Speaking to an American audience on C-SPAN, the Haitian ambassador to the United States sketched an optimistic future for Port-au-Prince — a smaller, well-built city to replace the teeming, chaotic and shoddily built sprawl of almost three million people that was virtually wiped away by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

“There is a silver lining,” Raymond Joseph said. “What was not politically possible, was done by the earthquake. We will rebuild differently . . .

“The future of Haiti will be very different from the past.”

Will it? Only if the Haitian government and the international community manage to overcome longstanding obstacles of poverty and poor governance that have dogged the country for decades.

Experts in foreign development and disaster say there are few modern parallels with the Haiti earthquake — a profound catastrophe striking at the urban heart of a national capital, crippling the institutions of the whole country.

“I think Bosnia, Sarajevo,” said J. Brian Atwood, who led the U.S. Agency for International Development under President Bill Clinton. “Never have I seen anything this bad in one urban area.”

Not only did the earthquake kill more than 100,000 — the official toll was 111,481 as of Saturday — it destroyed the core of authority: the National Palace, the parliament, the police headquarters and 13 of the government’s 15 ministries. And the two surviving ministries have been declared unsafe. Entire neighborhoods of the city may have to be razed and rebuilt.

The government was already weak before the quake, struggling to provide even basic services to an impoverished population while trying to shed its reputation as one of the most corrupt nations in the world.

With so many obstacles, and no ready blueprint, the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince will be a minefield of hard questions with no clear answer, experts say.

WHERE TO BEGIN

“The first question is, `Whose Port-au-Prince is being rebuilt?’ ” said Lawrence Vale, an urban-planning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in disaster recovery. “Who is really empowered here? And where will the resources that come from outside be targeted?”

The scale and strategy of the reconstruction are so far unknown. The United Nations will convene a meeting of foreign ministers this week in Montreal to begin discussing long-term plans.

But the Haitian government has already taken steps to establish settlements for evacuees outside Port-au-Prince that could become permanent, while shrinking the old capital’s footprint. Experts warn, however, that such mass-relocation schemes in other catastrophes have usually failed because they isolate people from the jobs and economic opportunity that drew them to the city in the first place.

“People right now are afraid. They will jump on a bus or a train to get away,” said Haitian businesswoman Youri Mevs, whose family runs some of the country’s largest private enterprises. “These solutions will always be temporary unless there is the support of job creation.”

The head of the International Monetary Fund has called for a Haiti “Marshall Plan,” invoking the mammoth reconstruction efforts in Germany and Japan after World War II. But development experts caution that any long-term plans must not be imposed on Haiti by outsiders.

“The real fear is a large agency is going to come in and dictate how Port-au-Prince gets rebuilt, and you end up in this situation where there is a lot of fear and resentment,” said Cameron Sinclair of the nonprofit Architects for Humanity, which has worked in disaster zones around the world.

The ultimate cost is anyone’s guess, although at a Saturday discussion of architects, academics and government officials that took place under a tree in Pétionville, the figure of $3 billion was offered by Patrick Delatour, an architect and Haiti’s minister of tourism charged with evaluating the destruction.

That figure, which covers publicly owned buildings and new homes for some quake victims, broke down like this: $2 billion for schools and health facilities, $500 million for parks, hotels and other infrastructure rehabilitation, and $500 million for courthouses, jails and government ministries. It also includes a proposal to build 20 villages of 1,000 new homes each with schools and health facilities. Delatour warned that the number was only an early estimate and could easily spiral much higher, even triple.

Delatour said he’s been in touch with various international actors about to rebuilding the capital in a public-private partnership, and finding permanent new homes for quake victims.

“Time is of the essence,” Delatour said. “Not only are we going to rebuild the capital — and no one knows where yet, if it’s Port-au-Prince or somewehre else — but we are going to create the governmental and social infrastructure that goes with decentralization.”

MODELS FOR COMPARISON

Virtually everyone agrees that any recovery will take decades.

Even in more advanced countries with strong governments, rebuilding from earthquakes can be long, complicated and expensive.

After an earthquake shattered the city of Kobe, Japan, in 1995, the Japanese government invested some $58 billion in the four-year reconstruction effort. Haiti, on the other hand, will have to rely almost exclusively on foreign assistance: The country has a federal budget of just under $1 billion a year, and at least half of its revenue comes from foreign aid already.

So the new Port-au-Prince may end up resembling Managua, where sections of the Nicaraguan capital remain in ruins from an earthquake 37 years ago.

“Building back better is very expensive. In a place where the resources are very limited, that can be an empty call,” Vale said.

Given the circumstances, experts say the best scenario for Haiti would have massive amounts of foreign aid channeled through non-governmental organizations, financing grass-roots programs to rebuild neighborhoods, with technical assistance supplied by the United States — while the government focuses on infrastructure and rebuilding important civic structures.

USAID officials have said they will model their response after that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed 228,000 people in 14 countries. USAID built homes, schools, roads, bridges, clinics, community centers, water systems, libraries and markets. But the agency also offered vocational training, small-business loans, training for government officials and psychological counseling for survivors.

If Haiti is ever to lessen its reliance on foreign aid, however, it must also seize the chance to build up its small private sector, said Mevs, whose family controls a large chunk of it. The key will be forging joint ventures with American companies that can provide financing and expertise.

“There are Haitian companies that have the capacity to rebuild homes and ports, but there are not enough of them. If you’re looking for skills, you will find them locally. If you’re looking for capacity that will meet the magnitude of the need, no,” Mevs said in an interview in Miami.

IN THE NEAR TERM

Reconstruction — informal and unregulated — will probably begin long before any long-range plan takes hold. Residents accustomed to scavenging and desperate for shelter may simply rebuild shantytowns rather than wait months or years for government action. Families with remittances from relatives abroad may also get a head start on rebuilding.

NGOs will also likely begin tackling small-scale projects, like homes and schools, just as many did before the earthquake — though perhaps, with help from outside architects and engineers, with stronger quake resistance.

“There are so many helping hands in Haiti that probably many of them will be doing whatever they can, wherever they can,” said Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, architecture dean at the University of Miami.

Architecture for Humanity’s Sinclair said he is already talking to groups in Haiti about providing designs for simple schools and homes like those it developed in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami.

“USAID can go and hire some big contractor, but that’s not what we’re going to do,” Sinclair said.

But in Haiti, where the government has long relied on U.S. and U.N. assistance, it’s unclear who has the clout to author and enforce a broader reconstruction strategy.

Atwood, the former USAID administrator, suggested that the country may have to be become an “international trusteeship” to keep recovery on track.

“You want to do everything you can to support the government of Haiti, but you have to recognize that even in the best of times, their ability was limited,” he said.

“What should be the first goal is to establish a sound government,” said Fred Cole, a former disaster response specialist with USAID. “Good luck with that.”

IN THE LONG TERM

Disaster recovery in Third-World settings tends to work mainly in countries with strong central authority, experts say.

Downtown Mexico City was successfully rebuilt following back-to-back earthquakes in 1985; rather than move the displaced out of the city, as some suggested, the Mexican government decided to rebuild the owners’ homes in their original locations, but with stronger building standards.

The Chinese government completely redesigned the city of Tangshan following a 1976 earthquake — rendering a new and larger city within six years.

“The central government was ordering what province would deliver what, where and when. It’s the opposite extreme of Haiti,” Vale said.

To be successful, any Port-au-Prince reconstruction plan must incorporate strong building standards and better planning, to minimize the effects of future earthquakes or storms, said Richard Stuart Olson, a Florida International University political science professor who studies the political effects of disasters.

“Who is going to enforce plan review, engineering, design and construction? This will fall to the international community, or the U.N. or U.S.,” Olson said.

Joseph, the Haitian ambassador, told C-SPAN that building rules could be enforced if the future Port-au-Prince is smaller. Before the earthquake, he said, any Haitian could take “two bricks and mortar and build, and say, `This is my house.’ ”

In an effort to move homeless victims out of Port-au-Prince, a Brazilian team has already started bulldozing Croix-des-Bouquets, eight miles outside the city, to make way for temporary housing for 10,000 people. A second location in Tabarre near the U.S. embassy has also been identifed for 4,000 people, and many other areas inside the city may also end up getting cleared to bare ground.

In addition to settlements for evacuees, the government also plans to hire private builders to erect permanent housing on those sites with the help of the people who will eventually live there.

But experts warn that forced relocations could risk a backlash from the populace, leading to civil strife. Such problems arose in Managua after the 1972 earthquake, when the government forced out residents and land owners from the quake zone rather than redevelop.

“The danger in a post-disaster situation is that there will be a land grab by the government,” Vale said. “You have the potential for great political unrest in a situation where official policy is trying to rationalize a system that has been informal for generations.”