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Comments on the article 'Plans, planning and Tragic Choices,' by John Foley and Mickey Lauria published in volume 1, number 2 of the 'Planning Theory & Practice' journal. Examination of the claims of communicative planning theory in relation to what could be achieved through collaborative processes and consensus building in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Communicative planning theory, with its emphasis on collaborative processes and consensus-building, has become widely accepted as a new and dominant paradigm for planning practice. It appeals especially to planners concerned with the potential for creating social change through planning processes. It also attracts those trying to escape from the narrow confines of traditional rational policy analysis. It avoids the pessimism of structuralist notions of the role of planners by identifying cracks in the structure that allow agency to survive. However, there are pitfalls in the communicative emphasis on reaching consensus which need to be avoided. This is illustrated through a study of recent debates about the character of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the role of plans in sustaining this. Qualitative research, utilizing conversations with neighbors in New Orleans' French Quarter as well as documentary sources, demonstrates the limitations of consensus-building processes when conflict between visions exists. First, the antagonism between groups, some favoring preservation and others development (visions not necessarily oppositional), creates animosities that are difficult to resolve through communicative processes. These antagonisms point to the ongoing difficulty of dealing with the 'tragic' choices created where substantial differences in systems of meaning collide. Second, the role of a substantive normative vision appears unclear in communicative approaches. In New Orleans, public pressure has persuaded the city administration to elaborate a Master Plan indicating the population's need to define what is desired for the city and their neighborhood. The Plan is still held up as a way of confronting differences. At the same time, neighborhood movement organizations are important for their construction of visions of a desirable urban environment at the margin of the formal planning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the speed at which lender's enter the mortgage foreclosure process, interpreting slower rates as evidence of forbearance. A telephone survey was conducted to evaluate the presence of lender discrimination in defaults that lead to foreclosure in New Orleans, Louisiana between 1985 and 1990. These data are used to estimate the independent effects of race and neighbourhood characteristics on the extent of lender assistance during the foreclosure process. The analysis does not reveal discrimination based on race of borrower or racial composition of the neighbourhood. Instead, greater time in default is granted loans with lower interest rates and loans with outstanding balances below the mean value of housing in the surrounding neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which explored residential mortgage foreclosure as a mechanism that links economic shocks and the process of racial transition. Data, variables and methods used; Economic change and racial transition in New Orleans; Multivariate analysis of foreclosure and racial transition.

Public housing, if located proximate to the central business district or other valued development sites, is often seen as a threat to urban regeneration activities. Growth coalitions may develop strategies to remove the threat to increase the value of the land and probability of reinvestment. In cities with an African-American majority electorate, like New Orleans, the electoral coalition of the governing regime is inherently unstable and has to pursue its development strategies carefully. Public housing poses a more intractable political barrier to regeneration strategies than do privately owned slum neighborhoods. In New Orleans, the governing coalition has been forced to retreat to its previously faltering spatial-containment policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toxic elements released into the environment through natural and anthropogenic processes can expose vulnerable populations especially children to adverse health risks. This study aims to determine the concentrations and spatial distributions of Pb, As, Cd, and U in 182 soil samples collected from playgrounds, parks, daycares and other sites between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. The elemental concentrations of soils were measured using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS). Soil pollution status was assessed using geo-accumulation and pollution indices. The concentrations of toxic elements showed mean (min–max) (mg/kg) of Pb: 71 (4.6–939), As: 6.4 (1.3–51), Cd: 0.69 (0.04–19), and U: 2.1 (0.38–72). About 2%, 3%, and 8% of the soils exceeded the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) soil cleaning level guideline (mg/kg) of 3.9, 400, and 12 for Cd, Pb, and As, respectively. The mean geo-accumulation indices for toxic elements were below zero, suggesting no significant contamination. Pollution indices (PI) of U and As showed no pollution (PI < 1), and PI for Pb and Cd were 1.7 and 2.0, respectively indicating moderately polluted soils. This study shows the current contamination status of the studied elements in soils of southern Louisiana and identifies hotspots for Pb, As, Cd and U, which can pose adverse health effects especially to children upon chronic exposures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: On August 29, 2021 Hurricane Ida struck New Orleans with Category 4 winds. While the most severe weather occurred during a 24-hr period on August 29, the city suffered significant damage to telecommunication systems, medical facilities, and infrastructure for several weeks afterward. At the height of the storm, multiple events affected routine deployment of EMS, including damage to transmission lines causing interruption of the 911 system, and suspension of ambulance travel for safety when the winds exceeded 50 mph. These factors, as well as pre-storm preparations, affected utilization of EMS by residents and thus a "peri-hurricane" period was examined to determine the overall effect of Hurricane Ida on New Orleans EMS operations. Method: Run sheets for calls to NOEMS between August 26-September 9, 2021 were analyzed to assess the most frequently reported medical complaint just prior to and after the hurricane. Run sheets were also evaluated to determine average time from call to arrival on scene, time to arrival at patient ("response time"), and time from leaving scene to arrival at destination ("transport time"). To account for the atypical period during which EMS response was suspended due to wind, both mean and median times were calculated. Data was compared to a control period of Aug 26-Sept 9, 2022. Results: During the study period, 1,971 calls were received, with trauma and respiratory the most common complaints. The mean call-to-arrival time was one hour, although the median time was 15 minutes. Response time was 34 minutes compared to 21 minutes in 2022, and median response time was comparable to the control period. Transport time mean and median were 12.3 and 11.3 minutes, also similar to 2022. Conclusion: Despite citywide infrastructure failures and suspension of operations for over 12 hours during landfall, multiple mitigation strategies enabled NOEMS to quickly resume operations and minimize impact on patient care times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I deploy an ethnographic approach to analyze the detrimental effects of gentrification on longstanding residents in New Orleans' Tremé neighborhood. I focus on conflicts between long-established residents and gentrifiers over the use of neighborhood space on a day-to-day basis as a means for examining the consequent changes in neighborhood life. As their neighborhood gentrifies, long-term residents of Tremé must contend with greater policing, the erosion of place-based knowledge, practices, and cultural traditions, the loss of social networks, and the closure of vital neighborhood institutions. These changes in neighborhood life provide a starting point from which to begin to understand the broader effects (beyond displacement) that longstanding residents experience as a result of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a study of environmental harm created in the collision of real estate speculation and the political process that governed extension of the urban frontier of New Orleans into its eastern wetlands. Near term concerns of rent-seeking real estate capital and the contested politics of urban infrastructure expansion challenged a fragmented state charged with regulatory oversight and protection of investments in land and citizens. The paper engages theoretically the relative inattention of urban political ecology theory to rent as a way to theorize how capital flows through land, and argues for increased attention to the problem of land rent and the multiple scales of political engagement that manage ecological crisis immanent in the metabolism of nature and society under capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interlocking nature of racialization and rescaling in post- Katrina New Orleans, focusing specifically on the implementation of the Louisiana Road Home program, the largest housing recovery program in US history. Based on interviews and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize the Road Home program as a racialized spatial strategy to revalorize disaster-devastated spaces and enhance the exchangeability of damaged property. I trace the logic of rescaling in post- Katrina New Orleans and reveal the ways in which state policies to accelerate the turnover time of flood-damaged housing reflect and reinforce the racialization of space. New Orleans stands as a valuable laboratory for the study of government intervention under conditions of widespread upscaling, downscaling and outscaling processes, pushing trends found elsewhere to their limits while revealing the negative consequences of rescaling for local institutions and residents. The article illustrates the localized dynamics of rescaling in times of crisis and offers a novel processual account of the drivers and consequences of rescaling processes in a disaster-impacted territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism and an event-based economy have fundamentally changed the City of New Orleans, a major urban center in the southern US state of Louisiana. Although the city's stock of tourist establishments declined dramatically in the aftermath of the devastation associated with Hurricane Katrina, recovery of the city's tourism sector has been equally dramatic. Visitor spending is at historic highs, and the number of hotel rooms in the city now exceeds the pre-Katrina figure. Yet the transformation of New Orleans into a tourist city has not occurred in a vacuum: the growth of tourism over the last half century and the industry's rapid recovery since 2005 are due to both structural changes in the international political economy and to deliberate planning strategies adopted at both the state and local levels in response to those changes. In this article, I begin by outlining the impact of tourism and an event-based economy on the New Orleans urban fabric. I then utilize both regulation theory and urban regime theory to account for the significant changes the shift to a tourism economy has brought about in New Orleans, paying particular attention to the ways in which planners and policy-makers have privileged tourism in the city's recovery after Hurricane Katrina. I conclude by considering the planning and policy implications associated with the transition to a tourism and event-based economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the planning and staging of the 1984 Louisiana Exposition, the last world’s fair in the United States, and makes comparisons with other US world’s fairs, to provide insight into the sources of opposition and resistance to urban spectacles. Drawing on the work of Guy Debord and his concept of the ‘society of the spectacle’, this paper advances a conception of mega events as spectacles of contestation that embody contradictory tendencies and articulate conflictual and opposing meanings of urban space and reality. Rather than obscuring and camouflaging urban problems, mega events like world’s fairs express social inequalities and display highly contradictory urban representations that can spawn resistant agendas, complicate élite redevelopment agendas and divide pro-growth coalitions. Through a critical interrogation of the Debordian concept of spectacle, the analysis in this paper suggests a new theory of mega events as sites of struggle and articulators of political dissent, a conception that helps to explain the increasing international opposition and protest against the Olympics and the mega-event strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina unveiled the legacy of racial and class stratification in New Orleans, Louisiana. Much of the Katrina-related research has focused primarily on how poor Black neighborhoods were disproportionately affected by the disaster. While this body of research makes valid claims, there has been very little research that examines how Black middle-class residents in New Orleans were impacted by Hurricane Katrina. This study examines how residents in Pontchartrain Park, a Black middle-class neighborhood, are responding to the disaster. The author uses in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival data to examine the barriers that residents are facing in the recovery process. She argues that the experiences of the Black middle class also have implications for the connectedness of race and class. The challenges discussed within the article are linked to a history of racial stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article evaluates the post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction process in New Orleans, Louisiana. The responses by city officials to a report issued by the United Nations criticizing the redevelopment efforts of federal, state, and local authorities involving the demolition of public housing are examined. Particular attention is paid to the historic practice of establishing control over specific populations by reorganizing property relations through the destruction of collectively held property or commons. The concept of "trap economics" involving the systematic maintenance of social-spatial enclosures regulated by physical boundaries and social, political, and economic “traps” is explored.

The article examines how Hurricane Katrina fundamentally transformed the Gulf Coast region through a review of the social history and social problems of New Orleans, Louisiana. How the disaster presented an endless number of intellectual dilemmas is assessed through the region's legacy of racism, and its persistence, in the modern era. It is noted that the majority of solutions offered by public, private and nonprofit organizations in the wake of Katrina were impoverished by both subtle and overt refusals to address long-standing social conflicts.

Objectives. Although many observers have interpreted Hurricane Katrina's damage to New Orleans as a case of nature striking humans, we draw on the sociological concept of the growth machine to show that much of the damage resulted instead from what humans had done to nature—in the name but not the reality of “economic development.” Methods. We triangulate findings from multiple qualitative techniques, including first-hand fieldwork, interviews, and analyses of historical records. We focus on a particularly telling illustration: the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a transportation canal. Results. Although the canal was widely predicted to deliver prosperity, it mainly created environmental damage, destroying wetlands that had formerly protected New Orleans from hurricanes. Despite enthusiastic predictions about its economic importance—plus millions of dollars in ongoing federal investments—the “outlet” was used by only a dozen of the ships for which it was designed during the entire last year before Katrina hit. Conclusions. This was clearly not a case of an “enduring conflict” between the environment and the economy; it was a case where economic benefits to a tiny number of beneficiaries created profound costs to the environment, and to humans in turn. Claims about supposed “economic benefits” from environmentally harmful projects need to be examined more closely in other contexts, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the highly contentious rebuilding debates that emerged in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricanes, neighbourhoods were compelled to use rhetorical methods to solicit funding and municipal support for reconstruction. The stakes were particularly high for the Lower Ninth Ward; a neighbourhood the city was reluctant to rebuild. In New Orleans, notions of 'justice' were multiple, variable, and instrumental to the Lower Ninth Ward's 'right to remain' assertions. To discuss the ways in which the 'just city' was conceived after the hurricanes, the paper draws from the work of John Rawls, Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt. Kevin Lynch's notion of imageability is employed to discuss the centrality of spatial representations in debates over justice and rebuilding. The paper concludes by illustrating this theoretical framework in Lower Ninth Ward efforts to circumvent the municipality's exclusionary rebuilding plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two planners from New Orleans discuss the relationship between civil society and urban design in pre- and post-flood New Orleans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the city still struggles to rebuild and recover. In this article, we examine how deeply rooted historical patterns of state–local conflict reasserted themselves even after the terrible destruction of Katrina and the redemptive promise of a new beginning. We also explain how state government, some city leaders, and most New Orleanians took advantage of the opportunities presented by Hurricane Katrina to change certain aspects of governance in New Orleans. This research highlights the importance of the state–local relationship in understanding urban affairs and the critical nature of historical patterns and their persistence. State–local conflicts over finances, control of local politics, and cultural differences have plagued New Orleans for decades, and they continue to do so in the post-Katrina era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a case study of the Algiers Charter School Association, a new organization formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The Association coordinated the start-up of charter schools on the West Bank of the city, a high-ground neighborhood that escaped the massive flooding that engulfed New Orleans. I situate the case study in the broader social, political, context of state takeover, rapid-fire school crisis and reform, and deepening privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence, development and abandonment of 'new town' communities in eastern New Orleans in the half century after 1957. Containing about two-thirds of the land area in the New Orleans city limits, much of it wrested from swamps using emerging drainage technologies, eastern New Orleans promised municipal leaders, planners and citizens an alternative to crowded city and sprawling suburb. This paper also considers how planners and many local citizens viewed planned communities in the eastern stretches of the city as an antidote to population exodus from New Orleans. It explores the influences, design characteristics, social planning aspirations and environmental challenges that informed new-town planning in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the collapse of the federal Title VII programme in the mid-1970s, New Orleans leaders and developers continued to seek ways to develop this land, ultimately fashioning a suburban landscape that attracted a socially diverse population seeking upward mobility. With the end of the city's oil boom in the mid-1980s, New Orleans East began to suffer public perceptions that it was becoming blighted. Following Hurricane Katrina twenty years later, the tattered suburban landscape prompted not just despair but determination to rekindle the spirit of a planned, idealistic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism-led redevelopment often provides city residents with increased opportunities for employment, leisure, and cultural enrichment, but it can also have dramatic and unpredictable effects on their lives. One of these effects involves the repercussions of redevelopment that transforms working-class neighborhoods into middle- or upper-class areas catering to tourists. We use the city of New Orleans as a case study to explore the connections between tourism and gentrification. We first discuss the growth of tourism in New Orleans, paying particular attention to its geographic scope. We then consider the ways in which gentrification and tourism are connected in New Orleans and what their relationship adds to theories of tourism development and urban revitalization. The analysis concludes with an in-depth look at one of the nation's oldest black neighborhoods, Tremé, where both tourism and the nonblack population have been increasing in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of New Orleans, Louisiana as a tourist attraction. The author suggests that Hurricane Katrina allowed the public to perceive racial and economic divisions in New Orleans. He suggests the French Quarter of New Orleans was developed for tourism due to its historic architecture. An attempt to attract military bases to the region during World War II failed due to the labor market and competition, leading to a focus on tourism. The author compares the city's appearance to that of Disneyland and suggests urban renewal relocated African Americans to ensure the development of the French Quarter.

Despite civil rights advances, widespread suburbanization and the increased presence of racial/ ethnic minorities within the middle class, most U.S. metropolitan areas remain highly segregated residentially. This research provides an analysis of residential segregation in New Orleans, Louisiana, by investigating changes in two dimensions of segregation evident among the four main racial and/or ethnic groups from 1990 to 2000. Measures of residential exposure were decomposed in order to investigate the relative impacts of metropolitan-wide compositional change and intra-urban redistributive change on segregation. During the 1990s, all non-white groups became increasingly segregated from whites and increasingly integrated with one another. Evidence suggests that whites, Hispanics and Asians exhibited some degree of ''ethnic (or racial) self-selectivity'' that functioned to concentrate these groups residentially, although these forces were generally overwhelmed by other redistributive and compositional changes. The evidence further suggests that the degree of isolation experienced by African- Americans were strongly impacted by the residential behavior of whites and Hispanics. African- Americans and Asians, however, did increasingly share the same neighborhoods over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on primary and secondary data to provide insight into the processes and conflicts over efforts to brand New Orleans as an entertainment destination from the 1990s to the present. The author identifies the key actors and organized interests involved in branding New Orleans, the rationale and logic of branding, and marketing strategies used to enhance place distinctiveness. The second half of the article describes the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans's tourism sector and examines efforts to rebrand the city. The article points to the problems, contradictions, and unpredictabilities of urban branding. This analysis provides an important opportunity for theoretical development and offers a unique perspective for understanding urban branding as a contested and conflictual process of homogenization and diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents insights about the potential for broader democratic transformation in post-Katrina New Orleans complementing autonomous grassroots planning process, surveying some of these neighborhood-based process. It places neighborhood planning processes in a historical and socio-political context and trajectory that illuminates the study's scope and significance, as well as the prospects of a possible shift to broader and more transformative political processes in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina's effect on New Orleans raised serious questions about governmental preparedness and response. New Orleans operates without a stable and long-lasting partnership among resource providers, and the absence of a regime greatly affected how it readied for and reacted to Hurricane Katrina. We employ regime analysis to identify how three key differences between regimes and nonregimes impeded New Orleans's ability to respond to this event. New Orleans lacks an understood agenda; it depends on issue-based coalitions rather than more permanent governing arrangements: and it ineffectively targets resources in the absence of a scheme of cooperation. These characteristics place New Orleans and other nonregime cities in much more precarious position than urban areas with regimes, and this crisis exacerbated the negative effects of this nonregime environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process of ‘tourism gentrification’ using a case study of the socio-spatial transformation of New Orleans' Vieux Carre (French Quarter) over the past half-century. Tourism gentrification refers to the transformation of a middle-class neighbourhood into a relatively affluent and exclusive enclave marked by a proliferation of corporate entertainment and tourism venues. Historically, the Vieux Carre has been the home of diverse groups of people. Over the past two decades, however, median incomes and property values have increased, escalating rents have pushed out lower-income people and African Americans, and tourist attractions and large entertainment clubs now dominate much of the neighbourhood. It is argued that the changing flows of capital into the real estate market combined with the growth of tourism enhance the significance of consumption-oriented activities in residential space and encourage gentrification. The paper contests explanations that view gentrification as an expression of consumer demands, individual preferences or market laws of supply and demand. It examines how the growth of securitisation, changes in consumption and increasing dominance of large entertainment firms manifest through the development of a tourism industry in New Orleans, giving gentrification its own distinct dynamic and local quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regime theory argues that local actors shape city politics even though state government sets the rules under which urban players act. Regime theorists typically do not focus on conditions under which governors assume important roles in local regimes. The authors examine major economic development projects in New Orleans to highlight conditions under which extralocal actors. namely, governors, become involved in local regimes. A scarcity of both resources and business leaders in New Orleans, competition with other states, and political considerations motivated Louisiana governors to increase their participation in New Orleans's urban development regime. Governors constituted part of the mobilization effort to move the city from a caretaker regime to a pro growth regime. They used their authority, fiscal resources, and leadership skills to assume this greater role. Gubernatorial participation in the regime benefited governors, New Orleans mayors, and major businesses at the expense of tourists, working-class and poor residents, the state legislature, and the state's business reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Current efforts to redevelop public housing in the US create new opportunities and risks for low-income residents. Although cities are able to pursue innovative strategies for combatting troubled public housing, the danger is that the interests of the residents will be subordinated to those of the local power structure--especially where public housing poses an obstacle to revitalization. This article examines the efforts to redevelop the St. Thomas Housing Development in New Orleans in order to discover the impact on residents and to evaluate prevailing theories of urban power. The case involves empowered public housing residents and powerful economic interests. Although residents of St. Thomas gained access to the pro-growth coalition pursuing revitalization of the surrounding Lower Garden District, the outcome for residents is mixed. In order to understand the constraints faced by public housing residents we must recognize how political discourse can enhance the power of the business community in urban regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]