Architecturewriter

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 ...

Die Landshuter Zeitung berichtete am Samstag, den 23.08. über den "Hitzecheck" und dessen Bedeutung für die Stadt. Auch die "Causa Mühleninsel" wurde im Interview erneut thematisiert. Beide Themen werfen wichtige planerische Fragen auf. Und sie betreffen die Stadtöffentlichkeit. In den beiden genannten Beiträgen wurde angesprochen, dass ein gemeinsames Gespräch von politisch und planerisch Verantwortlichen gewünscht wird. Das ist ein positives Signal. Es ist dabei erforderlich, sich zu überlegen, wie ein solches Gespräch gestaltet wird. Es empfiehlt sich ein öffentliches Format, das von einer unabhängigen Institution moderiert wird. Es haben sich nämlich Fälle der öffentlichen Kritik wiederholt, deren Ausgangspunkt strittige Planungen waren. Eine fachlich begründete und sachlich moderierte öffentliche Diskussion kann Konflikte mindern oder vermeiden. Dazu wäre es hilfreich, Pläne (Grundrisse, Schnitte, Ansichten) zu "sehen". Grün und insbesondere Stadtgrün...

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...