If You Build It, Can You Make Them Come?
As Haiti emerged from the rubble following last January’s devastating earthquake, it soon became clear that the task of rebuilding was no ordinary clean-up effort. Approximately 1.3 million people were homeless, the presidential palace was in ruins, and rescue workers would be pulling bodies from the debris for months. All told, 35 seconds of terror caused more than $8 billion in damage and set an entire country back decades on its path toward economic development.
The Haitian government, for its part, quickly realized that the seeds of disaster had been sown long before the ground started shaking. "It was obvious that such a toll could not be the outcome of just the force of the tremor," writes the government in its Action Plan for National Recovery and Development, a document presented at the UN’s New York headquarters last March at a hastily-convened conference of international donors. "It is due to an excessively dense population, a lack of adequate building standards, the disastrous state of the environment, disorganized land use, and an unbalanced division of economic activity."
At the time of the quake, Port-au-Prince, the sprawling capital city that sustained most of the damage, accounted for roughly 30 percent of the country’s population and 65 percent of the its economic activity. In hopes of preventing such debilitation in the future, the recovery team -- headed by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton -- came up with a radical plan: deliberate decentralization.
"The earthquake has demonstrated the disproportionate importance of Port-au-Prince and the fragility of the areas located on tectonic faults," the Plan reads. "Reconstruction must be carried out elsewhere, at least in part." By distributing people more evenly, the thinking goes, the country as a whole will be less susceptible to any single natural disaster, and the utter destruction of last January won’t be repeated. But there are tradeoffs, and if Haiti pursued this path, wouldn’t the well-documented economic and cultural advantages of urbanization be squandered? Human civilization has pursued centralization with sustained zeal over the centuries -- only recently, for the first time in history, did the majority of humans become city-dwellers -- but Haiti’s bold new approach could challenge this trend.
To development economists, decentralization is a dirty word. "Economic theory says there are forces that push people to agglomerate," explains Stephane Straub, an associate professor at the Toulouse School of Economics in Toulouse, France, who studies the role of infrastructure in development. "In cities, there are big markets for companies and a diverse set of jobs for workers." Gilles Duranton, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto who has worked extensively with the World Bank on urban development, agrees. "Cities are good because they allow people to learn from each other," he notes, and this critical mass of people creates an atmosphere ripe for innovation and specialization. Global data confirm these trends. Duranton has found that doubling a city’s population increases its economic efficiency by roughly 5%, and World Bank reports show that urbanization is linked to better health, increased literacy rates, and higher incomes.
There are exceptions, of course: cities that grow too large too quickly, or without sufficient planning, often fail to deliver the infrastructure needed to foster order and prosperity. Nearly everyone acknowledges that Port-au-Prince was not exactly a paragon of urban enlightenment. Port-au-Prince was established in 1749 by French sugar planters, and the city expanded organically -- with no coherent plan or growth strategy -- until the mid-20th century. Between 1950 and 1970, lower mortality rates and the economic pull of the urban center caused the population to balloon from 150,000 to 350,000 people. The city was able to absorb the increase with relative ease, as the central government modernized roads and sponsored the construction of hundreds of thousands of homes. But the next round of growth in the late '80s and early '90s, which saw a tripling of Port-au-Prince’s population, proved too much for city planners to handle. Homes, roads, and plumbing couldn’t be developed quickly enough, and the waves of newcomers settled in the unregulated slums that hang precariously from the hillsides surrounding the city. Port-au-Prince, a city built for a fraction of the nearly 3 million people it contained before the earthquake, has been overwhelmed by the influx, constrained by geography, inadequate housing, and decades of environmental neglect. "In terms of security and basic services, it was very bad before the earthquake," Straub says. Kidnappings were a near-daily occurrence, the country had no wastewater treatment facilities, and raw sewage ran through the streets when the water table lifted during the rainy season.
Andrew Morton, the Haiti Program Manager for the UN Environmental Program, has experienced the challenges of the capital first-hand. "It’s extremely crowded, the traffic is problematic, and its capacity to expand is very limited," he says. "It’s not a city that should be encouraged to grow, period."
By moving people away from the capital and into smaller regional cities, Morton and other proponents believe, reconstruction planners in the Haitian government can use billions of aid dollars to develop urban plans that can be repeated from one place to the next. In this way, they argue, planners can take advantage of the smaller cities' relative "blank slates" rather than try to disentangle and retrofit the rubble-choked slums of Port-au-Prince. "It’s pretty obvious that decentralization makes sense," Straub argues. "The previous degree of concentration was probably too high, so I would push for three or four medium sized cities that would be easier to manage and would provide services to people."
The regional cities proposed in the plan -- Cap-Haitien, Les Gonaives, Saint-Marc, Hinche, Port-au-Prince, and Les Cayes -- possess certain advantages that could seed vibrant economic hubs, at least in theory. Gonaives and Cayes could be useful international ports, Hinche could be an agricultural center, and Cap-Haitien could lure tourists with its colonial architecture and picturesque beaches. With strategically-placed hotels, shipping ports, factories, and airports, Haiti could begin to take advantage of its rich history, rich ecological potential, and positioning at the crossroads of the Caribbean to make significant economic gains.
The National Recovery Action Plan earmarks $5.85 billion of the government’s budget and anticipated aid for a range of recovery projects and social initiatives for the 18 months following the report’s release. As the halfway mark in this initial budgetary period passes, it is clear that progress thus far has been slow. At the fourth meeting of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission in December, Clinton complained about the "totally unacceptable" pace and proposed new measures to expedite funding. It will take at least 5 to 10 years, estimates UNEP Program Officer Muralee Thummarukudy, for the decentralization plan’s real impact to be felt as infrastructure is built and people relocate. Among the current budget’s line items are $354 million worth of projects promoting decentralization: $180 million for the national highway network, $35 million for new airports, $14 million for shipping ports, $75 million for development plans of regional towns, and $50 million for territorial and local development.
Whether or not the funding can be sustained is an open question, and the short memory of the international community -- donors tend to put away their checkbooks once a disaster fades from the headlines -- doesn’t bode well for long term commitment to the initiative.
Some critics of the plan question the very premise of decentralization, the notion that a more distributed population would minimize the risks from natural hazards. "I’m not sure the argument against putting all your eggs in one basket makes much sense," says Duranton, "because instead of breaking all your eggs at one time, you’re going to break some of your eggs a lot more often." The likelihood that a natural disaster -- hurricane, earthquake, or flood, take your pick -- might strike a major population center increases as the number of cities grows, but the overall damage is likely to be less severe than was the case last January. Even so, statistically, it’s not clear if more scattered settlements actually decrease the overall risk.
Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas’ Jackson School of Geosciences, studies Caribbean earthquakes and believes that decentralization could lead to even more seismic problems if it’s not done right. He points out that historically, earthquakes have centered around tectonic fault zones along the country’s northern and southern coasts. Rebuilding these areas, including proposed hubs Cap-Haitien, Cayes, and Port-au-Prince, is inviting disaster. "The simplest solution," Mann proposes, "is to get as far from the fault lines as possible but remain on a coast given the importance of ports for an island nation." This logic points to Saint-Marc, a city with the additional benefit of being built on bedrock, "which is less susceptible to shaking than areas like most of Port-au-Prince that are located on softer sediments," according to Mann. Of course, economic and demographic realities must be taken into account, but Mann’s analysis shows that decentralization without an assessment of geological or meteorological risks is irresponsible. If the goal is to minimize the risk posed by natural hazards, planners would be wise to understand the historic and projected distributions of those hazards; otherwise, newly-developed cities could be putting even more people in harm’s way.
Just how the population redistribution will proceed has yet to be worked out, and the Action Plan’s lack of specificity implies a "build it and they will come" approach. In talks with Haitian governmental officials, Thummarukudy encouraged the use of carrots rather than sticks. "Getting the population out of Port-au-Prince should happen by creating a pull factor through employment and services," he says, "not by a push factor through legislation and taxation."
Straub fears that despite the government’s efforts, uncontrolled and insufficiently planned urbanization might be inevitable. "A lot of people left the countryside," he says, "choosing to settle in the city," and despite their shortcomings, Port-au-Prince’s slums afforded residents access to more money, better education, and a greater chance of upward mobility than they would have had in rural areas. Several years down the road, Straub suggests, as new urban economic hubs develop, and Haitians from the countryside or other floundering cities will flock there, seeking the same promises of a better life that sparked the uncontrollable growth of Port-au-Prince two decades ago.
Duranton has sensed a political undertone to the decentralization plan from the outset. "I suspect the government is actually concerned about social unrest," he says, noting that slow governmental response to basic needs -- water, food, and shelter -- foments rebellion. The recent presidential election, which has triggered violent street protests, and the threat of a cholera epidemic have both compounded the pressure on the government and disrupted the recovery and relocation plan. Decentralization would likely blunt both of these threats by decreasing crowding and fragmenting unsavory political movements.
Whatever the true motive, Haiti’s plan for decentralization is a unique experiment. The push toward decentralization runs counter to centuries of human development, but it could usher in a new paradigm of natural disaster management. And in a country like Haiti, which has been unable to gain traction on the path toward economic improvement for decades, the push of the "restart" button has provided a remarkable opportunity to correct past errors. After all, as Straub succinctly puts it, "you can hardly do worse than before. It’s certainly a risk worth taking."
