Schwarz
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But as Blakely himself is quick to note—in his quiet, professorial, and vaguely irritated way—he is exactly the right man for this job. He has authored or co-authored several urban planning texts, is chairman of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney in Australia, and is the namesake of the Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at the University of California, Riverside. He got his expertise in post-disaster planning in his home state of California (he grew up in San Bernardino), where he was involved in rebuilding after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the 1991 Oakland fires. He also happened to be teaching at the New School University in Manhattan in the fall of 2001 and assisted with neighborhood planning after the World Trade Center attacks.
In speeches after he started work, Blakely put forth some big-ticket ways in which New Orleans could reinvent itself and rise above selling trinkets to tourists. (“We have an economy entirely made up of T-shirts,” he said in a speech last spring.) New Orleans should strive to once again become a trade and travel gateway to Latin America, he said. He hoped that well-orchestrated investments could build the city into a major bioscience research center. He'd like to see tax credits help revive the grand old theaters of Canal Street and create a “Broadway South,” just as tax credits have made Louisiana into Hollywood South. (It's third, after California and New York, in attracting moviemaking expenditures.)
And he believes the underused Mississippi riverfront, which contains some of the highest ground in the city, could become a centerpiece of development for the new New Orleans. After attracting entries from teams that included Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind, the New Orleans Building Corp.'s “Reinventing the Crescent” competition was won last December by the team led by architects Enrique Norten and Allen Eskew, landscape architect George Hargreaves, and urban planner Alex Krieger, who together will craft a plan to bring parkland and other public uses to a six-mile stretch of wharves