-
8. Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
165 In the fall of 2011, a meeting of Haitian government officials, community leaders,foreigndiplomats,andrepresentativesfromtheinternationalnongovernmental organization (INGO) community was held at a Pétionville hotel. After one panel, several attendees came to the microphone to express their anger about the extent to which Americans seemed to be leading the reconstruction efforts. They shouted about a lack of coordination among Haitians that had allowed this unwelcome influence to enter their nation. By the end, some called for the establishment of a state-level ministry of urban affairs or policy to assist in the redevelopment of Haiti’s urban centers. In other contexts, urban affairs and policy has relied on professions and disciplines that work for egalitarian outcomes in the design and development of urban places. However, without the similar legacy of the reform and Progressive eras that shaped many service professions such as social work and planning in both Western Europe and North America, Haiti has not enjoyed the endogenous growth of these fields.1 Planning can be summarized as an activity that organizes land use for human settlement. However, an important feature of this definition is the communal nature of the exercise of planning. A market-based approach to the design of human settlements focuses not on human needs but on capital accumulation.Therearethusinherentegalitarianandpublicendsembedded in the very definition of what planning does as a field and profession. One theory is that political disruptions throughout Haiti’s history have prevented 8 Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince Harley F. Etienne 166 harley f. etienne sustained and vigorous public action. To institutionalize the planning profession in Haiti as it exists in other parts of the world is to create a sustainable public interest, and an egalitarian Haitian way or life. The course of Haitian history is not tangential to a definition of planning that makes sense in this context. It is perhaps why planning has never been well defined in Haiti or by the Haitian people. Vigorous public action has not been sustained for long periods of time without violence and political repression. That is to say, the egalitarian ends of planning have often eluded the Haitian nation-state. Thischapterseekstodescribethecurrentframeworkforcityplanningthat is operating in Haiti after the 7.0 earthquake of 2010. In many ways, planning issimultaneouslydesperatelyneededinpostdisasterHaitianddifficulttofind in any coordinated or sustained way. For the purposes of this essay, I am separating the acts of shelter provision and housing development from the larger rubric of planning. It is not that shelter and housing are not planning, but that theyarepartsofplanning.Itisthecoordinationofpolicy,design,engineering, resources, sound decision making, and politics that makes planning what it is in other parts of the world. All of this depends, in part, in the state’s ability to govern and marshal the confidence (or compliance) of its people through the just execution of the law and sound governance practices. Without it, the practice of planning struggles to create and execute future visions of human settlement. An important feature of planning is that it depends on the legitimacy and capacity of the state to function. This is not to mean that planning cannot happen in local contexts; rather, vigorous public action requires the government ’s ability to forecast and pursue egalitarian public ends. Haitian history and critiques of its recent crises would suggest that Haitian leaders have often governed how they were themselves governed. The legacy of the brutality of French colonialism lasted long into the twentieth century, only to be surpassed by the brutality of the American occupation. Disasters are catastrophic in many ways, but they do provide an opportunity to address long-standing problems and rebuild communities in ways that would have been impossible without the disaster.2 Haiti’s earthquake was unique in that it was far more catastrophic in Haiti than similar and larger earthquakes have been in other parts of the world. The documented geography of destruction reveals that the greatest damage was inflicted on central [3.239.15.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:52 GMT) Urban Planning 167 Port-au-Prince, Carrefour, and Léogâne. Initial estimates placed the death toll at260,000.Thisnumberwasrevisedseveraltimesdownwardto220,000.The economic toll of the devastation is estimated to be $14 billion. Although the focus of the earthquake’s impact has largely centered on housing the more than 1.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) affected by the initial event and subsequent aftershocks, there are several other issues that have not receivedthesameattention.Forexample,IDPswerenotonlyresidentsofthe affected communities but workers, suppliers, and entrepreneurs in...