As Los Angeles recovers from its devastating wildfires, environmental engineers, urban planners and natural disaster experts are casting forward with visions of what could come next for neighborhoods that have been reduced to ash and rubble.

Thousands of firefighters have been battling wildfires across 45 square miles of densely populated Los Angeles County. The two largest fires, the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades and the Eaton Fire near Pasadena, remain active. One of the latest, the Hughes Fire in the Castaic area, has prompted evacuation orders for tens of thousands of people.

In the era when American cities regularly caught fire, the widespread destruction seeded what looks, in retrospect, like possibility.