Resilience Cells in New Orleans: Challenges and Opportunities for Socially-Optimal Housing- Reconstruction Governance Models

By focusing on the post-Katrina New Orleans reconstruction framework, the objective of the paper is to analyze the potential of the affordable housing movement as a plug-in for building new urban visions with improved resilience for the city. The analytical kernel of the analysis is housing; a material artifact that is treated not only as a noun (a commodity) but also as a verb, 'to house', the emancipatory process of housing, which is itself part of a broader process of rebuilding socio-ecological systems.

The theoretical orientation of this paper is founded mainly on a building dialogue between theorists of social capital (Bourdieu and Castells), social innovation (Moulaert), political ecology (Swyngedouw), and housing (Turner). The theoretical insights are then applied in the case of New Orleans with a historical retrospect in order to analyze how housing actors have been built in and interacted with each other over the recovery years. This provides us with an analytically significant chronological platform on which we can test how redevelopment has been variously imagined and re-imagined, shaped and reshaped in terms of narratives, policy orientations and actions.

Over the course of a six-month fieldwork, various housing groups (i.e. non-for-profit and for-profit housing developers, CLTs, CDCs) were studied with the aim to: a) understand the diversity of claims, modes of actions, and sustainability challenges; b) investigate the functional and institutional complementarity with each other (bridging social capital) and with the state (linking social capital), and c) dig out the heterogeneity of the resilience dynamics.

This heterogeneity of 'resilience cells' consequently leads the discussion towards the investigation of the ‘new’ role of the government in formulating relevant disaster-recovery governance models that hold a potential to accommodate the redundancy in housing actions; which could also be seen as a strategic and democratic planning tool to incubate urban resilience.