Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina

A Reciprocity of Tears

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AFTER A DISASTER

Pat Evans and Sarah Lewis

ON AUGUST 29, 2005, HURRICANE KATRINA made landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, bringing with it the pounding wind and rain that destroyed modest family homes and federal levees alike. Faced with unprecedented strains on infrastructure, public services, and emergency response resources, thousands of New Orleanians—often those too poor to flee the city as Katrina approached—were stranded without food, water, or medical care. It was one of the most widespread and highly televised human rights crises in modern American memory.

Such is the beginning of nearly every publication aimed at understanding New Orleans' physical and cultural recovery from Katrina. The storm itself is portrayed as a dramatic deus ex machina and a starting point for analyzing community organizing, planning priorities, and the myriad daily difficulties of a city ripped apart by floodwater. When the city's pre-Katrina social conditions are discussed, it is almost exclusively in relation to the racial and economic disparities that exacerbated the flood's effects on vulnerable populations.

To be sure, such inequalities did threaten the quality of life of far too many New Orleanians pre-Katrina, in many cases causing the poor to shoulder a disproportionate amount of storm-related hardship. However, to focus only on the demographics of the disaster overlooks the culture and social capital that existed before the storm. Built on centuries of a shared landscape and bolstered by local nonprofits and community activists, New Orleans' pre-Katrina neighborhoods were a dense web of traditions and relationships. Whether focused on food, festivals, or simply a common streetscape, it is the city's neighborhoods themselves that serve as the building blocks for recovery and should guide post-Katrina community engagement.

A Blended Voice

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

—Günter Grass

The challenge of addressing community engagement in post-Katrina New Orleans is a humbling one. The scope, immediacy, and emotion-laden nature of the subject ensure that any author would find it nearly impossible to distill a salient argument from the combination of scholarly research and personal experience. For those of us straddling the line between our own generations-long family traditions in New Orleans and the insistent, daily experience of living in a community struggling for an image in which to recreate itself, the prospect is truly daunting. Add the task of combining two such perspectives and you get a potential quagmire, so it is with a certain degree of awe that we now put pen to paper or fingers to computer keys, earnestly attempting to write about “civic engagement in the wake of Katrina.” We share our observations with some hesitancy. Ours is a blended voice of a front line practitioner and an aspiring academic, both rooted in the institutional resources of the university and the solidity of on the ground experience. We should, perhaps, begin by introducing ourselves.

Pat Evans has worked in media, government, and community building for forty-five years. Beginning her professional life as a documentary filmmaker at WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge, she went on to a variety of positions within state government, working to pass landmark legislation that changed rape laws, family violence laws, child support laws, and laws affecting the elderly. In occupied Cyprus, she worked to assess and develop bicommunal projects between Greek and Turkish nonprofit organizations, and convened a week of intensive training for Serb, Muslim, and Croat nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Sarajevo. Pat also brought her skills to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as an in-residence coordinator for the U.S. Baltic Foundation, offering education, training, and technical assistance in capacity building and advocacy to nearly one hundred Baltic NGOs.

Returning home to her native Louisiana in 1999, Pat founded the International Project for Nonprofit Leadership (IPNL) at the University of New Orleans (UNO), where she continues to direct the project. It provides a continuum of capacity-building offerings, including graduate education, certificate training, technical assistance, and consultancy to the nonprofit sector. Through its Urban Routes initiative, IPNL works with neighborhood groups in Treme and Central City, two of New Orleans' most culturally rich and economically depressed African American communities. In this capacity, IPNL is a catalyst, convener, connector, coordinator, collaborator, and capacity builder. It is community development one neighborhood at a time, combining capacity building and community building, neighborhoods learning to rely on each other, working together on concrete tasks, and becoming aware of their collective and individual assets, in the process creating human, family, and social capital.

In contrast, Sarah Lewis is a doctoral candidate in UNO's Department of Planning and Urban Studies. Also a native New Orleanian, Sarah spent three years working for the Louisiana Regional Folklife Program, where she worked with community groups to document and present their cultural traditions. Her work with this program spanned a broad range of topics, from New Orleans' skilled building artisans to local quilters and textile artisans. Following Hurricane Katrina, Sarah cofounded Common Knowledge, a nonprofit project that promotes accessible public information by providing New Orleanians with a road map to permitting and other municipal processes and documents the changing face of the city's built environment.

Community Building

Connectedness is the mother of all skills.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

How does a university initiative connect to the community in the first place? We will begin with a short description of IPNL's method. It uses an approach known as “appreciative inquiry” (AI) developed by David Cooperrider and his associates at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. It calls the community together in an inaugural meeting with the university. The university listens. The community identifies itself and what works in the community, in essence communicating what it appreciates about itself. This approach is based on the assumption that whatever the community wants more of already exists there. It reframes the question so often asked when we undertake civic engagement from “What are the problems?” to “What works?”

This type of community building buttresses a network of resources; it is most effective when it is interactional and transactional. Social theorists note that a “web of affiliation” knits a community together and helps turn an aggregation of people living together in the same neighborhood into a cohesive moral unit. It provides a sense of purpose and identity for individuals. Such work is particularly crucial in contemporary America, where the domain of civil society has been steadily encroached on by big business and big government and the preferred forum for disseminating information or discussing community concerns might be the shopping mall rather than the public park.

Community building is, by its very nature, expressive. It speaks to people's need to express their values, faith, and commitments through work, prayer, volunteerism, and philanthropy. It is a capricious loudness, and there is an undeniable personal element to community engagement that must be grasped. It is based on the fundamental goal of obliterating feelings of dependency and replacing them with attitudes of self-reliance, self-confidence, and responsibility. It is not the provision of a finite work product but rather helping individual neighborhoods build the capacity to do their own work. Looking over our experiences in New Orleans, and with an eye toward successful community building in the impoverished neighborhoods of other U.S. cities, we find that the most successful of these projects share a number of characteristics:

1. They are focused on specific initiatives in a manner that reinforces and builds social and human capital. This process involves neighbors working with neighbors on specific, productive projects. The work serves to build friendship, mutual trust, institutions, and capacity, the social capital that is essential to building a community of support for families and residents.

2. They are community driven with broad resident involvement. If social capital is to be built, if attitudes of dependency are to be replaced with those of self-reliance, community residents must do it for themselves. Community participation is not enough. The community must play the central role in devising and implementing strategies for its own improvement. This does not mean that outside facilitators cannot help, but it does mean that the agenda must be set by community members rather than facilitators.

3. They must be comprehensive. Quality of life is not limited to single issues such as housing, schools, jobs, crime, or infrastructure. While it is impossible to tackle all community concerns at once, an assessment of neighborhood concerns and assets can provide a guide to the issues that are most important to community members. Following a brief planning period, it is crucial to begin results-oriented work swiftly. You cannot overestimate the power of “building your monuments early” as small successes foster enthusiasm and hope.

4. They are asset based. Assisting residents in an inventory of neighborhood assets is in itself a powerful device for building trust and exploring community concerns.

5. They are tailored to the size and condition of the neighborhood. The core unit of a neighborhood should not exceed ten thousand people. Working on this highly focused scale builds on the natural face-to-face interactions that support friendships and mutual trust.

6. They are collaboratively linked to the broader community. Partnering with universities and other outside institutions brings in resources otherwise unavailable to neighborhood residents.

7. They consciously change institutional barriers between universities and their surrounding communities.

It is a quotidian affair, this business of civic engagement, and there is no escaping the dailiness of it. It requires an experimental mind-set and the willingness to work by trial and error. More often than not, it is an iterative process replete with small successes and temporary setbacks. Like folk culture itself, it builds on everyday life and oral tradition but must constantly adapt to changes in culture and community if it is to remain relevant. To borrow an analogy from New Orleans' great musical tradition, “It ain't Beethoven. It's jazz.”

Engagement: The Role of the University

Our responsibility transcends pragmatism. We must help our cities become what we aspire to be on our campuses—a place where human potential can be fully realized.

—Richard Levin, President, Yale University

The neighborhoods of America's cities invigorate the creative spirit and provide homes and opportunities to thousands of families. However, over the past three decades city dwellers across the country have become all too familiar with the scourge of deindustrialization and the jobs it has sucked from city economies. In this new environment, universities are increasingly significant elements of urban job markets, in some cases representing the largest employers in individual cities. With their significant landholdings, large urban universities also wield tremendous power regarding the physical landscape of their host cities. Conversely, as top-notch faculty and students are drawn to safe, vibrant communities, the success of large urban universities is closely wedded to the quality of life in their surrounding cities.

As institutions tremendously tied to their locations, universities have a vested interest in the health of their host cities, and it is not surprising that many undertake community-based service projects. Traditionally, this community work has tended to take the form of stand-alone projects or studios aimed at addressing narrowly tailored concerns, for example, literacy programs, design initiatives, sociological analyses, and small business assistance. These are links between a walled academy and the city streets.

The benefit for impoverished communities varies, partially because the personal social interactions necessary to implement such programs often prove difficult to negotiate. Disparities in education and power represent one primary obstacle facing university employees who undertake community-based projects in inner cities.¹ Community members, many of whom have experienced previous collaborations with university groups, are often wary of outside “experts” who offer advice on community development.² Some view academics as opportunistic do-gooders who use their work with “the poor” to gain grant money and prestige.³

In recent years, however, a new paradigm has begun to influence university-community partnerships, one that considers consistent civic engagement to be a morally imperative institutional priority. This model—in stark contrast to the short-term nature of individual projects—has been prominently championed by Yale University president Richard Levin. After assuming the presidency of Yale in 1993, Levin created the institutional foundations for an enduring community partnership that crossed the lines of academic semesters and grant-funding cycles. The university, he argued, “needed to develop a comprehensive strategy for civic engagement, infrastructure to support the strategy, and make a substantial, long-term commitment to its implementation.”⁴ As an employer, the university supported the local economy by providing financial incentives for faculty and staff to buy homes within New Haven. Under Levin's leadership, the Yale and New Haven communities have begun to overcome long-standing distrust and address the needs of surrounding neighborhoods.

This type of holistic, collaborative engagement, while it is becoming more common, remains marginalized at far too many universities. An academic culture of theoretical inquiry and scholarly publishing leaves little room for the protracted, empathic relationship building that is the yeoman's work of community engagement.

And yet we persevere, those of us attempting to build capacity at the neighborhood level. We choose to do so, aware that our on the ground efforts are unlikely to earn us quick promotions or academic accolades, out of a dedication to serve the greater needs of a civil society. Association with the university, while sometimes constrictive, provides a degree of legitimacy that can help us voice neighborhoods' concerns to seats of power or more directly to argue that neighborhood leaders deserve a place at the decision-making table themselves. It is precarious and delicate, straddling this line between academia and activism, but the potential payoffs are huge.

Engagement Post-Katrina

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

—Paul Romer, Economist

As Katrina made its way across the Gulf Coast, New Orleans was faced with unimaginable destruction of its physical and social resources. The city experienced a disaster, and sluggish institutional response at all levels of government made it a catastrophe. New Orleans was laid bare, wounded, revealed, and its wounds were vividly depicted via television news. The nation's attention and compassion were briefly focused on our city.

Local universities responded to the disaster in several ways. Not surprisingly, in the hours and weeks after the storm they began to address the logistical concerns associated with securing and repairing buildings, temporarily relocating academic programs to undamaged facilities, and providing information for displaced students. At our own university, for example, a call center was immediately established in Baton Rouge. With the university's e-mail system down and information difficult to disseminate, faculty and staff manned the center and provided up-to-date advice for students. Back on campus, administrators worked tirelessly to restore power and coordinate mold remediation in flooded buildings.

Just as quickly city leaders engaged prominent university officials to participate in the creation of a blueprint for recovery. For example, Tulane president Scott Cowan became part of the Mayor's Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB), the body charged with drafting recommendations for everything from land use to tourism and health care. He was later appointed to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, a state body that controls the disposition of city-owned land and promises to have tremendous power over who is able to purchase properties seized due to tax delinquency or turned over to the state via widespread buyout plans. Alex Johnson, the head of Delgado Community College, was also a member of the BNOB and served on the City Council's similar commission, the New Orleans Hurricane Advisory Committee. Norman Francis, president of Xavier University, became the chairman of the governor's Louisiana Recovery Authority and serves on the board of the New Orleans Building Corporation, which guides development on the city's own land. Timothy Ryan, a prominent local economist and chancellor of UNO, also advised the mayor and held board memberships at the local Chamber of Commerce and United Way.

As large local institutions, universities played significant roles in early visions for the city, and school leadership articulated a newfound dedication to urban issues. Tulane University created new community service requirements for its undergraduates and announced plans to create a new urban studies program. For its part, the University of New Orleans strategically focused its anthropology and geography curricula around urban concerns. Adjacent to the Gentilly and Lakeview neighborhoods—two of the hardest-hit areas—UNO also directed its urban planning staff to assist community groups in developing their recovery plans. These collaborative planning efforts, which have outlasted several formal government planning initiatives, included documentation of infrastructure conditions, proposals for housing and community design, and surveys to determine the portion of pre-Katrina residents who planned to return.

For its part, pursuant to Chancellor Timothy Ryan's directive that UNO assist New Orleans neighborhoods in their recovery, the International Project for Nonprofit Leadership stepped up the kind of community building it had been doing before the storm. In the weeks after Katrina, when information and communications systems were down, IPNL organized six different sites to serve as “recovery stations” where returning residents could receive and post information about needs and services. In the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward, IPNL increased the ability of the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association (NENA) to lead the comeback of the neighborhood by drafting a capacity building plan, conducting board development, and offering ongoing technical assistance on staff development.

Despite their express support for community service, local universities' overall sustained participation in neighborhood-level community building has been inconsistent. Initially two significant factors were the damaged facilities and displaced faculty that limited local schools' ability to reach out to their surrounding communities. Decreased enrollment and unanticipated expenses further increased the stresses on university resources. However, even in light of their substantial challenges, New Orleans' universities made post-Katrina restructuring decisions that directly hindered their ability to serve the city's neighborhoods.

At UNO, the most significant of these changes was our administration's decision to dissolve the College of Urban and Public Affairs (CUPA), the academic unit that housed our urban planning and public administration programs. While both degree programs were retained, the university placed them in separate academic units, threatening a good deal of the synergy that stemmed from a shared dedication to community building. The termination of two public administration professors in an effort to save money further limited the university's capacity to serve its surrounding neighborhoods.

As the primary community outreach arm of the university, CUPA had developed name recognition with many neighborhood groups, nonprofits, and city agencies. The dissolution of the unit created understandable confusion on many levels, with some community members wondering whether the degree programs had been wiped out altogether. For community-building work, where constancy is key, decisions like this one threatened residents' trust that their university-based collaborators would be in it for the long haul. For instance, even as UNO staff helped the Lakeview neighborhood develop a broad recovery plan, steering committee members brought up rumors that the school's planning program had been cut.

External funding opportunities also influence the nature of university involvement in post-Katrina New Orleans. Spurred by empathy and the desire to help rebuild a great American city, large private funders have dedicated significant resources to community-based projects in Katrina-affected areas. However, with few exceptions these grants have provided support for citywide initiatives and pseudo-government-planning efforts rather than neighborhood-level engagement. The highest-profile funding agency has been the Rockefeller Foundation, which donated $3.5 million dollars to the Greater New Orleans Foundation for the completion of a Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP). Another $500,000 dollars was donated to America Speaks, a national citizen participation company that held three large public input sessions—facilitated by a computer-enabled voting system and simulcast in several cities throughout the southeast—in conjunction with the effort. The planning initiative, which employed well-known planning firms from around the country along with some local planners from UNO and elsewhere, drafted a recovery plan for the city. However, following completion of the plan the majority of these planning groups left the city entirely and moved on to new endeavors.

Rockefeller's investment in New Orleans continues to be substantial, and the foundation recently announced a grant of more than $500,000 to defray staffing and other expenses at the city's Office of Recovery Management. In addition, the foundation has pledged more than $2 million for a fellowship program, housed at the University of Pennsylvania, that uses New Orleans as a laboratory for training young development professionals. In each case, the foundation's money has targeted short-term, citywide initiatives over the types of time-intensive, neighborhood-specific work that constitutes true community building. While these projects may be powerful first steps toward reviving New Orleans' urban vitality, they cannot substitute for the protracted community building that builds trust between neighbors and helps residents develop the capacity to improve their own neighborhoods.

Like private foundations, in its support for Katrina-related research the federal government has tended to favor external researchers over local scholars with on the ground expertise. Through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds roughly 20 percent of the nation's academic research, federal tax dollars have supported Katrina-focused initiatives in nearly every state in the union. In fact, of the $15,731,651 granted for Katrina research as of the summer of 2007, only $1,216,220, less than 8 percent, went to universities based in New Orleans. Local universities lost out on this federal funding for many reasons—political, perhaps, or capacity based—but a key one was the fact that the government's initial grant deadlines passed before many local scholars had returned home from their evacuations. Negotiating temporary housing and with their offices, books, and files inaccessible, New Orleans' scholars were distinctly disadvantaged.

With millions of research dollars focused on studying the region and service-minded academics eager to conduct projects in New Orleans, the city has been teeming with outside scholars. In fact, in the summer after Katrina it sometimes seemed that actual New Orleanians were matched one-to-one by those who had come to study our recovery. There have been some success stories in blending neighborhood building and outside academics, most notably the collaboration between Harvard University and the Broadmoor neighborhood. Harvard students spent months on the ground in Broadmoor, developing relationships and working with the Broadmoor Improvement Association to map the neighborhood, create a community center, and complete a preliminary neighborhood plan. The relationship between Broadmoor and Harvard continues.

It is important to note, however, that this collaboration was not a random one. Walter Isaacson—a prominent Harvard graduate, cochair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, and board member at Tulane University—grew up in Broadmoor and has a strong affinity for the neighborhood. Currently president of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson's behind the scenes networking has been a powerful influence on Harvard's focus on Broad-moor. Neighborhoods without such prominent former residents, outspoken remote champions for their recovery, have been significantly less successful in garnering sustained assistance from outside universities rather than the short-term, studio-type projects that often create scholarly work products but few tangible benefits for neighborhoods.

Community Building on Neighborhood Terms

These Americans are peculiar. If in a local community a citizen becomes aware of a human need, which is not met, he there upon discusses the situation with his neighbors. Suddenly, a committee is formed. And a new committee is established. It is like watching a miracle. These citizens perform these functions without a single reference to any bureaucracy or any official agency.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

In the months after the storm, initial hazards to public safety became less intense. Roadways were once again clear of fallen trees, gas leaks had been addressed, and potable water had been restored to most of the city. But as New Orleanians began to return home to their neighborhoods, they found places both physically and emotionally fractured from the communities they had known. One such change was mail delivery, which did not return to flooded neighborhoods for many months.

In many ways, it was a new world, even for lifelong New Orleanians, and the daily tasks of receiving mail, purchasing groceries, and navigating from place to place became foreign. We were experiencing our city anew, and our lives were those of newly settled migrants. With this uncertainty came an increasing consciousness of the city's social and institutional framework. As Oscar Handlin describes it in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, “The customary modes of behavior were no longer adequate, for the problems of life were new and different. With old ties snapped, men faced the enormous compulsion of working out new relationships, new meanings to their lives, often under harsh and hostile circumstances.”⁵

Much like immigrants, New Orleanians turned to their neighbors for aid in negotiating the new landscape. Many leaders recognized early what Father Luke Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church eloquently articulated: “You can't wait for the government to raise you up. You have to pull yourself up, and once you get far enough they will come to you.” Neighborhood internet groups exploded in popularity immediately after the storm, providing a forum for neighbors to share information regarding municipal services and reputable contractors and to begin discussing community priorities for the recovery process. In a city whose culture is firmly rooted in face-to-face interaction, neighborhoods also began to share information and develop visions for the future at meetings. The number of New Orleans neighborhood associations quickly grew to more than two hundred. In fact, in the year following Katrina resurrected and newly formed neighborhood associations were so numerous that CityWorks, a new non-profit organization, spent months simply mapping their boundaries.

Some neighborhoods, often those that had experienced severe storm damage, created their own planning initiatives long before city-endorsed recovery planning began. One particularly notable example was the Lakeview neighborhood, which with the help of UNO planning faculty created the District 5 Neighborhood Recovery Group. The group soon developed a complex organizational structure, including seven committees that met each week to discuss, in turn, communications and community engagement; green space recovery and beautification; neighborhood planning, resources, and finances; infrastructure; crime prevention; and coordination between the area's various neighborhood associations. The Infrastructure Committee itself included seventeen distinct subcommittees.

The focus on the neighborhood as an organic unit of recovery reached up to the city's political leadership. In the city's 2006 mayoral race, which pitted incumbent Ray Nagin against state lieutenant governor Mitch Landrieu, Landrieu's campaign highlighted neighborhood bonds. His memorable television ad campaign featured various small groups of New Orleanians, racially and ethnically diverse. “We're neighbors, and we're voting for Mitch,” they would say.

Early neighborhood self-organizing caught the eye of those orchestrating formal city plans. One example of this consciousness occurred at a meeting of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, where architect Steven Bingler laid out the framework for the Unified New Orleans Plan. “Nobody wants to bring in another planning process that overwhelms the existing neighborhood process,” he said, “because the neighborhood planning process is so beautiful.”

Despite Bingler's lauding of neighborhood-based planning, the process he and his colleagues devised was far from grassroots. Time-intensive, small-scale community engagement proved impossible for a project with significant time constraints and tremendous scope. And yet citizens continued to participate in unprecedented numbers. This participation was rooted in the ideas of neighborhood power that formed in the months immediately following Katrina. Citizens worked to ensure that their concerns were not left out of official plans. As local architect Alan Eskew noted, there was a fear that “all of a sudden they're going to look up and things are going to be decided.” In turn, residents recognized that it was their participation that lent the Unified New Orleans Plan its authority. While supporting official adoption of the plan, one Claiborne area activist summarized this point of view, saying that “the legitimacy of the Unified New Orleans Plan draws from citizen participation.” Jeff Thomas, a representative of the city's Office of Recovery Management, echoed his sentiments, noting, “The true success of the recovery, to date, is the neighborhood planning process.”

Conclusions

The statement that nothing is going on in New Orleans is not true. There's a lot going on in New Orleans. You just have to go to the neighborhoods to see it.

—Arnie Fielkow, New Orleans City Council Member at Large

Since Katrina flooded more than half of the city's neighborhoods, planners, elected officials, and outside observers have lauded neighborhood self-organizing as the key to New Orleans' rebirth. It is the everyday citizens, supporting each other and constructing visions for the future, who make recovery possible. However, despite the lip service given to neighborhood organizing, city leaders have shied away from substantive work at the neighborhood level. At an early meeting of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, Ed Blakely, director of the city's Office of Recovery Management, explained his plan to work primarily at the citywide level. “We will doing everything citywide,” he said, “because neighborhoods exist within the city.” He went on to explain that he would not be dedicating much of his energy to individual neighborhoods, arguing, “I am not going to get down to the neighborhood level. I have other things to do.”

Neighborhood organizations' ability to address local issues more effectively than city government itself became evident in January 2007, nearly a year and a half after Katrina, when a devastating tornado hit the once flooded Northwest Carrollton neighborhood. In the hours following this small-scale disaster, neighborhood leaders mobilized. Using the social ties, communications capacity, and knowledge of city services developed as a result of Katrina, neighborhood residents quickly assessed damage, directed traffic, corralled local media, found alternative housing for those whose homes had been damaged, and assisted schoolchildren in navigating the dangerous landscape. They did this in spite of, rather than in collaboration with, the city's disaster response. “It became painfully obvious that no one was in charge when a call to City Hall some twelve hours after the event yielded the answer, ‘We don't know,’” explains Northwest Carrollton resident Karen Gadbois. “We felt like we were working against the clock to avoid the chaos that would ensue when ‘help’ arrived from the city.”

The potential for neighbors to effectively collaborate on issues of common concern is not limited to postdisaster environments. In their book There Goes the Neighborhood, William J. Wilson and Richard P. Taub tell us that people have long been accustomed to making their own geography, whether in bricks and mortar or in that less visible yet most important feature of the city, the neighborhood.⁶ Neighborhoods deal with change or the threat of change in different ways. Their reactions are in large part determined by the strength of their social fabric. “Strong neighborhoods often remain so in opposition to other groups of people,” the authors conclude somberly, noting the double-edged sword that is community strength.

The book does offer a note of hope. When interests coincide, such as when Latinos and whites joined forces against an autocratic school council in Beltway (a neighborhood in Chicago), groups can form across racial and ethnic lines. And the ability to see that “coincidence of interest,” the book suggests, is perhaps the city's best hope: “Cities need leaders who can somehow persuade middle- and low-income residents of the metropolitan region to make common cause, to realize that their lives inevitably intersect.” We who work in community building are challenged to maintain this hope in part by maintaining both balance of mind and quickness of sympathy, what the poet Wilfred Owen called during the First World War “the eternal reciprocity of tears.” Perhaps this is the work required of “civic engagement after Katrina.”

NOTES

1. J. Shefner and D. Cobb, “Hierarchy and Partnership in New Orleans,” Qualitative Sociology 25, no. 2 (2002): 273–97.

2. Larry L Rowley, “The Relationship between Universities and Black Urban Communities: The Clash of Two Cultures,” Urban Review 32, no.1 (2000): 45–65.

3. Kenneth M. Reardon, “A Sustainable Community/University Partnership,” Liberal Education 85, no. 3 (1999): 20–25.

4. Richard Levin, “Universities and Cities: Richard Levin—the View from New Haven.” Lecture delivered at the Inaugural Colloquium of Case Western University, January 30, 2003.

5. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (New York: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1951).

6. William J Wilson and Richard P. Taub, There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tension in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (New York: Knopf, 2006).