Watching the human tragedy in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast has been heart-wrenching. As we move into the cleanup portion of this disaster, I am left to wonder what the next steps should be.

New Orleans, beautiful as it was, was an unfortunate place to build a city. A below-sea level location sandwiched between three bodies of water isn't a smart location to locate a million or so people. The economics of its strategic location outweighed those negatives, however.

Not that New Orleans is the only city in potential trouble. Parts of New York are built on questionable soil. Coastal cities like Miami are in trouble if ocean levels rise over the next few decades, as some scientists predict. San Francisco and Los Angeles could be time bombs, sitting near multiple fault lines. And when Mount Ranier decides to blow off more than a little steam — as it will some day — a good portion of the Seattle area may be in a world of hurt.

None of this even takes into account the possibility of a manmade tragedy. Will terrorists someday get their hands on a small nuclear weapon or dirty bomb and detonate it in one of our cities?

While I don't suggest abandoning all these major U.S. cities or crawling into a hole in the ground, I do think that the rebuilding of New Orleans presents us with an interesting opportunity, because it is not out of the question that we will face another disaster of this sort in the next few decades.

Some people have suggested that instead of simply rebuilding the city, that a "New New Orleans" be constructed, perhaps 30 miles further inland. That kind of thinking — widely dismissed in the media — is at least worth a look. Maybe an intelligent compromise would involve building a second city center inland, leaving the old downtown as a "midtown" type area.

The $100 billion (or whatever the total is, when insurance money is thrown in) in rebuilding costs would go a long way toward building an entirely new city center and neighboorhoods. Think about it. Urban planners could take the best of what has been learned over the past 50 years and incorporate it into the new city. Downtown could be laid out in an efficient matter, instead of the haphazard way that many downtowns grow. Neighborhoods could be built in a way that encourage interaction. Lower income housing could be intelligently spread out, keeping ghetto areas from developing. Mass transit and the highway system could be coordinated so as to reduce urban sprawl.

Much like some of the cities in Germany and Japan that were devastated in World War II, the New New Orleans could be a model for efficient, livable cities. And what of the "old" New Orleans? Infrastructure in the higher parts of the city could be retained, and building in the lower sections would be restricted. Many of these lower areas could be left as parkland, maybe even administered by the National Park Service's French Quarter visitor center.

The easy thing to do is to dismiss this as a pipe dream, but we have the ability to do this now. Unfortunately, some day, we're going to have another city follow in New Orleans' footsteps. Let's rebuild smarter now, and maybe next time we'll know better what to do after tragedy strikes.