She wanted to retrieve her medicine, and if
memory serves all these years later, also a hairbrush and a photograph from her
apartment.
It was in 2009, a couple of days after an
earthquake flattened L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, in central Italy.
Authorities had closed the city to residents, but the woman and her sister had
sneaked in. I found her leaning on a cane in a broken, empty plaza staring up
at a midcentury building that the quake had somehow sheared horizontally so
that it looked like a pot with its lid askew.
اضافة اعلان
She asked for help.
From afar, we measure catastrophes like the
calamity in Turkey and Syria by totaling the numbers of dead and buildings
destroyed. Reports describe a spectacularly wide disaster zone, recovery
efforts that are too slow, leaving untold hundreds and possibly thousands of
victims still buried, alive and dead, under the rubble — and hundreds of
thousands more in the cold without homes, food, drinking water, or medical
supplies.
We build out of brick and steel, asphalt and stone, and forget how fragile cities are until something like this happens, then we struggle to rebuild.
It is too much to process, the loss of
lives and history.
In Turkey, the Habibi Neccar Mosque
collapsed. The earthquake’s destruction was ecumenical. The mosque dates back
to 638 CE. It was a church and a mosque, depending on who ruled the city. Over
the centuries, authority passed from the caliphs to the Byzantines, who
succumbed to Seljuks, who were ousted by the Crusaders, who ceded to Mamluks,
who were replaced by Ottomans, and eventually Antakya was annexed by Turkey.
The quake erased whole swathes of history.
The biblical city of Antioch, Antakya is
also where the word “Christian” was supposedly first used. The Apostle Peter
led the church there before establishing a church in Rome. Paul preached in
Antioch. The quake collapsed the St. Paul Orthodox Church, as well.
Implementing building codesWe build out of brick and steel, asphalt,
and stone, and forget how fragile cities are until something like this happens,
then we struggle to rebuild. The urge to urbanize is hard-wired in us because
cities are life.
And like other forms of life, they need
constant care to grow strong and productive over time. In Turkey, that clearly
did not happen. After an earthquake in 1999 killed 17,000, building codes were
introduced and updated. But authorities turned a blind eye to developers who
ignored seismic regulations, and they failed to check projects that supposedly
complied with the rules. In 2018, Turkey’s government granted amnesty to
developers who violated the codes in return for fees, without requiring that
they actually make their buildings safe.
“We draft the laws well, but we do not
implement them,” Pelin Pinar Giritlioglu, the president of the Istanbul branch
of the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, told my
colleagues James Glanz and Ceylan Yeginsu.
According to the Associated Press, a
Turkish government agency has acknowledged that more than half of all buildings
in the country do not meet earthquake standards.
According to the Associated Press, a Turkish government agency has acknowledged that more than half of all buildings in the country do not meet earthquake standards.
L’Aquila, like Antakya, lies in a notorious
earthquake zone. A quake in L’Aquila in 1349 killed 800 residents; another in
1703 killed more than 3,000, prompting Pope Clement XI to send priests and nuns
freed of their celibacy to repopulate the city.
The quake in 2009 killed more than 300
people, destroyed hundreds of historical buildings, and left tens of thousands
homeless. Italian authorities rushed to resettle survivors in tents and
temporary housing on the outskirts of town and on the coast, promising to
rebuild what had been destroyed.
A boastful Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian
prime minister at the time, declared these “new towns” and prefab houses an “Italian
miracle.” But these sad, costly, cramped settlements, disconnected from transit
and civic life, became permanent as the years passed; there were probes into
contractors’ links with the mafia; and L’Aquila’s recovery stalled.
Spaces that serve the peopleYou may rightly ask about the logic of
rebuilding time and again in these risky places. The notion comes up around a
different threat: climate change. Scientists predict large-scale migrations in
the coming years from zones where rising seas, floods, droughts, and extreme
weather will make life increasingly difficult or impossible. Already, climate
change has displaced millions of people around the world.
But logic is not the point.
The least government can be expected to do is ensure that buildings and streets are up to code and that cities answer to the needs of their residents.
Cities are only nominally bricks and
mortar, after all. To residents they are repositories of a hairbrush and a
photograph — collective threads of a social fabric that, over time, weave
together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, a community. The least
government can be expected to do is ensure that buildings and streets are up to
code and that cities answer to the needs of their residents, not to developers
and politicians. But in much of the world that is the exception.
When I returned to L’Aquila a few years
after the quake, I found a group of men chatting in the empty Piazza Duomo. One
of them, a retired lawyer named Antonio Antonacci, told me that his house had
been lost in the quake. He moved in with relatives an hour or so away.
He was lucky, he said, but every week he
still made the trip back to the piazza so he could meet his old friends who,
like him, had scattered. As they had before the quake, they smoked cigars and
wiled away the afternoon.
The city was still a shambles. But it was
home.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
