[Lapg] Dreaming A New New Orleans, Version 1 | Alan AtKisson

[Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Dreaming A New New Orleans, Version 1 | Alan AtKisson

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003425.html

The full measure of the catastrophe in The Big Difficult has yet to be 
taken; indeed, the catastrophe is still worsening.

There will be, as soon as the city can be re-opened, many funerals. Mardi 
Gras -- should there even be one next year -- will undoubtedly have a 
special theme of mourning. I am in mourning already.

As one who has at various phases of life called the New Orleans region both 
"home" and "client," I have a special love for the place that has sometimes 
expressed itself irrationally. Helping people escape from rationality has 
always been one of the city's unique talents. One does things both in New 
Orleans, and for New Orleans, that one would be unlikely to do in, or for, 
other places. The city inspires a freedom of spirit, which in turn creates 
a fierce loyalty.

It is no wonder then that city leadership was already talking about 
rebuilding, even before the destruction was complete. Something like 
three-quarters of the city's residents are, after all, native-born. New 
Orleans is home, period, often over many generations. And those who are not 
native tend to quickly feel a similar sense of belonging there.

So take it for granted that New Orleans will be rebuilt. If the economics 
look daunting, if the physical challenge seems staggering, if the news 
reports of the day speak of chaos and disaster, if the idea of rebuilding a 
city in a basin placed in between a huge lake and big river seems foolish, 
count on emotion and passion to overwhelm these counter-arguments. And the 
United States, as a nation, is not likely to allow a major city -- 
especially one so strategically placed -- to be abandoned.

Massive resources will be mobilized, first to care for the victims, then to 
clean up ... then repair and rebuild. Where to begin with such a gargantuan 
task? How can it be done in such a way that something like this never 
happens again ... and in a way that helps lead the world toward a generally 
better future?

What follows are very preliminary thoughts on principles for eventually 
creating a "New New Orleans," one that is more environmentally secure, more 
economically successful, and more socially healthy and equitable, while 
retaining the culture that made it world famous. As the news reports 
continue to create a picture of the city's horrible descent into hell, such 
an exercise feels a bit foolhardy; but there is so much dreaming to be 
done, to restore this great and wondrous city, that the dreaming must begin 
now.

These thoughts build on the earlier work of a consortium of regional 
leaders, which I and my colleagues had the privilege of supporting over the 
last few years. The results of that work seem, in many ways, even more 
relevant and urgent now.


Background: The End of Fatalism

Beginning in 2001, my firm was engaged by a consortium of regional leaders 
in New Orleans to help them design and launch an ambitious regional 
initiative, called Top 10 by 2010. The sponsor was the regional Chamber of 
Commerce, now renamed Greater New Orleans, Inc. The co-chairs were very 
prominent businessmen, from distinctly different sides of the political 
aisle. The initiative's Steering Committee, Civic Leaders Panel, and 
Technical Expert Group were characterized by a remarkable diversity, one 
not previously seen in regional development initiatives. Local governments, 
banks, arts organizations, environmental advocates, universities, social 
justice campaigns, major property developers, leading minority business 
owners ... this extraordinary group worked together for a year and a half 
to craft a new foundation for regional progress. It was just in the process 
of re-forming and assessing progress so far when Katrina struck.

The Top 10 by 2010 vision was simple: dramatically raise the city's profile 
as a successful, special, and wonderful place to live, such that it would 
begin to make "Top 10" lists in the US by the year 2010. The strategy was 
also simple: to actually make the city a more successful, special and 
wonderful place, so that more businesses, families, and tourists would come.

But the strategy proposed was not to import the formulas of other places. 
By focusing on improving New Orleans on its own terms, we reasoned, the 
region would also rise in its standing on those terms valued by the rest of 
the country. Better education for all, a better dynamic link between the 
arts community and the economic development community, more capitalizing on 
the excellent universities as a source of intellectual capital, cleaning up 
basic environmental problems, preserving and highlighting cultural 
heritage, and addressing the entrenched inequities were just some of the 
strategic conclusions to emerge from an intensive process of polling, 
dialogue, indicator development, trend analysis, and vision development. 
(Some of the results of this process are available at this website.)

One of the most important, and surprising, conclusions of our initial 
research concerned an apparent lack of skill, on the part of regional 
residents, in envisioning a better future. Asked to name three things about 
their community that they thought would "get better" over the next ten 
years, only about a third of our 2,600 telephone respondents could, or 
would, do it. (This figure compares to 96% in a similar survey performed in 
northern California.)

Many of those on the Steering Committee were less surprised at this result 
than we were; they spoke often of a persistent regional fatalism, a sense 
that things "would always be this way." That attitude, some said, was the 
greatest hindrance to progress in fundamental challenge areas like cleaning 
up corruption or improving education -- steps that were necessary to 
improving the business climate generally. Indeed, the initiative's Steering 
Committee itself found it difficult to believe our finding, based on US 
Census data, that poverty had been significantly reduced during the 1990s, 
just as it had in many other cities around the country. It was hard for 
some to accept that anything was getting better, much less one of the 
city's worst and most visible problems.

Overcoming fatalism, helping people learn to dream, began to emerge as a 
critical first priority ... and something all participants could 
theoretically embrace as a common strategy, throughout the region, in every 
sector. "We have to market a message of hope to our own people," said a 
regional business leader in one of our final planning sessions.

But the creation of the Top 10 by 2010 initiative -- which used the 
development of indicators of sustainable development as a starting point 
for building regional collaboration and common strategy -- was itself an 
indicator that fatalism was on the wane, at least among the emerging 
regional leadership. Just as we were delivering our first major report, 
elements of that leadership were beginning a transformation. The new mayor 
had four department heads arrested for corruption and thrown in jail. A 
dynamic group of young business leaders won a new basketball franchise, 
reversing a series of business losses that had left the region with only 
one major corporate headquarters. Several top executives at the regional 
Chamber of Commerce were replaced, its name was changed, and the new crew 
was initially headed up by the same woman who was directing Top 10 by 2010.

These were just a few of the changes we observed first-hand, and countless 
others appeared also to be under way. There was hope stirring in the city. 
When we recently updated the indicators for Top 10 by 2010, we were 
ourselves amazed to discover that whatever was happening in New Orleans was 
quickly being noticed elsewhere. In just three years, on the Forbes/Milken 
list of Best Places for Business and Careers, the New Orleans region had 
climbed from number 194 (out of 200) to number 110, a jump of 84 places. 
Suddenly, cracking the Top 10 by the year 2010 -- a goal that looked wildly 
ambitious and unrealistic in 2001 -- actually seemed possible.


When the Worst Has Already Happened

A scenario like the one that played out with hurricane Katrina was 
certainly known to the region's leadership. Even National Geographic had 
recently written about the threat to New Orleans from a monster hurricane 
(October 2004 issue), and that was just one of the most visible in a 
torrent of similar articles, popular and scientific, both inside and 
outside the region.

Indeed, the very first indicator in the 2002 "Top 10 by 2010 Regional 
Indicators Report" is called "Coastal Erosion, Storm, and Flood Damage." It 
shows rising insurance costs over time, from more frequent flooding, caused 
by a combination of factors that included disappearing coastal lands and 
more frequent and intense hurricanes. (Framing the issue in terms of 
dollars ensured that it got everyone's attention.) The report notes that:
Taken together, these threats have raised serious, and difficult, questions 
about our long-term future. And the data from the last 10 years -- showing 
a steady increase, punctuated by the enormous spike in costs from the May 
1995 flood -- confirm that the threat is not merely academic; it is 
economic, as well as social and environmental.

The 1995 "spike" of over half a billion dollars in damages now seems, of 
course, like nothing. But in retrospect, there was probably no way for the 
city to avoid the fate that has now befallen it. Yes, awareness of the 
problem was rising. Even very conservative business leaders had noted to me 
privately that they were worried about global warming and getting hit by 
"the big one" they were just proscribed politically, they said, from 
talking very much about it. One went so far as to draw up plans for me, on 
the back of a napkin, showing his vision of a tremendous sea wall and 
causeway across the Gulf, complete with casinos and beach resorts.

But in the technical language of sustainability theorists, "respite time 
was shorter than response time." That is, the signals had come too late. 
Awareness of the threat had finally reached some key decision-makers in a 
convincing way ... but not in time for them to overcome various kinds of 
resistance -- economic, political, psychological -- and begin to respond. 
It turned out that the clock on the time-bomb, the amount of "respite time" 
left before irreversible catastrophe struck, had only a few years left on 
it. This was insufficient time to make, or even to convince people to start 
making, the massive investments that would have been required to avoid this 
catastrophe.

In other words: Even if the regional leadership, from the moment some of 
them had truly understood the nature of the threat, had begun mobilizing 
all of the available resources and willpower to try to protect the region 
from such a storm, and even if they had started a frantic process of 
rebuilding lost landscapes (which buffer the region from storm and storm 
surge), raising levees, redoubling the pumping infrastructure and the like, 
it would probably not have had time to avoid most of what Katrina has now 
done to New Orleans.

So, the worst has happened. The city has, in functional terms, been 
destroyed. Fatalism has had its ultimate day.

>From here forward, New Orleans can choose its own fate.


Principles for Rebuilding a Bright, Green, Safe New Orleans

What follows is a first draft, tentative at best, of some ideas for what 
New Orleans might become, now that the choice of what to become is forced 
upon it.

1. Work with nature, and technology, to protect the city from future 
worst-case scenarios

Not since the fires and earthquakes of earlier centuries has the US been 
given the opportunity to rebuild a major city. Conditions are very 
different now, in terms of both what we can do, and what we must prepare 
for. The debate as to whether climate change additionally fueled Katrina's 
intensity began hours after the storm struck, and will continue for years. 
Whether or not global warming played a role in this catastrophe, it is 
absolutely the case that a new New Orleans must be built for much greater 
resilience in the face of a changing climate.

The city was always one of the world's most vulnerable; that is what makes 
rebuilding it such an extraordinary opportunity for learning. If we can 
make New Orleans a secure place for the 21st century, we can make every 
coastal city secure.

Start with the basics. The system of levees built to protect New Orleans 
was, we now know, tragically inadequate. They were built to withstand a 
Category 3 storm, but we live in a time when Category 4 and 5 storms are 
becoming more common, and likely. Not only has the worst already happened 
to New Orleans; the worst could easily come again, and soon.

If there is to be a New Orleans, it must be first and foremost be made 
completely safe from flooding in any conceivable worst-case scenario. If it 
cannot withstand a Category 5 hurricane churning straight up the mouth of 
the Mississippi, few will dare to live there.

Is such a thing possible? The short answer is: it must be. But it will 
require assembling the smartest engineering minds on the planet. That is 
why the rebuilding effort should call in the Dutch.

There is no one in the world smarter at managing land and water than the 
water engineers of the Netherlands. They have a thousand years of 
cumulative experience. New Orleans' famous pumps, which worked adequately 
for many years, were actually of Dutch design, and early on in the Top 10 
by 2010 process, I brought in a leading Dutch economist to try to 
strengthen the bonds between these geographically and even somewhat 
culturally similar regions. (It is not hard to think of New Orleans and 
Amsterdam in the same sentence.)

But pumps, levees, and high-tech sea walls are just the beginning. The 
other major partner for rebuilding a secure city must be Nature itself.

The science of living more sustainably on the Mississippi Delta is actually 
quite well developed. The mechanisms that were causing erosion of wetlands 
and coastal islands are understood, and can be reversed. The task involves 
rethinking the management of the entire river system. It involves restoring 
wetlands, the "land" part of which were being erased by lack of 
sedimentation from above, and getting sucked down under the water level 
from below, by subsidence caused by oil removal. It involves letting the 
river rebuild the intricate network of coastal islands and shoals that 
buffer the region from storm surges. It's about learning to work with the 
natural features of Southeastern Lousiana, rather than continuously 
fighting a pitched battle against them, or attempting to bend them to the 
will of vested economic interests.

A New New Orleans will likely depend on a combination of very large, very 
high-tech storm and flood protection systems (such as the Dutch and the 
British have recently built in the North Sea, to protect their polders and 
London respectively), and much more "natural" land and river management. 
Yes, this will change the face of the region, economically and 
geographically. But Katrina has already made that inevitable.

To those worried about the ecological impacts of building protective 
structures in the Gulf of Mexico: remember that significant parts of the 
areas to be affected are officially classified as a "dead zone" already. 
This effort would actually give us a chance to bring those parts of the 
Gulf back to life.

2. Use rebuilding to lift the poor to safer economic and social ground

It is a bitter thing to view the photographs and videos of the refugees 
left behind in New Orleans, and to see that most of them were obviously 
poor and black. An anonymous email from a rescue worker noted that those 
who did not evacuate were those who could not afford to evacuate: those who 
had no private car, no resources, no people to turn to. Katrina was not 
alone in her killing; her accomplice was terrible poverty. That poverty 
turned the city into a living hell of random shootings and suffering for 
the refugees still trapped there, days after the storm.

A New New Orleans must be a city dedicated to the genuine well-being of all 
her citizens. Poverty had been reduced in the 1990s; but pockets of 
terrible, entrenched poverty were still far too common in that city prior 
to its deluge. Those pockets are the one thing that must not be restored; 
instead, the city must charge into rebuilding with an eye to reducing 
poverty drastically, by reducing the conditions that create it. The 
now-destroyed, once-crumbling houses in the 9th Ward (the poorest section 
of the city) must be replaced with decent, modern, and yes green housing 
(see below). The people who live in New Orleans must be employed in 
rebuilding it, thereby gaining marketable skills in the process.

While simple morality should make this principle clear and sufficiently 
compelling, it also behooves the nation to rebuild the city in a way that 
uplifts even its poorest residents, for simple security reasons. The 
alternative is chaos, and the scenes of looting, shooting, armored vehicles 
and violence that followed eerily in the hurricane's wake are but a 
foreshadowing of what New Orleans could become, semi-permanently, if a 
truly visionary and socially just rebuilding does not occur.

The poor of New Orleans have suffered the worst of the worst, starting well 
before Katrina; the New New Orleans must promise them a much better life.

3. Create an economy of creativity

Another surprising finding of our initial research for Top 10 by 2010 was 
the lack of significant strategic contact between the region's economic 
development efforts and the arts community. New Orleans is known around the 
world for its music, food, and cultural life generally; but as in most US 
cities, artists and arts organizations had not been brought into serious 
discussions about the future of the region, until Top 10 by 2010 invited 
them. (This was also true of its environmental advocates, who had been 
trying, in measured tones, to awaken the leadership to the dangers of 
coastal erosion and storm threat.)

New economic visioning processes had, after Top 10 by 2010, resulted in the 
inclusion of arts and environment leaders in economic strategic planning. 
This is a trend that must be sharply strengthened. New Orleans cannot hope 
to revive as simply "a place to do business." It must again become 
something special, something truly wonderful; and that means embracing 
creativity in all its forms, with a passionate ferocity. It means 
envisioning the city as a whole as a work of art -- one that cannot be 
restored exactly as it was, but that can be recreated.

The arts are key here. New Orleans' music and cuisine, its festivals and 
gardens and galleries, and even its notoriously wild parties are the only 
thing that can hope to draw people back to a place whose inundation is now 
etched in the world's consciousness.

But the arts are hardly the whole story. We also learned that the region 
lagged other similar places in its ability to take the ideas being 
generated from its fine universities (I graduated from one of them, Tulane, 
which used to bill itself "the Harvard of the South") and turning them into 
economic assets in the form of patents and businesses. So "an economy of 
creativity" means embracing creativity in general as the only viable 
strategy for the city's long-term economic vitality. New Orleans has -- or 
rather, had, and must now reassemble -- most of the ingredients that tend 
to attract high-tech companies, including that ineffable quality of 
"character".

What's required now, in addition to fundamental gritty determination, is a 
new flood of creative people, who see the chance of rebuilding a city as 
the creative opportunity of a lifetime, whether they are businesspeople, 
architects, sculptors, technologists ... or some fascinating new 
combination. The New New Orleans must truly be new.

4. Become a clean, green showcase

Recreating a beautiful, vibrant, successful city will require a new 
environmental ethic as well. The environmental problems that plagued city 
in advance of the storm -- including exposure to toxic chemicals and even 
simple litter -- had already caused at least one major company to decide 
not to move there. The environmental damage caused by the storm and the 
flooding is now incomprehensible. The rebuilding process offers a 
once-in-lifetime opportunity to clean up the city, in every way imaginable.

But cleaning up the now-magnified problems is just a small piece of what 
can, and I believe must, be envisioned. Currently the City of New Orleans 
exists, in part, to service the oil and gas production and distribution 
infrastructure that now lies in tatters in the Gulf of Mexico. It is likely 
inevitable that this infrastructure will also be rebuilt -- massive 
economic and security interests will see to that.

But it would be nothing short of criminal to rebuild the city of New 
Orleans and not aspire to run the place on renewable energy. The sun shines 
mercilessly there; solar panels need big markets to push their development 
curve up and prices down; and so New Orleans (not to mention its sister 
cities like Biloxi or Mobile, also terribly affected by this storm) could 
provide a tremendous opportunity to spur the nation's energy independence.

Sustainability economist Herman Daly always noted that using non-renewable 
resources is not wrong, so long as you are investing some portion of them 
adequately in the development of their renewable replacements. New Orleans, 
sitting next to 30% of the nation's oil and gas production, could 
demonstrate this principle in an extraordinarily visible, powerful, and 
dare I say beautiful way.

New Orleans could become a living laboratory for solar roofs, mini hydro 
generators, architecture that creates cool buildings without air 
conditioning, electric and fuel cell vehicles ... the whole list of green 
dreams for technically sustainable world. These could become the basis of 
new industries to replace the gas and oil revenues, and be partly financed 
by them, as well as by the general reconstruction funds that are already on 
their way.

Massive amounts of money are going to be mobilized for this reconstruction. 
Massive purchasing creates massive buying power, and this opportunity to 
push the nation's markets forward in the development of 21st century 
technology -- by directing that money toward the greenest alternatives 
available -- must not be wasted.

5. Dare to dream

These are days of despair and sorrow for the great City of New Orleans. 
Those days will not end soon. And as anyone who has weathered the death of 
loved ones or the loss of a home knows, there is no way out of grief except 
through it.

But what pulls us through grief is the knowledge that, while what is 
permanently lost cannot be restored, new things can be created.

The people of New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf region will need 
tremendous amounts of practical help, money, and psychological support to 
come through this. But they will also need dreams -- and not just their own.

It takes courage to dream in the face of catastrophe. And courage often 
comes from being encouraged, with the thoughts, wishes, hopes, words, and 
yes, the dreams of others. We can all contribute to the recreation of New 
Orleans. We can all dream for her, and help her residents to dream. They 
have now lived through a nightmare -- one that many feared would one day 
become reality, and has. We can all now help her to dream a beautiful dream 
of recovery, restoration, and renewal, and to make that dream become real 
as well -- for herself, and for the world.


Afterword

This article is called "Version 1" because I expect to take it through many 
revisions over time. Your comments are more than welcome ... or perhaps 
this will inspire you to dream your own dream for the recovery of New 
Orleans. The city will need all the dreams we can give it.

-- Alan AtKisson


Posted by Alan AtKisson at September 2, 2005 10:26 PM | TrackBack


 
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