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Cities coping with disaster offer lessons for rebuilding New York's World Trade Center site
> HISTORY Last spring, as the nation continued to reel from the events of the preceding September, and as the mountain of rubble and remains continued to be cleared at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan-widely referred to as 11 ground zero"- many New Yorkers found themselves torn between a sense of the tragedy's ineffability and an increasingly clamorous debate (not least engaging the architectural community) about how to rebuild. It seemed useful to try to put the situation into Q broader historical and cultural perspective. Presumably there were lessons to be derived from the example of other cities and the way they coped with similar cataclysms.
Indeed. while each of the instances of "urban reinvention" under examination in Out of Ground Zero is unique, it offers a suggestive way of thinking about the situation in New York. It may be cold comfort to realize that the magnitude of suffering in Manhattan is no greater than that endured in other places and times. Yet the spectrum of responses offers not just a set of variations on the theme of urban destruction, but a sense of the manifold meanings of urban experience. For the most part, these responses confirm the perennial resilience of cities in the face of drastic events; a couple, however, also offer more cautionary tales.
LISBON
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a truly world-shaking event. As Kenneth Maxwell, a scholar of Portuguese history, relates. it is estimated to have registered 9.0 on the Richter scale. The quake and its aftershocks were felt as far east as Venice, where Casanova, imprisoned in the Ducal Palace in Piazza San Marco, seized the opportunity to escape from his cell. In Lisbon, the epicenter, as many as 15,000 people were killed and about one-third of the city was destroyed. But what is distinctive about the case of Lisbon is the emergence of what Hegel would call a "world-historical individual." Stepping in for a weak and fearful monarch, the Marques de Pombal lost no time in taking charge of the situation.
Pombal was one of those visionary-and ruthless-personalities through whose agency an entire urban fabric was transformed, a figure comparable to...