New Orleans: What's the Plan?

This article originally appeared on WorldChanging.com, September 7th:

Or, to describe the situation more accurately, why isn't there a plan yet for New Orleans? Though we've posted about the great work done over the past year, and on the uneven overall state of recovery, urban planning has not proceeded -- it cannot proceed -- because there are so many unresolved questions about the future of New Orleans. Who gets to plan the new city? Who is being planned for? Can government, or the free market, build something as complex as a city? Meaning, if we rebuild it, will people come back? Or, is the city continuing a historic and inexorable decline?

This post has many more questions than answers, and none of them are intended to be merely rhetorical. As large, vague and unwieldy as these questions are, they're also worth looking at in closer detail, not only because this was an unprecedented catastrophe to befall a modern American city -- only Chicago and San Francisco seem to compare -- but because the situation in New Orleans also raises some hard questions for the practice of urban planning. The rebuilding of New Orleans -- hopefully, for the better -- will be the biggest story of this (my) generation of urban planners, and how we solve (or fail to solve) them now tells us something about the future of urban planning efforts both in New Orleans and elsewhere.

Footprints or Communities?: One of the chief planning questions for the city of New Orleans is the area of the future city, the so-called footprint on a map. How big will the city be? This question has surfaced repeatedly both in terms of physical planning and political reality, as reported in this Times-Picayune article:

[One] vision of the mayor's rebuilding commission [was] to shrink the developed area, the so-called footprint, of a city that now has 235,000 people but was originally developed to cater to a peak population of more than 630,000 in 1960. That idea failed essentially because Mayor Ray Nagin, then in a re-election battle, refused to support shrinking the city, a notion tantamount to political kryptonite in many neighborhoods that feared being bulldozed. Nagin's decision, or lack of one, sparked outrage among urban planners at a national level....

Echoing a point often made by the Urban Land Institute, a prominent planning association that crafted an early rebuilding blueprint, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, said the city has failed a leadership test by refusing to shrink its developed area to match the realities of its shrunken population and flood control issues.... "I'm still looking for political leadership that is going to come clean with citizens and acknowledge that for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a smaller city," [American Planning Association Executive Director] Paul Farmer said.

Although most of the public and media seem to agree that Mayor Nagin has done little since winning a comeback re-election, calls for "leadership" fail to address the social realities that have resulted in the physical shape of the city. Namely, Katrina seemed particularly cruel and unjust, because the storm and subsequent flooding revealed that the low-lying land in New Orleans was extremely vulnerable to flooding; the cheapest land was inhabited largely by the poor; and therefore African-Americans were most vulnerable during the storm because they were most likely to be poor and segregated. The storm made one's race, class, and risk of dying brutally equivalent, and shockingly visible.

So, when planners talk about a smaller footprint, are they really talking about whether not to rebuild the African-American neighborhoods?. If those neighborhoods are not rebuilt, then are they really talking about moving people who are largely dispossessed, poor, and African-American? Does a smaller footprint and a smaller city mean that those people will go elsewhere? Is that in New Orleans, or out of New Orleans? Will those neighborhoods be preserved as communities -- wherever they end up -- or will they be dispersed? And, how will this be discussed? Will it be discussed at all? Which brings me to....

Is it a Just Planning Process?: Can the planning process in New Orleans ever be considered just, if it reflects the previous racial, social, and class divisions of the city? As I've been researching more about the city, I also asked a few friends, who are architects and planners working in and around New Orleans, what things that they felt were missing from the media coverage of the rebuilding effort.

A good friend from New Orleans, thought that what I -- and others -- are missing is the culture of government in New Orleans, where people expect the government to do nothing, or if it does anything at all, to do it with no great haste and unprecedented corruption. Another colleague said what is missing from press accounts is the level of racial distrust, the belief among poor African-American residents of New Orleans that nothing will be done fairly for them. She told me that without going there, one could not witness the legacy of distrust and suspicion among the residents, and how it quite literally colored their perception of the planning process. Finally, another colleague told me that the multiple planning processes are being run in haste, with not enough information being distributed to people, who have nowhere to meet, gather, organize, or communicate.

So, how can this miasma of distrust result in a just planning process.... or, is it just (another) planning process that masks existing power structures?

Is it Rebuilding or Redevelopment? The mayor of New Orleans has steadily maintained that all of the neighborhoods of New Orleans will be rebuilt because of a widespread economic boom and the power of the "free market". Most demographers, planners, developers, and business people, however, believe that the economic prospects for New Orleans are dimmer. Even before the storm, New Orleans already ranked third in poverty concentration, with a declining job and tax base.

Now that unprecedented sums of money are being pumped into New Orleans -- with much of the money going to individual homeowners and businesses -- can anyone predict what will happen to New Orleans? Will increasing amounts of economic activity lead to revitalization of the city, or will rebuilding the physical infrastructure do the trick?

The fairest thing to say, I think, is that we simply don't know what the future holds for New Orleans, because in many ways, we don't really know how to stimulate economic growth at the local level. The mechanics of economic development, whether through trade, technological change, social capital, or endogenous growth, is not well understood in theory or practice, particularly at the local level. We know that economic growth certainly won't occur if there isn't any housing, infrastructure, or insurance. However, the opposite is not necessarily true: we don't know if building any or all of these things are going to result in urban revitalization or economic growth.

So, if we rebuild the city as it was before, will it flourish? Will people return? Or, if we're redeveloping the city, what is our goal?

Why Has the Environmental Dimension Been So Quickly Forgotten? My last post mentioned that several environmental organizations released a report titled "One Year After Katrina: Louisiana Still a Sitting Duck" detailing the failure of the government and planners to address the continued erosion of New Orleans' wetlands that could have, and might still, protect the city from storm surges. However, the Times-Picayune mentioned that:

"Timed to coincide with the media attention on New Orleans as the region marks one year since Katrina made landfall, a news conference on Monday to release [the report] underscored how marginal the issue remains. Panelists from the environmental groups outnumbered reporters, and no national news outlets attended the event at the Jax Brewery in the French Quarter." (Times-Picayune)

It's not as if the phenomenon and consequences of storm surges are not well-understood: even before Katrina, a Scientific American article in 2001 detailed the effects of a hurricane on New Orleans, and many scientists had pointed out the dangers before the storm.

So, what is the role of positivist science in planning for the future, when the alarms are ignored? And, why have people forgotten so quickly the environmental causes of the original destruction?