Katrina at 20 – Discussing Schismourbanism

Katrina at 20: Eight years after Katrina recovery in New Orleans was still ongoing. The process of return was incomplete, offset by long-term dislocation to other cities in the United States, such as Houston, Texas. The same year, my research on how disaster bifurcated the lives of residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and split their recovery between cities was published in the peer review journal 'Disasters'. Planning played a significant role in facilitating this bifurcation, since it disregarded vulnerability due to ethnicity, poverty, and housing tenure. To quote from my journal paper, 

"The Road Home programme is seen to include an inadequate or ‘disproportionate share of the rental-type programs’, which is viewed as a problem in relation to the city’s homeownership rate: ‘the state is something like a 75 per cent homeownership state, but New Orleans is at 40 per cent’. This leads to qualifying Road Home as a ‘fundamentally unfair programme to New Orleans, yet sort of inevitable if you are letting decisions be driven by the state’. From the perspective of the city, there is a need ‘to have the decision-making on how to spend these moneys rest with the entities to which they benefit’. The buyout option is viewed as a ‘massive failing’, since receiving Road Home grants ‘should have had to require spending on rebuilding your home, in this town’. Calculating grants based on pre-Katrina property values is seen as a further problem, since individual damage has ‘nothing to do with your capacity to rebuild. If you lost a 50,000 dollar house, it will still cost you 150,000 dollars to rebuild’. As result, homeowners with low property values may prefer a buyout, particularly ‘if you only give someone 50,000 dollars for their house they lost that was in a poor neighbourhood’. Another problem was the programme’s complex application process, designed to prevent fraud, which led to delays in receiving grants (...)" (Kammerbauer 2013:413-414).

My intention was to know how planning and stratification influenced the two interconnected phenomena of return or displacement. I conceptualized this interrelated process as ‘schismo-urbanism’ – a form of post-disaster everyday life split between two cities. Data were collected during two rounds of field research in New Orleans and Houston in 2007 and 2009. As a comparative sociospatial study of affected and receptor communities, it made a novel theoretical and methodological contribution to research on urban disasters in the context of continuing and rapid social change. The peer review paper is intended for disaster researchers, planning theorists and practitioners, and urbanists alike.