A plan for safer
growth, away from
Port-au-Prince.


Even as outsiders feel sympathy for Haiti’s suffering, they tend to look upon it as a country beyond saving.

Now there is a plan to do just that, and it is surprisingly convincing. The lucid, far-reaching reconstruction guidelines that the Haitian government unveiled at a donors’ conference at the United Nations should give all who care about Haiti’s future cause for hope.

Prepared by a group of urban planners from the Haitian government agency responsible for the country’s development, the plan is built around a bold central idea: to redistribute large parts of the population of Portau- Prince to smaller Haitian cities, many of them at a safe distance from areas most vulnerable to natural disaster. In the process the plan would completely transform Haiti from a country dominated by a single metropolis to what the planners call a network of smaller urban “growth poles.”

The guidelines are still in an early stage, and Haiti’s fate will ultimately have a lot to do with economic and political developments beyond the scope of planners. But the guidelines already surpass any of the early reconstruction plans for post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans or for the parts of Asia affected by the tsunami in 2004. The proposal’s well-reasoned thinking about environmental threats and the history of urban development in Haiti suggests that they could become a reliable blueprint not just for reconstruction, but also for solving many of the urban ills that have plagued the country for decades.

The causes of those troubles can be traced back a century. Haiti was once primarily rural, with its major economic activity distributed among several ports along the northern, western and southern coasts. But after the United States invaded in 1915, the Americans began to concentrate most trade operations in Port-au-Prince, the site of their military headquarters. The port was dredged to make room for big new steamships; other major ports, to the north and west, began to lose their importance. By the middle of the 1960s, Francois Duvalier had shut down the other ports entirely as part of an effort to concentrate his power base in the capital.

The growth of Port-au-Prince accelerated in the political turmoil after Duvalier’s son and heir, Jean-Claude, fled the country in 1986. Over the next 20 years, the city’s population nearly doubled, to close to three million people, according to some estimates.

The effect of this shift was an urban disaster ? one that has put more and more pressure on the capital while draining the provinces of economic opportunity.

“You need to restore a balance,” said Leslie Voltaire, an urban planner and a special envoy to the United Nations . “If we don’t do anything, Port-au- Prince is expected to grow to 6,000,000 in the next 15 years. It will become an incubator for further crime and violence. Our economic advantage is in agriculture and tourism, and these are by nature decentralized.”

The notion of shrinking the capital and reviving provincial cities dates back to 1987. It was enshrined as a goal in the post-Duvalier constitution by a government seeking to redistribute political power and has been brought up periodically by urban planners ever since, to little effect.

The environmental and geological concerns raised by the earthquake have made this approach seem all the more critical.

In essence, the guidelines treat the recent disaster as an opportunity. Thousands of public buildings in Port-au- Prince were destroyed by the earthquake, including schools, hospitals and markets. Around 600,000 survivors have since fled the capital for cities like Cap Haitien, in the north, and Hinche, in the central plateau. The population of Gonaives, a port city on the west coast , has swollen to 300,000 from 200,000 in less than three months.

By relocating many schools and hospitals to smaller cities, planners hope to create an economic incentive to keep people from returning to Portau- Prince once reconstruction begins. The new buildings could be organized around public squares and parks to provide civic centers to communities sorely lacking in them.

Planners have outlined a similar approach for rural villages, with farms encircling a communal core containing a market, a school and healthcare facilities.

“This will only work if these poles become magnets of attraction - with agriculture, tourism, industry and especially jobs,” Mr. Voltaire said. “Otherwise, these people are going to come back.”


NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF / ARCHITECTURE