Concordia’s Steve Bingler: Disaster Recovery Planning Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
With questions swirling around how Los Angeles will balance fire recovery with compounding crises of housing, affordability, and climate change while preparing to host the LA28 Olympic Games, VX News shares this op-ed by Steven Bingler, founder and CEO of New Orleans-based architecture and planning firm Concordia, who elaborates on key lessons learned from the evolution of New Orleans's Hurricane Katrina recovery planning process. Citing the failure of top-down and unimaginative approaches, Bingler emphasizes the necessity of authentic community engagement that fosters co-creative networks and a holistic approach that is cognizant of and delivers returns to the diverse communities impacted by increasingly frequent and destructive climate disasters.
“With so many individual, communal and financial outcomes at stake, these holistic principles of natural intelligence, combined with the power of collective and co-creative networks, are essential tools for addressing the rapidly accelerating climate challenges that lie ahead.”
LESSONS FROM KATRINA
As many communities are now facing the devastating consequences of climate change, including urban wildfires in Los Angeles, California; riverine flooding around Ashville, North Carolina, and a trio of record setting hurricanes along the west coast of Florida, some of the lessons learned from hurricane Katrina might provide helpful insights into the herculean task of planning for future recovery and rebuilding.
The recovery planning process for New Orlean’s evolved through three iterative phases. The first plan was created through a top-down process led by a prominent real estate developer named Joseph Canizaro, who worked in collaboration with Mayor Ray Nagin, the Urban Land Institute (ULI), and the Philadelphia office of the Wallace Roberts and Todd planning firm. Their “Bring New Orleans Back” (BNOB) urban design proposal was presented in November 2005 to a standing room only crowd of 1000 local residents. One of the plan’s biggest stumbling blocks was the assumption that New Orleans needed to wake up and not rebuild everywhere, least of all in sections of the city that were, in essence, swamps certain to flood again. But in spite of this common sense reality, the social and cultural blow back was so vehemently negative among people whose houses would be condemned if damaged exceeded 50% that the plan was immediately terminated.
A second top-down plan called the “New Orleans Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan” was subsequently developed by the City Council, presented for the approval of the Louisiana Recovery Authority and roundly rejected for its limited scope and flawed approach to equity and inclusion.
The third plan for the city’s recovery was led by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, a local non-governmental philanthropy, with additional funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and others. Known as the “Unified New Orleans Plan” (UNOP), it was created through an inclusive process that featured the collaborative efforts of twelve urban planning firms, with extensive community outreach and authentic participation from more than 9,000 local residents. Achieving this goal required extensive outreach to the “diaspora” of residents who had found refuge in remote cities like Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge and Atlanta. The result was a “people’s plan, which was approved by the New Orleans City Council in May, 2007.
In all, nearly 20 months had passed from the when Katrina made landfall in August 2005 and an approved recovery plan was finally in place. In 2010, the City Planning Commission magnified and expanded many of the underlying outcomes of the UNOP plan through a two year Comprehensive Master Plan and Zoning Ordinance planning process called the “Plan for the 21st Century”.
There are several lessons in post disaster recovery planning that can be derived from the Unified New Orleans Planning process:
Lesson 1: Recovery planning is not master planning. When people’s lives are at stake, they are less amenable to the rigor of comprehensive master planning and more attuned to essential outcomes that point to a return to normalcy and personal security. For that reason, the UNOP planning process was grounded in compassionate entrepreneurship through a planning process built around authentic community engagement.
Lesson 2: The framework for recovery planning is not linear and sequential, but rather a holistic and complex system of parameters that include a full range of the physical, cultural, social, economic, organizational and educational domains of community life. These parameters are further impacted by a confounding set of additional post-disaster risks that include things like mental health, volatile real estate values and escalating insurance premiums.
Lesson 3. A well executed recovery plan must also create some immediate and tangible returns. Notwithstanding that hurricane Katrina was a disaster of epic proportions, the recovery process resulted in an estimated $200 billion in new community infrastructure; including $14 billion in levee improvements, a transformational Public Charter School system and $2 billion in new school facilities, $2 billion in urgently needed improvements to drainage infrastructure, a new $1.1 billion University Medical Center, a complete $1 billion overhaul and rebuilding of the city’s public housing projects, some critical wind and storm water management updates in the city’s building code, a progressive plan and implementation strategy for tourism and cultural development, and an unprecedented level of civic determination to stay the course and own the outcomes.
The catastrophic impacts of climate change are continuing to shape the dynamics of pre-disaster and post-disaster planning. For the most part, these dynamics encompass a systemic view that resembles that of living organisms, where all parts contribute to the whole - highlighting the importance of diversity, interdependence and balance that exist across all biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions. With so many individual, communal and financial outcomes at stake, these holistic principles of natural intelligence, combined with the power of collective and co-creative networks, are essential tools for addressing the rapidly accelerating climate challenges that lie ahead.