Katrina at 20 – Built Back Better?

One recovery planning aim in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina would have been simple – for the Road Home program to prioritize the rebuilding of small rental properties, thereby recreating multiple residential units at once, which would have allowed many more residents evacuated to distant locations to return and rebuild their homes without needing FEMA trailers, which never materialized in sufficient quantities anyway. Why didn't rebuilding the city after the storm happen that way? Why the obsession with single family home construction in a city with such a high share of renters before the storm?

"Early on 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall and resulted in the failure of the city’s flood protection system, the submergence of urbanized areas in floodwater, environmental problems through debris, contamination, and accelerated coastal erosion, and the death of almost 2,000 people. The city was confronted with “severe but not catastrophic winds, record rainfalls (up to 14 inches in 24 h), and stormwater damage” (Kates et al. 2006:14654). Katrina’s storm surge caused 100 billion gallons of water to inundate 80 percent of the city to a depth of up to 5 meters (ibid; Hiles 2007:12; Bergal 2007:3)."

These sentences are from my dissertation and remind me of two things: the nightmare of institutional incompetence that effectively rendered impossible any “return to normal” after the storm and the fact that systemic and historic inequality had produced a situation of unequal urban un-normality that few would want to return to in New Orleans. I began visiting the city in 2007 talking to people, interviewing them and conducting surveys. To fully capture the picture I also visited Houston and spoke with evacuees from New Orleans who had arrived and remained there, for various reasons. This marked the beginning of my search for an answer to the question on why it was so hard for certain people to rebuild. The key to understanding this is identifying the spatial consequences of vulnerability and the disconnect between this circumstance and the reality of urban planning and post-disaster recovery. If all of these had been considered in an integrated, interconnected way from the get-go, urban reconstruction efforts could have become “building back better” to allow residents to adapt to future environmental disasters. The onus however was on non-profit organizations that decided to step in when the “failure of initiative” became a glaring disgrace for the world to see amidst the unwillingness of the richest country on earth to help its citizens in need – in the case of New Orleans, specifically African Americans. Many lessons to learn for architects, urban designers, urban planners and urbanists.

In 2012 I was awarded a doctorate for my research at the Bauhaus University Weimar under the supervision of Dieter Hassenpflug, Bernd Nentwig, and Alexander Schmidt. My dissertation was published in book form in 2013 by VDG Weimar under the title "Planning Urban Disaster Recovery. Spatial, institutional and social aspects of urban disaster recovery in the USA – New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina."

Topic: uneven citywide reconstruction and recovery after disaster, where planning for urban disaster recovery appears to fall short of achieving its goals. 

Methods: mixed-methods approach, document review, quantitative questionnaire survey, qualitative interviews, walk-through analysis and photo documentation. 

Case study: New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. 

Findings: uneven recovery occurs due to disconnects between planning and the demographic characteristics of impacted populations, the root causes of their vulnerability, and the places in the city they inhabit.