designing public consensus

I read with interest two recent overviews of the failures of the rebuilding process in New Orleans–Charles C. Mann’s Fortune article, The Long Strange Resurrection of New Orleans, and Dan Baum’s New Yorker article, The Lost Year. 

Both pieces are full of fascinating details about colorful local personalities, elite commissions gone awry, planners’ premature enthusiasm for rebuilding “smarter and better,” and the inexcusable lag in reaching out to the community–when they could find one–or consulting with displaced New Orleanians about what needs to be done. As Mann’s article notes, just getting started on planning has proven to be “the Big Difficult.”

A few noteworthy passages that touch on the essential role of public involvement in the search for solutions:

Dan Baum: Lee [Silas Lee, “the city’s best- known pollster”] said [Mayor Ray Nagin] needed to “disperse teams right away, and organize discussion panels at places in the community.” He should have advertised a 1-800 number in the Houston Chronicle, for instance, encouraging evacuees to call in. Taking measures like these would send the message that ordinary New Orleanians—and not just a small group of elites—were included in the planning. “In a volatile time, you have one chance to get your message out,” Lee said. “You hit the bull’s-eye or that’s it.”

Baum: The bill [to finance reconstruction, introduced by Republican congressman Richard Baker] made New Orleans the greatest urban-revival opportunity in recent American history, and planners and architects from around the world gathered to help…done right, planners said, New Orleans could serve as another example of how to rebuild, smarter and better…In their enthusiasm to create a new city, though, the planners were up against New Orleanians’ uncommon fondness for the old one.

Charles C. Mann: Since the storm, much of New Orleans’ political establishment has fled from its responsibility to make decisions about the city’s footprint. In a cringeworthy pattern, city bodies repeatedly hired urban planners, who proposed recovery land-use proposals, which then fell into limbo, neither accepted nor rejected, until they were swept aside by the next wave of consultants.

Mann: Those two projects—reconfiguring New Orleans and rehabilitating its ecosystem–are daunting enough, and working through them will require a stupendous force of political will, especially in Washington. Here is the third dilemma: That desperately needed political will is nowhere to be seen. Against all that, the efforts of …accidental activists to save a city and its economy seem a slender reed to lean on. The scale of this rebuilding effort is a reminder of the limits of local self-reliance and the need for effective government. Yet New Orleans best chance for recovery may lie in its reawakened sense of community, born of shared disaster—because government, it is now clear, will not act unless pushed hard.

The moral of the story as I see it: Notwithstanding the involvement of commission members who can get the President on the phone, as well as world-renowned architects and planners, no plan can survive without the support of residents, homeowners, and neighborhood activists. These are the people who will carry through the plan and revive New Orleans, long after the planners and pols have moved on.

Like other Americans, I was mesmerized by coverage of the unfolding disaster in New Orleans last year. It was almost too much to watch and comprehend. We’ve just passed the first anniversary of Katrina, and as the story has played out over the past year, it turns out that all those incredible images and reports conveyed a false impression. Katrina wasn’t really the problem.

As John Biguenet notes in an update of his blog for The New York Times:

Most of what you think you know about what happened in New Orleans a year ago is probably wrong. People distinguish between a pre-Katrina and a post-Katrina city, for example. But such a distinction suggests New Orleans was the victim of a natural disaster. It wasn’t.

New Orleans survived Katrina but was devastated by a breach of the levees—apparently due to flaws in the levees’ design and construction. Not a natural disaster, but a manmade one.

I was struck by Biguenet’s mention of the submerged cars and trucks in the flooded Lower Ninth Ward, and the fact that many of the people who stayed could have gotten out. They stayed because they’d survived previous hurricanes and trusted in the security of the levees (and the emergency response capabilities of the government). Unfortunately, their faith in public works was misplaced.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues over the several months, as EDAW prepared a system of maps to identify environmental hazards and development issues along the Gulf Coast. We worked with ESRI and a distinguished academic group hosted by ASLA and chaired by Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association of New York, and Fritz Steiner, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

The maps paint a disturbing picture of the future of the Gulf Coast. Still, I believe it’s important to present these maps to the public so that people can see the interaction among loss of wetlands, storm surge threats, planning decisions that have been made over the past 50 years, and other information that should guide future decision-making by public officials and citizens. The ASLA group had a spirited conversation regarding the public disclosure of this mapping, and it made the right decision. The public should see the areas that could be encumbered by hurricanes, storm surge and wind.

Something the maps make clear is that people are taking their chances if they choose to live in certain areas on the Gulf Coast. That’s the scary reality. But this information should be made widely available so people can decide for themselves whether the risk is worthwhile.

Public process is a daily topic in planning offices—both public and private—and in newspapers across the country. This blog is meant to keep the discussion going.

Here’s a quote I love: “We cannot be stuck in the malaise of planning.” New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis was commenting on new planning efforts for the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood, in a recent LA Times article entitled Lower 9th Plan: Start ‘From Scratch’.

Residents of the Lower 9th Ward are part of Willard-Lewis’ constituency. She “called for ‘a sense of urgency’ to move beyond planning to implementation.” Her frustration is understandable, given the several false starts in New Orleans over the past year. But I think her assumptions are wrong.

Public process is thought by some to delay implementation and discourage development. I believe instead that public process engages people in decisions for their block, neighborhood, and community, building support for development. My premise is that we have to keep the process open, transparent, and decisive, so that the result will be real solutions to the problems at hand.

This blog will explore public process and the issues of today. I’m all for participation. Please comment.