The increasingly frequent and dire impacts of climate change have created new challenges and opportunities for the planning and design professions. My experience with these challenges began two decades ago when, as a planner and a citizen of New Orleans, I was called to action in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As many communities are now facing similarly challenging circumstances—the urban wildfires in Los Angeles, river flooding around Asheville, North Carolina, and 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 Orleans evolved through three iterative phases. The first plan was created through a top-down process led by prominent real estate developer Joseph Canizaro, who worked in collaboration with Mayor Ray Nagin, the Urban Land Institute, and the Philadelphia office of the Wallace Roberts and Todd planning firm. Their Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) design proposal was presented in November 2005 to a standing-room-only crowd of a thousand local residents. The plan called for the abandonment of all low-lying neighborhoods where damage exceeded 50% of assessed value. These neighborhoods were clearly depicted on the plan’s drawings as large green circles, resulting in it being nicknamed by residents as the infamous “Green Dot” plan.

The first speaker to respond to the presentation was a gentleman, who said, “Mr. Canizaro, I live in the Lower Ninth Ward. I don’t know you, but I hate you.” It went downhill from there. A subsequent speaker, another black man from the same neighborhood, made it clear that he would be on his porch with a shotgun if anyone tried to take his home away. Ultimately, the mayor left the event early, through the back door. The BNOB plan was essentially dead on arrival. 

A second top-down plan, the New Orleans Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan, was subsequently developed by the City Council. Because the plan was designed to include only those areas of the city that received two feet or more of flooding, it was roundly rejected by the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) for its limited scope and flawed methodology with respect to equity and inclusion. 

After two failed attempts at imposing consensus, stymied civic leaders (reluctantly, perhaps) decided to open up the process. 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, it was led by our firm, Concordia, a New Orleans community-centered planning and design firm, and delivered through an inclusive process that featured the collaborative efforts of 12 urban planning firms, and 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.

There are several lessons in post-disaster recovery planning that can be derived from our experience in New Orleans—lessons that communities in Los Angeles, Asheville and Florida might find useful in moving forward. 

Lesson 1: There Is No Substitute for Democracy

The first two top-down planning efforts broke trust with the community, wasting precious time and resources. True community-centered recovery planning requires that those most impacted by the outcomes are respectfully and authentically engaged as co-designers in decision making, starting at the beginning of the planning process.

Lesson 2: 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. 

Lesson 3: The Framework for Recovery Planning Is Not Linear and Sequential 

Instead, it’s a holistic and complex system of parameters that encompass a nexus of the physical, cultural, social, economic, organizational, and educational domains of community life. For example, the master plan for rebuilding schools after Hurricane Katrina called for the hardening of school facilities to double as “Resilient Hubs” during disaster events, and to address more critical cultural and social needs by integrating innovative environmental, social and mental health programming into a more comprehensive educational system. Other systemic post-disaster challenges often feature economic issues like escalating insurance premiums or volatile real estate values. 

Lesson 4: Authentic Planning Takes Time and Can Be Contentious 

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, but it was more than a year and a half later before an approved Katrina recovery and rebuilding plan was finally in place and money was flowing to fill the city’s most urgent needs. While the plan was being implemented, the New Orleans Planning Commission was free to proceed with a more detailed two-year long Comprehensive Master Plan and Zoning Ordinance called the Plan for the 21st Century. Other parallel planning processes included a New Orleans Schools Facilities Master Plan; a group of site based Public Housing master plans; a New Orleans Water Plan, developed by Waggoner and Ball through a process called the “Dutch Dialogues”; a pop-up master plan for a new 37-acre University Medical Center, and some innovative new water management upgrades to the New Orleans Building Code. 

Lesson 5: Create Immediate and Tangible Returns

Notwithstanding that Hurricane Katrina was a disaster of epic proportions, the recovery process eventually resulted in an estimated $200 billion in community infrastructure and investments: $14 billion in levee improvements; the establishment of a public charter school system along with $2 billion in new school facilities; $2 billion in urgently needed improvements to drainage infrastructure; a new $1.1 billion university medical center; a $1 billion overhaul and rebuilding of the city’s public-housing projects; critical wind and stormwater 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 rebuild and renew the city.

The catastrophic impacts of climate change are continuing to shape the dynamics of pre- and post-disaster planning. To address these impacts, we will need to focus not only on the hard outcomes of planning, but also the softer side of a more collaborative, inclusive, and community-centered process. At times our instincts for expediency will have to be tempered by calls for more personal empathy and compassion. Our traditional linear, sequential, and egotistic, “me-centered” ethos will need to evolve to a more intelligent and systemic “we-centered” model, where all of us are smarter than any of us, and where the whole can be so many times greater than the sum of its parts.

Featured image: post-Katrina New Orleans, via FEMA.