In one crucial way, New Orleans's modern history of weak, ineffectual government helped it recover after Katrina. Though the [Bring New Orleans Back] luminaries drew up their plan swiftly, nobody had the political will, knowledge, or resources to enforce it. Property owners could show what they thought of the plan--and of various other utopian schemes bandied about by the nation's architectural giants--by ignoring them.The article is filled with examples of those experiments. The people of New Orleans, Nicole Gelinas writes, have "been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree--and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master."
This approach--or better, lack of one--differs markedly from the reaction to the nation's other recent large-scale disaster, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In New York, the state government, which had a long history of centrally planning huge projects, quickly monopolized control over rebuilding. Ground Zero, unfortunately, seemed the perfect opportunity for such a project. After all, the World Trade Center had been built as a government scheme 30 years before the attacks, and the towers' single leaseholder, real-estate investor Larry Silverstein, sweated under immense political pressure to cooperate with the government in its ambitious reconstruction plans. Six and a half years later, Ground Zero is still an early-stage construction site. Worse, what's eventually built there could be a white elephant.
In New Orleans, by contrast, though the city and feds can still screw up the sites that they control, including now-vacant housing projects, they can't define the whole reconstruction process. Enterprising homeowners can experiment with what works, rather than being stuck with some starchitect's vision for the next century.
[Hat tip: John Kluge.]