How to build after the disaster may give us ideas how to build to prevent the next disaster, of which possibly the largest conceivable one is the combination of climate change, species extinctions and peak oil - coming all at once.

As I write, it's the day after Christmas and all through the newspapers there are stories of the non-recovery from the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Tens of thousands of people are reportedly waiting and waiting and waiting for the assistance that is, as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, taking painfully long to arrive. In the case of the tsunami survivors, it is an extremely long time. When will the relief agencies and governments get it together? Slowly some houses are being rebuilt with materials recycled from destroyed structure and a dribble of new building materials is arriving as roads get repaired and money gets spent. It's so slow though that several articles report on teenagers getting bored and taking up drugs, presumably as an outlet for so few things to do and so few resources to do them with.

Mulling all this I remembered that Wendy Brawer, my friend who invented the Green Map system had written me that she has a friend who is working on reconstruction in parts of Indonesia destroyed by the Tsunami. You've probably seen the Green Map of one or a few cities with Wendy's icons available to map makers for a small fee. The internet-available icons indicating ecology centers, good green bookstores, recycling facilities, publicly accessible nature areas, parks, community gardens, solar energy hardware companies, city dumps, toxic hot spots and the like help people explore the environmental realities of their towns - the better to change the city for the better while supporting those who are.

These thought converged and I decided to answer the question put by Wendy's correspondent in Indonesia and send it off to Wendy, Marco and you.

Marco had asked, "Is there any methodology, adaptation, tools being developed for that purpose?" that is, for rebuilding after the tsunami using mapping systems.

I said I believe there is - and here it is:

1. Prioritize and find the big answers first.
The concept for the entire structure of the city, town and village in these times of high population and cheap energy (the cheap energy is soon ending) has been redesigned for machines powered by cheap energy instead of for human bodies getting about and doing their living.

The American version of that has been the sprawl/cars/freeways/cheap energy infrastructure. The world version of that is simply losing the logic of the pedestrian city, specifically that higher density and diversity works to bring connections close enough together to make human contact easily available, whether making commerce, education or friends. That's the big issue on the "what we humans do and build" side: the biggest things we build - cities and towns and villages, that is, the built community - has experienced a conceptual shift, a paradigm shift or gestalt idea or archetype image away from its proper place as supporting human beings. "What we do and build" has shifted over to supporting machines that are supposed to be supporting human beings.

But in fact the robots are taking over, despite the fact that the mindless robots - cars, trucks, gasoline cracking plants, earth moving and cement making factories, etc. - have taken the lead even before the "intelligent" ones housed in our ever more complexifying computers have started making decisions for humanity. Already the dumb ones are directing the distracted humans, fixated on close-in and often greedy or lazy interests, to build for them, for the robots, rather than for the health of humanity. The machines were supposed to help us. What they have accomplished is massive population of humans, massive average per/person human consumption, climate change of a disastrous sort that is just beginning if we stay on this path, species extinctions rapidly escalating and enormous reduction of natural plant and animal populations.

This is all mainly because these robots have also accomplished the demise of the pedestrian community. ("Automobile" MEANS robot, by the way: "self-moving" = "auto-mobile".) The US launched version of that - sprawl and its incalculably massive wastefulness and destructiveness - is becoming obvious to many. That villagers around the world don't think seriously enough about what it has meant, is another much more subtle problem since, after all, they have remained largely pedestrian - while nonetheless watching TV and developing for themselves ad-aggravated dreams of participating in a similar way to people in the anti-people cities, with all their cars and machines somehow integrated vaguely into something more village-like. Meantime, the basic ideas of the pedestrian infrastructure are fading away. That basic idea of the dynamics of the pedestrian supporting infrastructure, whether for cities, towns or villages, should be priority number one. That pedestrian infrastructure also happens to be the ecological city, town or village, or "ecocity."

2. Big answer second, after realizing there is some profound good sense in the pedestrian community, is that the local conditions are crucial. One can look at what exists and find what is best and worst in regard to healthy functioning - which is very educational, and is what green maps do, identifying such places with particular icons. So far so good. We need the data, relationships to "green" and the values of protecting life and health. But the next step is to ask, where is the whole community located?

There is the bioregional discipline to give good answers here on the larger scale. On the smaller scale which is the focus of Green Maps, where the community is located is also a crucial question, the answer is largely this: in the areas of opportunity for reshaping the community so that it CAN become a pedestrian community. I call these "opportunity sites" and have suggested to Wendy for years that she might locate the strongest of these as opportunity sites in Green Maps. Then the maps would help direct change into the future that transforms cities from supporting machines to supporting people. In a nutshell, that amounts to building for more density and diversity where pedestrian and transit centers can grow in efficiency into the future. It also amounts to removing development that is in automobile dependent areas and on top of high biodiversity features that once existed but have been destroyed for the car infrastructure, such as buried creeks.

In thinking through such pedestrian community, that's where we also consider tsunamis and hurricanes, the Indian Ocean, December 26, 2004 (a year ago today) and New Orleans, August 29, 2005. Here's how:

3. Putting the bioregional information together with the spatial arrangements of the pedestrian city, town and village, we discover that we can build on mounds of raised earth. This is because such cities, unlike cities designed for machines powered by cheap energy with all their wide streets, parking lots, gas stations, new and used car lots, wrecking yard, freeway interchanges, low density housing areas and so on, are cities that take up far less land. That means that "moderns" can mound up earth like the Sumerians 5,000 years ago at Ur to avoid floods of the Tigris and Euphrates, and for the Native Americans over the last 1,000 years up and down the Mississippi River valley to rise above floods there. While we still have some available relatively cheap energy from oil, we could use a fair portion of it to raise the future pedestrian city in such low lands. But remember that the ancients didn't have such easy energy and they built by hand the mounds they lived on. It can be done! It can only be done for the city for people, not the city for machines. The city of cars and sprawl would require an immense amount of earth.

Final thoughts on this: One year after the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 the articles in the papers report on billions of dollars slowly being used to rebuild. I haven't seen a word about raising the level of the houses and other buildings and therefore, of course, no general comment on just how high the villages, towns and cities should be above ocean level. If, say, 20% or 40% of the rebuilding budgets went into moving earth into mounds shaped with a ship-like prow toward the sea, armored with a thin wall of concrete and steel, how many lives would be saved next time. If only five feet of elevation were accomplished, it probably wouldn't help much. Ten feet might do a little good, and 20 feet would assuredly make a serious difference. What about a "hill" 40 feet high, literally parting the waters? Almost all people would survive even the largest of tsunamis. The areas to the sides of such raised communities would be reduced in elevation somewhat and suffer more damage in coming tsunamis. If the height of a ten acre village were raised 40 feet, say, and 100 acres were used on both sides of the new village for gathering fill, the surrounding land behind the beaches would be reduced in level four feet. The giant waves would move inland in corridors around the town, but everyone would know that and only lighter, more easily replaced structures would be built there. The objective is to save lives and when the warning comes, to climb up to the streets 40 feet above the beach, if you happen to be in the town-flanking lower landscape, is far preferable to trying to outrun a 40 foot ocean surge headed inland.

Regarding the people just waiting for direction and money from government and relief agencies, some essentially inactive in rebuilding for a year now, they could be building the mounds on which the new cities, towns and villages will be built. A couple hours a day or days a week with those tens of thousands of people shifting earth about with shovels and wheelbarrows could be a great investment in the future. That's what we got organized on a much smaller scale to dig up and open a one block stretch of a creek in Berkeley. After about six months of digging, the creek course was open and we took the creek out of its underground box culvert and planted native plants along its banks. About 375 people had participated in the work and a couple dozen contributed native plants, including a few expensive trees. In the thirteen years since then, we've had very few volunteers involved in maintenance and just plain enjoying the nature that came back, despite the much easier work and very rich environment that returned. Lesson: people actually like energetic earth moving work for a good cause. Why not tap into that? The raising the town concept would do just that, I believe. But it has to be communicated and organized. A kind of blend of green mapping and ecocity mapping might get the idea across, and then, make organizing much easier. The official zoning and planning folks also need this perspective. As we can see, they don't have it. Why I have no idea, but we all need them to have it.

I've proposed in earlier writing about rebuilding New Orleans the idea of the "mound" working there as one of three crucial features. The mound raises the town up over the waters. The other two features would work well where storms are a consideration around the Indian Ocean too. These are "labyrinth" and "shell." Labyrinth means building compact pedestrian cities with a twisting street layout so that the winds don't, as the Greek colony builders would say, "sweep the streets." Instead, such labyrinth of narrow curving or broken angled streets tames the wind in the "interior" of the built community. Shell simply means the outside buildings have to be reinforced to take the brunt of the high winds. Perhaps builders of the buildings in the "interior" of the community or government should pay into a fund that helps the builders of the "shell" of the community pay for stronger siding, glazing and roofing. Two more important related points: The compact pedestrian community takes up less land, leaving more for our much-assaulted natural and agricultural environments. And generally, the taller the buildings the less land required for the built community, and the more people are served above the flood, the more land is conserved per/person for nature and agriculture and the less energy is needed for each person's "trip" here and there. The pedestrian city holds enormous positive potential.

But we have to understand that, map it and then build it.