I was having a conversation with an old friend last night and he posed this fascinating question to me…
How do you rebuild a ghetto? And I mean funky ghettos, not government housing projects.
We were talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which is how this idea came up, but it set the jester’s mind to thinking. How do you rebuild a ghetto? Because you can’t, a ghetto exists for a thousand reasons; you’ve got the cheap rents in old buildings that have fallen into a state of disrepair, you’ve got shop-keepers who offer that eclectic selection of staples and oddities that the community residents somehow manage to live on.
I live in a student ghetto, and if something were ever to come through and wipe the buildings out, the feel, the community of this wild eccentric neighborhood I call home would be impossible to recreate. These areas grow organically and no amount of planning will ever call one into being. Your more upper-class neighborhoods are far easier to replicate, but how to rebuild a ghetto? Can it be done?
December 13th, 2005 at 10:42 pm
Once the soul of a place is gone it will never return. The New Orleans that everyone knows is gone. There will be glimmers of the old for some time, and what is to come might even be better/more amazing, but as time marches on it grinds the landscape under its boot heels.
I’d argue that the way to rebuild a ghetto would be to not do it. They will develop on their own as the rest of the society is put up. It comes from greed. Wherever money (or whatever currency the culture deals in) is amassed in large amounts, they always try to get the most out of the least. Get the fools to break their backs for our desires. The “fools” gather because they share a social environment. And there you have it, the birth of a ghetto.
Course I could be completely wrong…