In helping give birth to modern cities, disaster has been a useful, if cruel, midwife. In the months following Haiti’s massive earthquake in 2010, people hoped it might be true here, too.
There was plenty of precedent.
The Chicago fire of 1871 left one-third of the city’s population homeless. The city’s economy, however, grew faster in the year after the fire than in the year before it. The earthquake and fires that struck San Francisco in 1906 destroyed 28,000 buildings. Almost overnight, it cleared vast areas on which a healthier and more handsome city was built.