Unified New Orleans Plan Approved: Citizens Demand Clustering of Neighborhood Facilities

TPR last interviewed you three years ago. Since then, New Orleans, which is the home base for Concordia, experienced one of the worst natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina) in this country's history. You've been deeply involved in helping the New Orleans neighborhoods rebuild infrastructure and schools. Please update our readers on New Orleans' efforts to plan and rebuild since Hurricane Katrina.

Recovery was a process that created an opportunity to rethink a lot of things, like schools, governance, and all of the things that make communities either functional or dysfunctional. Probably the most important lesson-at least in this post-disaster recovery process-has been the need for extensive community engagement and conversation.

Concordia recently completed two major New Orleans planning projects. Elaborate on the roles you and your planning firm have assumed in support of the citizen-led recovery planning efforts.

One planning project was the Unified New Orleans Plan, which was a citizen-developed recovery plan. There were a half dozen professionally implemented planning processes immediately following Hurricane Katrina. The community was in a state of distress and desolation. Some of the components in these plans caused pushback from the community due to trust issues, which prevented the plans from moving forward.

Fortunately, the Rockefeller Foundation joined together with the Greater New Orleans Foundation and some others to support a community-engaged process that would ultimately determine the recovery plan for the city.

We were given the responsibility of staffing, coordinating, and developing that plan. We brought in about a dozen urban design firms from all over the country to help us pull it off. We held extensive community meetings. More than 10,000 people were involved in the process. We were communicating with people in 20 different cities around the country, including citizens of New Orleans who had been dislocated.

I remember one meeting where we had 1,500 people at the convention center in New Orleans; about 400 people in Atlanta; and 300-400 people in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Houston on a live video conference. That's what it took to get the community engaged and to get direction on how the city of New Orleans was to be rebuilt.

What is the status of the Unified New Orleans Plan now?

The Unified Plan was approved last summer by the mayor's office, the City Council, the Planning Commission, and the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is the state agency responsible for all the federal funding. The plan then served as the framework and backbone for Ed Blakely, the mayor's recovery czar, to move forward with putting together a community redevelopment strategy for implementation.

The most important element of the plan had to do with equity. There was a lot of concern that wholesale areas of the city would be eliminated. Some of the earlier plans suggested areas for elimination that were on higher ground than other areas that were not suggested to be eliminated. It caused a lot of social unrest and contention because the plan didn't appear to be only about geography, elevation, or flood levels.

One of the elements of the Unified New Orleans Plan was to focus on the fact that people were already moving back to all of the higher areas of the city. It led to the ability to rebuild the city of New Orleans with a very similar footprint in terms of its extended boundaries, knowing that there are parts of that footprint that will not be redeveloped as robustly as they were before Katrina, especially the parts that are in the lower elevations.

TPR featured an interview, in its January 2007 issue, with New Orleans Recovery Czar Ed Blakely, whom you just mentioned. What elements of the Unified Plan have guided Ed Blakely in dealing with rebuilding schools and the city's community infrastructure? How did the notion of enhancing community centers with infrastructure, such as schools, interject itself into the city's Unified Plan?

The Unified Plan outlines the notion of clustering facilities around what we now refer to as a "nexus." Beyond the concept of schools as centers of community is this more robust concept of clustered community resources. The plan looks at the core components of both, because of course we know that schools can be community centers in addition to being schools. But we have also learned that in terms of governance, the concept should be broader than simply bringing different functions like health care and social services onto a school site. That's the direction that we're moving in.

The New Orleans School Facilities Master Plan is currently being reviewed by various governing agencies. The plan proposes that Pre-K to Grade 8 facilities will be distributed throughout the city so that children will need to walk no more than half a mile to get to their school. That provides us, first of all, with a lot more equity. No one in the city of New Orleans will have to depend on an automobile to get to school. It also supports environmental sustainability because no one in New Orleans will have to drive a car and burn fossil fuels to get to school or whatever else ends up being located in and around these school sites in these clustered neighborhood centers. If folks choose to travel across town to a different school it's one thing, but they won't have to.

The attitude is different with Grade 9-12 schools. These schools are projected to be located in places that provide the highest level of leverage for the kinds of teaching and learning that take place at these grade levels. We're recommending for example that a school be located in the NASA/ Michoud facility, where the space shuttle tanks are designed and built. We have also suggested that schools be located in the Contemporary Arts Center and also in the Louisiana Art Works Building, which is an artist studio complex. Another site on the Mississippi River may become a Maritime/Military academy, along with another at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species, which is a Jurassic-Park-type research institution where more than 50 scientists are out there doing world class research every day.

To put kids into these environments and maximize the use of these community assets for learning is another component of the master plan that gives us a chance to look at the whole city as one integrated learning community.

Your firm, Concordia, has worked with the Ford Museum; New Schools, Better Neighborhoods; and communities and schools in jurisdictions throughout the country. You have had occasional successes, along with much frustration, when tasked with convincing authorities to adopt a new model for school facilities-a community schools model. Does it take a disaster like Katrina to compel our school districts and cities to collaborate and build "school-centered nexus neighborhoods" at this scale?

I certainly hope not. We all hope that the lessons that we have learned from Katrina can be used everywhere. We know that we had Katrina in New Orleans even before Katrina got here. Some of our school facilities were among the worst in the nation. It was very difficult to get any attention drawn to how bad it really was. It took Katrina for us to understand that we all have to work together to fix it.

If there is any silver lining around the Katrina cloud, it is that the community is coming together. There are very progressive organizational changes happening, especially at the neighborhood level. Neighborhoods are getting more organized. We have neighborhood organizations that are more actively advising their City Council members about how they feel the city should move forward.

In other jurisdictions, the community rarely, if ever, is viewed as the "client" of large school districts. The school board and state agencies are the clients, providing the rules, regulations, and framework for what happens in respect to hundreds of billions of dollars invested in facilities. Are you saying that these roles have been flipped around because of the failure of government, and now schools have found a new client in the community?

We could place blame on FEMA or the other governmental institutions that may have been challenged by the scale of the Katrina event. However, I believe Katrina really brought to light the fact that government cannot be expected to recover cities at this level of devastation; it takes a whole community to put itself back together again. There is no institution that can do it alone. If you look at what happens in the places that have been successful, you can see that the message continues to be the same.

The most important element in rebuilding a city-because of a disaster, in spite of a disaster, or even in preparation for a disaster-is the act of coming together and working collaboratively. The community has said that they will not tolerate the school system not working with the city government. They will not tolerate the city government not working with the housing authority. And they will not tolerate the housing authority not working with our city institutions. The community sees all of this as one challenge as opposed to silos of challenges addressed by separate governing systems.

You collaborated with New Schools, Better Neighborhoods in metropolitan Los Angeles. California is spending $100 billion on school facilities at the state level and the LAUSD is spending $20 billion locally. Collaboration with parks, libraries, health care, or early or adult education has been rare. What's the lesson from your efforts in New Orleans for the stewards of the state and local school facility bond authorities here in California?

The lesson is loud and clear. If you want to do things right, you have to work together. People must be civil to one another and must work collaboratively. The people from the city planning department must work with the education facilities planning departments, who must also work with the transportation planning department. All the departments must talk and communicate with each other so they can build a city that is efficient and livable.

Twenty years from now, New Orleans will look back and say, "No one wanted Katrina, but Katrina brought us together and taught us many lessons about how important it is for us to understand that we have to work together if we want to get it right."

Typically these jurisdictions see the money they get as "their" money-their bond funds are only for school facilities-and collaborating with other public agencies and the community is not seen as part of the DNA of that responsibility. In your experience in New Orleans and other jurisdictions in the country, how does one entice school districts to think and act collaboratively-to build schools as centers of their communities?

The city of New Orleans formed a recovery authority. But you don't need to wait for a disaster to occur before you form a coordinating entity that brings the various partners together. I'm sure there are people in every jurisdiction who can tell stories about disputes that go back sometimes ten, 20 years because someone insulted somebody else. It gets personal, and we have to get over that. Maybe all of our cities need to be thinking about recovery from these kinds of attitudes and getting away from individual silos and selfish, independent thinking.

What will result from the approval of the Unified New Orleans Plan and from the community planning work you have chronicled in this interview?

In the next few years, we will start to see the fruits of three years of planning come to fruition. The first phase of education facilities is already beginning to emerge. There will be close to $700 million allocated for schools in the first phase, which I know is not a lot by L.A. standards, but it's enough to change the lives of half of the student population in the city of New Orleans. To the degree that these schools are also being built as community-nexus facilities, this building program will also significantly impact the lives of half the adults in the city. That's part of the beauty of planning together. We get so many more benefits for the same dollar spent. Then we'll move on to the second phase. Pretty soon we're going to start to see this thing happen.