile to reconstruct the city, Young proposed a number of steps that could be taken to protect the area around New Orleans -- which he described as "a poster child for hydrologic vulnerability" -- from future disasters. These include restoring natural wetlands in the surrounding areas, letting the Mississippi River shift into a new bed and limiting major development to areas on higher ground.

He also proposed splitting New Orleans into two cities: a historic tourism district centered around the French Quarter and a more industrialized area set further up the river. Above all, he said, we must preserve the culture of the area and avoid "the McDonaldization of the reconstruction."

Although Young cautioned that the next 100 years will probably see more change in the American landscape than over the last 1,000 years, he ended on a positive note. "What we [Americans] are really good at," he said, "is looking at changing landscapes and finding opportunity in them."

The Cornell Institute for Progressive Policy is a student-run think tank dedicated to promoting awareness about a variety of global issues.

Courtney Potts is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.