Recovering New Orleans, 2007

In early September 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic flooding that submerged about two-thirds of New Orleans, Louisiana. The disaster not only highlighted the immediate damage and human suffering but also exposed the disorganized response from city, state, and federal governments. This lack of coordination left New Orleans to devise its own neighborhood recovery policies in the years following the storm.

By the summer of 2007, recovery efforts were progressing slowly, with many neighborhoods still struggling with flood damage and pre-existing economic challenges. The city's population had decreased significantly, underscoring the urgent need for continued recovery efforts.

Between September and December 2007, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s RECOVERING NEW ORLEANS studio addressed these challenges by developing urban planning strategies for three key neighborhoods: St. Roch, Treme/Lafitte, and Freret Street. These neighborhoods were part of seventeen “recovery clusters” identified by the City of New Orleans’ Office of Recovery Management (ORM) to focus investment and revitalization efforts.

The studio's work involved creating detailed recovery scenarios for each area, reflecting New Orleans' diverse physical and social fabric, including aspects such as public housing, open spaces, and mixed-use developments. The strategies balanced immediate recovery needs with long-term economic and environmental considerations, often leveraging incremental and market-driven approaches due to limited public resources.

The RECOVERING NEW ORLEANS project exemplifies how neighborhood-level revitalization efforts can be crucial to broader recovery strategies. The initiative was supported by Harvard University, local New Orleans institutions, and numerous individuals who contributed their expertise and insights.

This project underscores the importance of both localized and larger-scale strategies in addressing the multifaceted challenges of urban recovery and highlights the collaborative efforts required to revitalize communities affected by disaster.

Recovering New Orleans

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, recovery in many parts of New Orleans remains a pressing issue. The Recovering New Orleans studio, led by Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Brent Ryan, developed planning and design strategies for three New Orleans neighborhoods: the St. Roch Market, Lafitte/Treme, and Freret Street. These areas comprise three of the seventeen “recovery clusters” where the city and state have committed to focusing reconstruction resources in the upcoming years. The studio developed detailed scenarios for diverse planning and design issues in each neighborhood, including public housing and new open space (Lafitte/Treme); arts and culture and public markets (St. Roch); and mixed-use housing and retail (Freret Street). Studio strategies not only considered recovery from flood damage, but addressed the pre-storm decline found in much of the city. The extreme limitation of fiscal resources available from the public sector spurred many students to consider incremental, market-driven, and regulatory strategies in place of large-scale capital improvements and spatial reconfigurations. The strategies created in the studio acknowledge and promote the local scale of New Orleans’ recovery without obviating or ignoring the need for larger-scale strategies to occur in concert.

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