New Orleans: A Path to Resilience

New Orleans, like many cities of today, has several organizations and businesses that have recently become interested in committing themselves to sustainability efforts. However, New Orleans as a whole is a long way from leading the sustainable city and development agenda. While rebuilding since Hurricane Katrina could have been seen as the perfect chance to turn the city into an example of improving environmental impact efforts in the United States, the city lacked both the commitment and resources necessary to convert New Orleans into a truly sustainable city.

One example of an organization trying to propel New Orleans forward into the sustainability movement is The Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation with their GreeNOLA: A Strategy for a Sustainable New Orleans. Their executive summary states:

The City of New Orleans is establishing a comprehensive approach to its recovery by incorporating leading ideas about sustainable and smart urban development into the recovery process. We are, in fact, rebuilding both the city’s physical infrastructure and its administrative infrastructure. Our objective is not merely to recover smarter, greener, and better than we were before. In New Orleans, sustainable development means establishing resilient settlement patterns based on a thorough understanding of flood risk; adopting better building standards that include energy efficiency, design for climate change, and alternative energy sources; finding more effective uses for materials that are currently being discarded as waste; and protecting and restoring the urban and natural environments.(GreeNOLA)

New Orleans also happens to be a part of 100 Resilient Cities, an initiative for encouraging action for incorporating sustainability into cities around the world. The website describes 100 Resilient Cities as:

Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation (100RC) is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. (100 Resilient Cities)

Jakarta, Indonesia is also on the list of 100 Resilient Cities. It was also mentioned in the textbook as a city with numerous challenges. While it is making progress like New Orleans toward sustainability, its high pollution rate continues to pose major environmental and health risks to its residents. It also shares a challenge with New Orleans, with large sections of its city residing below sea level.

Several organizations have made considerable strides in planning for a sustainable future for New Orleans. Most of these plans however remain in their early stages and the dream of a smart, sustainable and resilient New Orleans have yet to make it to fruition.

In fact, the United States as a whole falls far behind many other nations when it comes to sustainability, particularly with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the White House has maintained their doubts on climate change, hindering regulatory efforts, ceasing encouragement of sustainable technologies, and instead favoring profits made from fossil fuels.

In the video New Orleans: Recovery or Removal, residents talk about the quality of housing of the mixed-use residential buildings that were constructed to replace the public housing buildings. They used cheap materials and made the units physically attractive rather than constructed to withstand a hurricane. The residents discuss that they don’t feel safe in the housing if another hurricane like Katrina were to hit the area. This is just one example of how the city had the opportunity to build a better, more withstanding, weather-proof and resilient structure but did not.

The textbook also discusses the clean-up of New Orleans’ Agriculture Street Landfill, which was an important step in pushing New Orleans towards environmental justice but it also highlights the many obstacles New Orleans face, many of them due to social injustices still occurring in the city:

In the United States, framing environmental issues as civil rights issues was key: if all citizens were granted equal protection under the law, why were they all not equally protected from environmental hazards? Armed with this new perspective, activists have successfully protested new hazards such as proposed landfills, garbage incinerators, toxic storage facilities, prisons, and even the use of diesel busses for public and school transportation. They have also demanded the cleanup of existing hazards such as the contaminated soil from New Orleans’ Agriculture Street Landfill… (pg. 311).

New Orleans has joined many cities across both the United States and globally to begin initiatives towards sustainability. Many plans that both government and several organizations have drawn up, point to a bright future for the city. However, the city currently is lacking many features to currently be considered a sustainable city.

Sources

100 Resilient Cities, www.100resilientcities.org/

Chen, X., Orum, A. M., & Paulsen, K. E. (2013). Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience. Wiley-Blackwell.

GreeNOLA: A Strategy for a Sustainable New Orleans. The Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, 2008, nola.gov/getattachment/bece551e-5cf8-421c-ac27-48db26194c40/Appendix-Ch-13-GreeNOLA-A-Strategy-for-a-Sustainab/.

“New Orleans: Recovery or Removal?” YouTube, YouTube, 14 Aug. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w2nb7wP85Y.

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