A New New Urbanism for a New New Orleans

Debates surrounding New Urbanist leadership in the project of rebuilding New Orleans make it clear that the process of good urban redesign must prioritize an attention to local voices and local stories. New Urbanist thinkers have been involved in the rebuilding process in New Orleans since the first months after Hurricane Katrina. The New Urbanist role in the city's planning process seemed to be dwindling last spring.¹ However, recently, under the city's new unified neighborhood rebuilding plan, four of the city's most historic neighborhoods—the French Quarter, the Central Business District, Gentilly, and the trendy Warehouse district—chose the firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk, a firm whose reputation is almost synonymous with the New Urbanist movement, as their neighborhood planning team. Notably, however, three out of these four neighborhoods are business districts that suffered only minor damage from Hurricane Katrina. The residents of Gentilly, the only residential neighborhood to choose Duany Plater-Zyberk as their planning team, made their decision despite notable local concerns about the feasibility of the New Urbanist vision in New Orleans.

Ever since the New Urbanists entered the debate over the best way to rebuild New Orleans, local residents have expressed fears about the New Urbanist vision. These fears stem from a more widespread national criticism of the relationship between what New Urbanists claim to want to build and what they actually build. New Urbanist communities claim to prioritize mixed-income housing, mixed-use open spaces, and mixed-style architectural landscapes, but often produce nostalgic simulacrums of traditional urban villages with housing units that sell for prices far higher than the market average.² In the vulnerable environment of post-Katrina New Orleans, local residents have particular reasons to be skeptical about New Urbanist planners' records for promising a kind of urban utopia that they cannot deliver. As New Orleans architect Errol Barron explains, "It's not the (New Urbanist) aesthetic that's wrong . . . it's the artificiality of something planned all at once. What we have in this city is something that developed over a very long period of time, with lots of incremental adjustments along the way. Sweeping utopian plans . . . I don't think would fit here."³

Despite New Orleans residents' reservations about the New Urban vision, the city's business leaders have now placed the renovation of the city's historic and economic core in the hands of New Urbanist planners. Andres Duany and his team now have the opportunity to prove skeptics wrong. If they can do so, they will not only renovate the city's historic core, they will also lift its soul. For, even though most New Orleans residents live outside of the city's downtown areas, the city's cultural and spiritual identity is inherently wrapped up in the unique and eclectic cultural and architectural traditions that constitute its oldest, most central neighborhoods.

A successful renovation of historic New Orleans requires planners that understand the city as a chronotope, a place that is situated in time and in histories as well as in space. Post-Katrina New Orleans requires its planners to embrace a "New" New Urbanism, a philosophy that would continue to seek the New Urbanist goal of building economically and environmentally sustainable communities but that would also attune itself to New Orleans as a "city of feeling," to use Carlo Rotella's term.⁴ Two recent interdisciplinary works on the role of local history and local narrative outline the possibilities inherent in this "New" New Urbanism. Read together, Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities, edited by Barbara Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton, and Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City, by Barbara Eckstein, call for a new kind of urban planning charrette...