Architecturewriter

On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The recovery was complicated by disparate planning attempts. In 2019 TOPOS published my series on snapshots of the city, slightly edited for this presentation.        Lower Ninth Ward floodwall. Kammerbauer, 2017 New Orleans, the „Crescent City“, the „Sliver by the River“: on August 29th Hurricane Katrina triggered a catastrophic disaster in the city, followed by a dysfunctional response and a flawed recovery. Before Katrina, New Orleans was already scarred by racial inequality and social vulnerability that can be retraced within the urban fabric, indicating who lives in which neighborhood and why. The flood evacuation and resulting nationwide diaspora led to a dramatic decline in the number of residents. Eventually the city reached 90 percent of its pre-Katrin...

Katrina at 20: The failure of initiative in Katrina's wake was also due to the dysfunctional response on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Today, there is even talk of dismantling FEMA completely. The performance of the agency is related to the performance of responsible actors. Under James Lee Witt, FEMA performed exceptionally well, under Michael D. Brown, the agency failed abysmally. This is why research is important: it can analyze and reflect on the institution's activity in disaster management. An international comparison offers further context. I compared the US, Australia, Germany, and the Philippines and their institutions and recovery plans for a publication of the German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBSR). On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The rec...

Katrina at 20: Evacuation is a common strategy to protect populations from the impact of disasters. This was also true in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The big problem was that evacuation was contingent on car ownership, leading to highly stressful post-landfall search-and-rescue and evacuation procedures. And while many long-term evacuees eventually found a new home and a new job in cities they were displaced to, Houston being the most significant destination, the process raises serious planning questions. In particular, vulnerable New Orleanians were left with little to no choice regarding their displacement. Is it possible to "design" such a process, by giving people a choice which way forward they prefer once they have been evacuated to safe havens in the surrounding region? My contribution on "Schismourbanism as Design" was published in Yana Milev's extensive edited volume "Design Anthropology". On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made lan...

Katrina at 20: For German architecture magazine BAUWELT, I reviewed the situation in New Orleans ten years after the storm. Despite the difficult recovery, the hurricane inspired new approaches to environmentally sound urban planning ("Dutch Dialogs") and corresponding water-sensitive planning projects in the city (the Urban Water Plan and the Mirabeau Water Gardens). Figurehead of these initiatives is the office of Waggonner & Ball Architects. I had the opportunity to speak with David Waggonner in person and remotely on the firm's inspiring projects aimed at living with, and not against the water. On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The recovery was complicated by disparate planning attempts.

Katrina at 20: On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The recovery was complicated by disparate planning attempts. For an edition of PLANERIN focused on resilience and crisis, I compared the displacement of New Orleanians to Houston to the displacement of Ukrainians from R*ssian-occupied territories to Kharkiv. Actors in Houston and Kharkiv proactively planned for vulnerable displaced individuals and families. In the first case, vacant housing was made available despite the objections of FEMA (the US Federal Emergency Management Agency) against transfering evacuees from shelters to available apartments. In the second case, GIZ (the German Agency for International Cooperation) and the Kharkiv municipality cooperated in the provision of temporary housing clusters complete with social services.

Katrina at 20: In 2009 I had the opportunity to visit New Orleans for the second time. The hurricane had hit the city four years earlier. In the Lower Ninth Ward, rebuilding initiatives supported residents in their recovery efforts. I interviewed individuals active in institutions or civil society organizations who played roles in the citywide post-disaster recovery process. One interview I remember in particular took place in a Bywater café with Rick Prose and Laura Paul, representatives from lowernine.org – and the organization is still active today. They still conduct rehabilitation work with volunteers. In fact, they repaired a house built by another initiative, Make It Right. In the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, they provided food security to residents. 20 years after landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the work of lowernine.org takes place in the broader context of community development. Here's a shoutout to the nonprofit organizations that helped New Orleanians return and r...

Katrina at 20: In the context of urban climate risks, it is important to acknowledge that urban planning and emergency management planning and preparedness are two different planning domains. The related institutions are more often than not staffed by professionals from completely different academic backgrounds. The first relates to everyday planning in cities with the aim of achieving sustainability and resilience, against the background of uneven development and differential access to resources that cities offer. The second encompasses planning for urban disaster recovery and reconstruction in order to facilitate rebuilding efforts after a storm, a flood, an earthquake or another kind of natural hazard caused destruction of the built fabric. One of the lessons learned in the second case is that a return to "normal" or a condition that (presumably) existed prior to the impact of disaster is inadequate to make cities and their citizens resilient against future disasters. The ...

Katrina at 20: For the urban research journal Dérive, I wrote an essay on how long term evacuation after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans led to the Lot Next Door program. The first contributed to slow return in the recovery and reconstruction phase after the disaster and the uneven redevelopment of the city. The second was a response to the fact that residents had either decided against rebuilding or lacked the resources to do so. In the context of the Road Home program for homeowner recovery, managed by the state of Louisiana, NORA – the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority – acquired the vacant properties and offered them for preferred purchase to residents who had returned. This way, residents could increase the size of their properties and, hence, their value. Also, by consolidating lots, population rates were stabilized. This worked well in low-density neighborhoods with suitable return rates, but it didn't cause the intended effect in neighborhoods where the return rate was t...

Katrina at 20: In the aftermath of the hurricane, conflicting planning initiatives eventually coalesced into a Citywide Plan for urban recovery after disaster. It distinguished different Policy Areas categorized according to the existing flood risk and how many residents had returned to rebuild and recover. The Lower Ninth Ward was defined as "Policy Area C", which emphasized targeted, clustered redevelopment amidst high degrees of blight and vacancy. However, the area is comprised of two of the city's neighborhoods – the Holy Cross neighborhood and the Lower 9 neighborhood, in addition to a Louisiana National Guard installation and hence, a state facility, Jackson Barracks – all displaying different social and spatial characteristics in the context of a shared history. My peer review paper on "Asymmetrical Reconstruction in Cities after Disasters" (Raumforschung und Raumordnung Journal, in German) investigated the differences between the two neighb...

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 rainfa...

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 in...

Katrina at 20: One key research question I investigated was why New Orleanians had such a hard time returning and rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Visiting the city and speaking with residents of the Lower Ninth Ward indicated the situation among those who returned. But what about those who didn't – or couldn't? For this purpose, I visited African American long-term evacuees who lived in Houston in 2007 who were from the Lower Ninth Ward and who shared information on their personal situation with me. Reasons included the degree of destruction of housing and access to resources for rebuilding, which pointed out vulnerability in relation to ethnicity and poverty.  The EFMSV Conference in Bonn took place in 2008 and focused on displacement and forced migration due to environmental stress and disaster. My paper and presentation featured my empirical research on rebuilding efforts after Katrina. During the conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Anthony Oliver-Smith, a re...

Katrina at 20: In 2012 I was awarded a doctorate at the Bauhaus University Weimar for my research on planning in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After identifying the reasons why residents couldn't return and rebuild following evacuation, I concluded that the focus on single family homeownership during the reconstruction phase led to a recovery bottleneck particularly among vulnerable populations – African Americans who owned properties of low value or were renters. Property value was the determinant for how much funding homeowners would receive from the Road Home program. And the focus on single family residences didn't solve the problem where prospective returnees would live during their individual rebuilding process. My proposal was to focus on small rental properties as pilot projects of recovery. They were common in the city before Katrina, fit into neighborhoods of various density, and would allow multiple returnees a place to stay before their actual h...

Katrina at 20: I began researching the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2007. My main interest was how and why planning for recovery failed to address the vulnerability of New Orleanians. The aim was to contribute to concepts such as "building back better". This master thesis (awarded as best annual thesis at the Bauhaus University Weimar) explores the social vulnerability exposed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It examines the interplay between mobility, disaster management, and social aspects of the population. It argues that the disaster impact was exacerbated by inadequate planning, which compounded the lacking capacity of certain population groups to cope with the situation – especially African Americans, the poor, and the marginalized. By analyzing the evacuation processes and the (lacking) return of displaced populations, the master thesis highlights the necessity of incorporating social aspects into recovery planning and rebuilding s...