In the week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall just east of New Orleans, people all over the United States and much of the world were transfixed by the endless media coverage of the unfolding disaster. A major American city was largely underwater, and American people were suffering through scenes of despair generally associated with other—i.e. poorer—parts of the world. Hurricane Katrina exposed massive rifts in American society along race and class lines and humbled a nation that was perhaps a little too comfortable referring to itself as a “superpower.” Soon after the last people were evacuated from the Convention Center and water was finally pumped out of the houses and streets, media attention began to wane. And with it, so did the attention of the nation. Meanwhile, displaced New Orleanians were starting to come to terms with the magnitude of their personal losses and the total uncertainty of their immediate future.
As individuals, families, and businesses started to pick up the pieces, government at the local and state levels moved towards answering some of the questions about the future. Panels and committees were formed to make plans and proposals for one of the largest reconstruction undertakings in American history. Concurrently, Xavier University, Tulane School of Architecture, and the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research mobilized to establish a framework for ongoing community participation in recovery planning for New Orleans.
The basic idea was simple: to pool a diversity of expertise and experience to enact a culturally and environmentally appropriate vision for the long-term recovery of New Orleans’ neighborhoods and communities. Linking technical knowledge with the expertise of living in the city, the two-day workshop generated an important set of priorities that are grounded in social and environmental justice, as well as good design.
At the core of the workshop is the belief that the residents of New Orleans bring essential knowledge to the table. While putting together ReInhabiting NOLA, organizers drew from New Orleans’ rich history of grassroots activities and cultural institutions to invite residents engaged in their communities before the storm. As the vast majority of New Orleanians are still in exile, the workshop budget included funding to cover displaced residents’ travel costs.
On November 29-30, 2005 at Loyola University’s DANA Center, 150 residents, artists, community-based organizations, local and national universities and colleges, national neighborhood advocacy organizations, local architecture and planning firms, and financial institutions gathered to take the first steps towards a resident-based vision for the future of New Orleans. Presented in this report are strategies and ideas developed during the two-day process. They represent one result of the ReInhabiting NOLA process. The other result, impossible to quantify and describe in these pages, are the connections made by individual people and the sense of a shared understanding of different people’s experiences that we hope will form part of the foundation of a stronger and healthier New Orleans.