Months after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, KCRW principals Stroud Watson and Jim Kennedy facilitated the first public conversation about the city’s future that engaged residents of the hardest hit neighborhoods in the city. This three-day session, sponsored by Tulane and Xavier Universities, helped articulate some common values and priorities for rebuilding the city. The process was recapped in the report "Reinhabiting NOLA." 

Years later, issues arising from the open awareness of the fragile ecosystem of the entire area remain unresolved – everything from whether and where to rebuild to how to undo monumental design blunders like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal, which brought Katrina’s tidal surge right to New Orleans front door. While plans of all kind abound, the rebuilding of New Orleans’ neighborhoods is painfully slow. Today, the city has 35% less people than before Katrina in 2005. Twenty-one percent of housing is blighted and unoccupied and concentrated in neighborhoods hard hit by the storm surge.

I was recently in NOLA to moderate a discussion at Tulane, part of a forum sponsored by the Rudy Bruner Foundation in Cambridge, MA and the Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and hosted by the Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research (CBR). The CBR tried long before Katrina to call attention to the fact that public policies and project made NOLA dangerously vulnerable to exactly the kind of devastation it ultimately suffered during Katrina.

The session I moderated was about the groundbreaking work of three dedicated professionals:

·         Mary Means, Director of Community Initiatives with the planning firm of Goody Clancy, is leading the creation of the New Orleans Master Plan, the city’s most important planning effort to date; and she’s doing it with unprecedented levels of participation throughout the community.

·         Coleman Coker, architect and principal at Building Studio in New Orleans, is designing and building new sustainable housing prototypes to help spur re-inhabitation of storm-damaged neighborhoods.

·         David Perkes, Director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi MS, is leading an innovative effort to rebuild low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in Biloxi and, in the process, is bringing new meaning and depth to professional practice by imbedding that practice organically in the community itself. He calls this “community ecology.”

Their work, and that of Doug Meffert, convener of the forum and Deputy Director of the CBR, is change-oriented in a change-resistant city, and they are up against the ecologically unsound city-building practices often found along the Gulf Coast. All of them are humbled by the challenges they face, but at the same time, they are energized by the love and attachment to place that characterize the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Step by step, house by house, family by family they are helping teach what it means to align climate change with community change. The rest of us best listen.