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Is Haiti a Laboratory for New Urbanists?

In April Haitian president René Préval asked the international aid community for $3.8 billion to rebuild his shattered country after January’s devastating earthquake. In what amounted to a fund-raiser at the United Nations, he received pledges of $5.3 billion over the next eighteen months. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised $1.15 billion on behalf of the United States. Most of the money will be spent on rebuilding schools, hospitals, roads, and basic infrastructure.

-the question is where?

A number of urban planners and economists within and outside Haiti have argued against the wholesale rebuilding Port-au-Prince and pushed for redistributing its displaced residents around the country instead.

There are many good reasons why Haiti should turn its back on Port-au-Prince: It’s destroyed; it straddles a major faultline; it is filled with slums offering few opportunities to residents, and they would only get bigger if left unchecked. But is depopulation the answer?

For one thing, it is impossible to separate the future growth of Haiti’s cities from the future path of its economy. Right now, “our economic advantage is in agriculture and tourism, and these are by nature decentralized,” argued Leslie Voltaire, an urban planner and a special envoy for Haiti to the United Nations. New Urbanism is a reaction against suburban-driven sprawl-the landscape created during the peak of American industrialization.

The problem with rebuilding Haiti along New Urbanist lines is that Haiti’s is a pre-industrial economy, not a post-industrial one. It needs urban concentration for manufacturing and infrastructure aimed at supporting exports--not a fantasy of self-sufficient agriculture. “This will only work if these poles become magnets of attraction-with agriculture, tourism, industry and especially jobs,” Voltaire told the Times. “Otherwise, these people are going to come back.”